I was not born in this house. I never lived here. This was my grandmother’s house in Napa, California. There is so much I could tell, because the family lived there for many years before I ever came along. But I suppose my story begins on June 23, 1990. Funnily enough, it ends almost exactly ten years and six months later.
That was the day that my parents were married in the front yard. The driveway came straight up out of the end of the road, and the house was backwards on it. The driveway led to the garage, which was in the back of the house of course. Then, in order to reach the front door, you had to walk around the house. The front lawn was long and round, dotted with a half dozen tall, sprawling oak trees. My parents were married there, on that wide brick front porch where my aunt and I would eat dry ramen and dance to “New Age Girl” four years later. On the long front lawn, I would run through the sprinklers with my best friend Trevor, whose mom Debbie taught me how to wink. At age ten, I would lose my “family ring” in the longer grass that the lawnmower couldn’t reach, just at the base of one of the towering oak trees. In the tallest tree there was a rope swing. There was a ladder up the back, but I would never be big enough to climb the ladder and swing from it until the house was long sold. Past the lawn was the barn where my father and his brothers would build a haunted house every Halloween, and it would house baby Jesus in the live nativity every Christmas. Last I heard, the current owners still do the haunted house. I must admit that I’m proud of them for holding up a Sorensen tradition, though they may never know what it means to us, and the people in the neighborhood we left behind. My grandma’s horse was named Mariah, after the wind, and she lived in the corral attached to the front end of the barn. There was one morning that my uncle Micah came in and announced that he had just been riding Mariah bareback, to which my grandma replied, “Were you bareback or was she?”
We had been standing in the kitchen, ranged around the long wood-topped island. We were probably eating crepes without plates, rolled up like burritos in the true Sorensen style. I think it had to do with the fact that, with eleven kids (not counting spouses or grandchildren or random “strangers within the gates”), there were simply never enough plates to go around. My grandma always made crepes, never pancakes. I think it was because they had a dozen or so chickens and needed something to do with the eggs. There was a burn mark on the island from a hot pan that had been set down without a pad, and something tells me that the cabinet below the burn mark was the cabinet from which my first sister pulled a jar of honey and spilled it all over the floor. It was on the island that I sat when I was about four and my mom corrected my lisp. It was in that kitchen that I learned to say “excuse me” when I wanted attention, and it was in that kitchen that my uncle, Micah again, made me choke on a Slurpee when I was five. The house rang with music, always, from one of the two grand pianos that my grandpa kept in the front room. My aunts used to sing when he played, their voices lusty and rich. I wish to this day that I could sing like them.
When I was ten years old, my grandmother died in a freak accident up Provo canyon. It was June 5, 2000. Within a year, the family was gone from the house. My aunt Jennifer was married in December of 2000, and we all came out to California to take our last vacation there. We had her wedding and the live nativity in a matter of days, and that was it. In those last few days, nothing had changed. Everything was as it had always been. The lawn was still long and green and lush. There was still a twisted pipe protruding from the ground where a house had stood before my dad burned it down – by accident, I’m told. We strung the back patio with Christmas lights for my aunt’s wedding reception dance, and my cousins and I spent the night arguing about whose dresses were actually burgundy. That night, the five of us slept on the landing at the top of the stairs. To this day, I am still curious as to how we all managed to fit up there. None of us slept much that night. I think we wanted to spend as much conscious, waking time as we could in the house. We all knew it would be the last time.
For ten more years, it was the last time. Some of the Sorensen siblings, my dad included, took several trips to California after my grandmother’s death, to visit friends and such. But I never went back. It wasn’t until this past August, August 2011, that my whole family went back. We had to visit The House, of course. At first glance, everything looked the same. The ground was still covered in a layer of oak leaves and acorns; the lawn was still, incredibly, as long as I remember. But then I noticed the dandelions, and that the rope swing had broken but no one had bothered to replace it or take it down. The grass in the field behind the barn was long and dead, and had obviously remained untouched for a long time. But it wasn’t until we came around the back that we noticed the changes. They’d built an outdoor kitchen, and added a pool, and plowed up the field where my parent’s engagement photos were taken to plant a vineyard. I’m not sure what I expected to see there. I think I expected to go back and just be transported back to my childhood, because that’s all I had at that house.
I don’t think I’ll be going back if I can possibly help it. Too much has changed. The house is not the Neverland it was when I was a kid, and I would rather it stay that way in my mind than be tainted with the reality of the remodels and renovations that it has undergone in the last decade. My grandma’s spirit doesn’t live in this new house. I thought that she would still be there, but too much has changed, and there’s really no point in going back without her. It’s just not the same.
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