Once upon a time, this farmhouse in the distance was my home. Now, that home exists, for me only in memory. The house is occupied by strangers. Some of the out buildings are gone. It is not the place it once was. I've heard it said that memories are often faulty. Our minds can fill in the blanks with things that never took place. We often interpret events and feelings based on what we think happened and not what actually did. We struggle to make sense out of all the bits and pieces of our experiences. We become creative authors as we write the stories of our lives. Does that make the stories any less real?
I spend my life in a physical body in a temporal world. That body houses a mind and a soul. The real story seems to take place there, in the mind and soul, in a world often filled with illusion and dreams. I often dream of this farm house at night. In these dreams, it is a haunted house. Sometimes, I'm a child with young parents just as they used to be. Sometimes I return to live in this house with the family I have now. In all these dreams, my feelings about being "home" are always complicated, a mixture of fear and relief.
Lately, I've found myself thinking about this house. These day memories are pleasant ones. I am often a young child, alone, walking through the pasture toward the creek in the wood. Our dog, Poochie, is with me. I've packed a snack of soda crackers spread with peanut butter. I put them in an old bread bag. Sometimes, I drag along an old blanket. I find a nice spot in the pasture on the side of a hill and lay down. A little rest before going to play in the creek. The dog comes back from exploring and lays down near me. She becomes my pillow. We look up at the clouds and I call out the things I see in their fluffy shapes. The dog snores.
The house that lives in my dreams at night is very different. It is built of broken memories and pieces of emotion that I can never seem to catch. The actual house had been home to my paternal grandparents and their children. As a child, I was convinced that one of my uncle's old rooms, still full of the pieces of the youth he spent there, was haunted. I was told not to go into this room. Such an admonition was a sure invitation to a spirited me. It was fodder for my imagination. It was soon haunted with things I could not see, things I could only sense and know in the most primitive of ways. I stopped exploring that room. Instead, I would hurry past the closed door, sometimes making the sign of the cross as a precaution. It became my little ritual of fear. It was enough to keep the spirits trapped behind the door, or so it seemed. These spirits have returned to me at night. I understand them less now than I did then.
As a rational adult, reviewing the memories of young childhood, I am certain that there were no facts to support my early belief that my home was haunted. There were no sinister spirits lurking behind closed doors. No phantasms materializing in the night. Yet, in the faulty world of memory, the spirits are very much alive. They tell stories of tragedy and triumph. They frighten me with the unknown. They tease me with snippets of truth. They hold up a clouded glass and challenge me to see. In the light of day, I see the best of times, days of ease, childlike abandon, freedom, a strong sense of self. At night, I am in the dark. I wrestle with the unknown.
Yesterday, the fear of the unknown was less compelling than the desire to get a glimpse of the house again. It sits at the end of a private lane, a good quarter mile from the main road. It is often hidden from view. A visitor to this piece of country may never know this house is there. I left this home over 40 years ago yet, still knew where to look. When I spotted it from the road, I was flooded with the good memories. In the light of day, I answered a quick, "no" to my childrens' desire to see more, to drive down the lane again. This was close enough. The house I lived in no longer exists. The time, the child I was, live only in memories, hazy bits and pieces that play hide and seek in the corners of my mind. This is the back story of my life. I create from it what I will.
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