Nothing Gold Can Stay

I should have called first to see if anyone was there, but I did not want to let anyone know I was going down to the shore. What used to be a family trip had, in recent years, become a trip I preferred to make alone. The moment I turned onto Greenhaven Road, my troubles seemed to go away, for the time being. I passed Bucky’s Bait and Tackle, the first sign that the ocean was near. I turned down the radio and held my breath at the train bridge, a habit from when my brother and I were little, and stopped halfway across to look for trolls. Once out of earshot, I let out a sigh of relief, and laughed at my good fortune of avoiding the troll, yet again.
The journey down the driveway used to be calming, a serene welcome to Grandpa’s house, with rabbits in the forest clearings, and puddle bumps which gently rocked the car from side to side. Now it looked like a construction or demolition site, and I was not able to enjoy the peace. A new driveway was being shaped, and fresh earth lay in piles. My Grandma owned half of the property after Grandpa King died, but last year decided upkeep was too expensive. Lines were drawn, and the property was divided into two sections. The house lay on my Great Uncle’s portion, and my Grandma put her portion on the market. A new driveway was being made to connect the house to the road without crossing the sale property.
I turned the engine off as soon as I could; city sounds didn’t belong in the silence of the cove. I sucked in deep breaths of salty air; realizing, as I always did, that I wasn’t really breathing until I was in Wequetequock. There were cars in the driveway; other relatives. My dreams of solitude at the shore were ruined, once again. I cursed myself for not having called earlier, and angrily swatted at the swarms of mosquitoes. To escape their incessant buzzing, I begrudgingly knocked on the door for some bug spray, and to inform the family that I would be wandering the grounds.
The house was no longer the way I remembered. The beauty of the house was that things were just as Grandma and Grandpa King had left them, decades before. Different family members would spend a few days at a time in Wequetequock, especially in the summer, but it wasn’t permanently inhabited. Now, Great Uncle Robert’s children decided that since the house was in their family, they could make it more homey. They weren’t content the way things were. They replaced the oak table, the sideboard, the gas stove, and filled the house with harlequin romances, cheap flip-flops, and Titanic posters. I pushed those images aside, and in their place remembered how things had been. Johnny and his wife, benign compared to other members of the family, were the only ones there. They were the two who loved the house for what it was, and didn’t modernize it. I greeted them and then took a walk around the house, seeing what had changed since I had been there last.
The basement was the scariest part of the house. It was dimly lit with bare forty watt bulbs, but I always thought that it was better off that way; I didn’t really want to know what was lurking in the dusty corners. All the tools from Grandpa’s long life of carpentry and boating had been untouched for years, probably in the same place he had set them down after fixing a leak in the rowboat, all those years ago. The drying life jackets on the clothes rack added a tinge of saltiness to the overwhelming musty smell, and I remembered that I was supposed to bring two lifejackets back home with me. I hurried back up the worn stairs after finding what I needed, marveling at the large foot indents that had been made on the wooden stairs. At one point, people must have enjoyed spending time in the basement. However, it was not somewhere I wanted to linger.
The steep wooden stairs wailed under my feet as I went to the second floor, and I got my first view of the cove out Grandpa’s bedroom window. The large panes overlooked the water; I watched as canoers glided by, as silently as the swans that floated near them. When I was little, this was always my favorite room in the house, but it now had lost its charm. Someone had taken the bed frame home with them, and the mattresses lay despondently on the floor. The decorative night stand was covered with bobby pins and hair clips, a sign that a girl, quite unlike me as a child, had stayed there recently.
I walked through the living room on my way outside, to see if things there were still as I remembered. The china cabinet was filled haphazardly with Grandma’s ceramic animals and bright colored glasses, and topped with generations of bad family pictures. Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys were kept in a tin by the old sofa, where they had been since my mom was a child. The Hammersound double keyboard was dormant in the corner, obsolete since someone had brought a boombox to the shore. My brother and I used to play Kumbaya once we had learned to read music, and I could still hear my mom’s voice, singing along with our youthful tunes. I was glad that some things hadn’t changed.
The screen door slammed behind me as I ran down the porch stairs, down the hill, and across the grass. The salt in the air clutched at my skin; the wind blew my hair in my face. I stood at the waters edge, the seaweed stench strong because of the outgoing tide. I remembered the time my cousins and I went out in the motorboat on the foggiest day of the summer. We couldn’t see more than five feet in front of us, and as a nine year old, it was the best day of my life. My Uncle Andy drove us out to the sand bar, and we caught crabs under the old lighthouse. Now, the motorboat was in storage, my cousins lived in Japan, and the cove was full of Johnny’s sailboats. He had built a dock from old boat planks, and the shoreline was no longer pretty to look at. He had snaked mismatched boards carelessly around the edge of the cove, and his boat loomed out of the water where we used to catch snails.
I turned around and saw the house, Grandpa’s house, my house, a red house with a white wrap-around porch, chipped paint, and gabled windows, almost hidden by a canopy of green. The old clothesline hung from the dead tree, damaged in the hurricane of 1932. Grandma had shown me picture of high tides up to the porch stairs, which had submerged the old rowboat and the stone wall. I was looking at the same image Grandpa King must have seen when he looked at the house fifty years ago. The trees have grown greatly since then, and the house has been repainted, but if I ignored that, I was in his shoes. He was lucky that he never saw what the house had become. The apple tree out front had been covered in old buoys by my immature male cousins, and now exuded gaudiness. The crystal door handles in the bathroom reflected more than just sunlight, and Grandma’s nursery was full of storage boxes.
I slowly headed back to my car, and said a final goodbye to the house I had known. Things would be even more mutated the next time I returned, and I knew I had to think parting thoughts before all of what I had loved was ruined. I wasn’t jealous that Uncle Robert had gotten the house, because his family was going to get more use from it. I had my memories, from when the house was golden, and that was all I needed.



My TAs comments....
"I'm sorry I don't have many comments or suggestions. This piece is extremely polished and impressive. The imagery is crystal clear- often difficult to maintain when working with both memories and physical perceptions. Please do not let this grade make you complacent- strive to make each of your subsequent papers as focused and purposeful as this. Call your mother and tell her she should be proud. Well done. -Chris"