gone with the wind

and so the day has arrived (or one of the few: dreaded and expected). the beautiful old house, what seemed to be the spiritual body of my precious sister, active, as it was, with spirits from a deep, American past that absorbed and transcended individual lifespans with centuries of accumulations of sorrows and loving and quiet ocean wave sounds and peeling laughter from down the distant, sloping lawn:

torn down.

and Callie, our magnificent, actually befriended tree. and the three-times giant christmas tree and Narnia and her flowerbed and the old kitchen where we'd talk for hours in the morning, looking out at the rabbits and the fog. and the porch where we knew, and were right, that we'd never be happier.

i remember once sitting with Patrick on the girls swingset made out of bound together thick branches (that that drunk creep Ed chopped up for firewood!! after Andrea was gone and the next era of depravity settled in, when all but traces of her actually miraculous domestic touch had vanished) - yes. sitting there with Patrick, looking at the house one Thanksgiving when Zoe was there, and the girls and my family - whole - and so many friends were there and I said, "Everyone I love in the world is in this house right now."

And all the things we could never go get to bring with us - my mother's books, (this hurts) - all her writing on the pages of Whitman and Rilke and all of it, the girls costumes and toys in the attic and perhaps most telling of all, the name scratched into the wall in one of the wierd attic rooms from generations passed that Andrea and I would go see to remark on the miracle of a lived moment - a signature - (Ulfred or Alfred?) testimony to his brief fact and ours and our all quick vanishing into time.
finally dust.



I don't know when it happened exactly - just another moment in what has generally marked the history of progress in this country - as when I was young, and our Ascolano house of the messy olive orchards and wild peacocks was suddenly sub-divided into a plot for sixteen, terra-cotta homes: the wet, sensual scents, the possibilty for adventure in your own back yard, the play of God's actual hand on the bright wildoats.
Obliterated without a word of thanks for the grace we don't even know we were heir too.
Who will remember these things when we don't even manage to acknowledge their passing, when we don't even look right to see the river as we pass over it to some other lost eden, paved: another place to buy more crap, to haul home, where we live alone and blame ourselves for all the wrong things.

It's been interesting that all the painting I've been doing in the past few months (years?) has been about the old house. Recently, not yet knowing the truth, the paintings have been flying into bits and the trees even - purple trees like Cassie and Callie and was it Big Green, flying upside down in every direction. I cannot help but wander those rooms - daily, feeling the banister and praying that praying could change the choices she made on her last day. Old house. Beloved and very old house, your hallway runs right through my body. No one making love to me in some future will know it - but there it is, the fatal corridor held safe there under my ribs, the ghosts wandering its lost length as they need a place to wander, and behind my eyes: the glaring, brilliant summers of her joy and ours.

I'm so sorry, Andrea.
You made life so beautiful for us.

We really tried to keep it safe.
Forgive us for how we might have failed you.