Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  Because it was so large and so many children lived in it, our house became a sort of community center for the other kids of the town. Even when we weren’t there, they felt free to drop by, sit on our screened-in front porch and read the comic books we kept in a box by the swing. They came to our house to play baseball in the backyard, to spin tops, shoot marbles, play jacks, roller skate on the sidewalk, learn canasta, listen to football games on the radio, play poker for matchsticks, play dolls, play guns, fix bicycles, build forts and playhouses. Sometimes one or two of them would stay for supper. Sometimes they would spend the night, or the whole weekend.

  Since I, the eldest, was nine when we moved in, and Sherry, the youngest, was only two, these activities continued for many years. And by the time the last of us was married and gone, the whole noisy whirl had been started all over again by the first arrivals of the new generation.

  During the forty-seven years since we moved in, five generations of my family have lived or visited there. For all those years, it has been a house filled with love and laughter, and, from time to time, grief and pain. The memories of Christmases, family reunions, birthday parties, high school graduations, weddings, and the ordinary events of living that are contained within its walls are beyond number. And wherever the rest of us have lived, and however many years we’ve been gone, we’ve always thought of that house as home, as the headquarters of our family.

  So when I drove a rental car out of the Midland airport a few weeks ago and pointed it toward the Davis Mountains, I already was feeling that emptiness in the pit of my stomach, that heaviness in the chest that makes one sigh. Our home had been sold. My mother had lived alone in the place for nine years and had decided, at age seventy-seven, that it was time to move into a smaller, more easily maintained house closer to her now middle-aged children, all of whom had drifted east of the Pecos.

  A week earlier, she had held a yard sale so huge that she had hired professionals from Fort Stockton to run it. Hundreds of customers from scores of miles around hauled off truckloads of furniture, kitchen appliances, souvenirs of my mother’s travels—including more than eight hundred coffee mugs—and just stuff that accumulates naturally in a large house if you live in it for half a century.

  When I arrived, I immediately noticed the empty spaces where familiar objects had been, but I could see that Mother had kept too much. She admitted she would probably have to hold another yard sale at the other end of her move.

  For the next few days, she and I sat on the front porch by the hour, remembering the years, listening to the call of a hoot owl over near the foot of Sleeping Lion and the town’s dogs barking at the moon just as they always have. We walked about the yard, every foot of which had borne the brunt of all our boisterous childhoods. Mother picked an armload of ripe peaches from the tree on the west side of the house. I picked up three ordinary rocks near the fence to take back to Dallas as keepsakes, one for me, one for each of my sons, who had spent several blissful, unforgettable summers there. Together we visited my grandmother’s grave in the cemetery on the hill.

  A day or two before the movers were to arrive, the new owner—a rich man from East Texas—appeared. He walked about the house, bragging to Mother about the changes he was going to make. He was going to rip out this, tear out that, renovate this and replace that. He planned to undo the changes that had been made to modernize the old place over the years and restore it to its original condition, he said.

  “Well,” Mother said, “you’ll have to dig a privy out back.”

  I wasn’t there when the movers came. Mike had accepted the difficult duty of seeing the house empty, as it hadn’t been since he was four.

  We talked about it later on the phone. Mother had broken down a couple of times, he said, when old friends had come to say goodbye. But, all in all, she seemed happy to be moving on. We concluded that we should be happy along with her. We comforted each other with the thought that although our home now belonged to somebody else, its best memories would always be ours.

  So why am I still sighing? Is it because my only remaining tie to the town I’ve always called home is my grandmother’s grave? Is it because the next time I journey to my mountains, I’ll go as a tourist and not as a home child returning? Is it because, in some deep corner of my heart, I believed I would live in Mr. Grierson’s old adobe again someday, and would recapture some small part of that innocent, beautiful world I dwelt in as a child?

  November 1993