I have not been there in many years, and so my hometown, frozen in time, feels like a figment of my imagination.
My grandmother's house where I rolled down the backyard hill and scoured the grass for four leaf clovers as a kid, made a play schoolroom out of a hair dryer closet with saloon doors, where I fell asleep sitting up watching Fantasy Island, where she filled her dining room with rose petal cake decorations and sewing projects, where my great-grandmother who only spoke Polish hung clothes on the back line, where my cousin Steve put fake letters for me from Ace Frehley in the mailbox, where my grandfather who I never got to meet organized his coin collection in the basement, where a cameo image of my mom's high school photo hung on the living room wall, where the whole family had thanksgivings and christmases and cookouts and easter dinners, has burned to the ground since I've been there and when I look at the images in google maps confirming its absence I cannot believe they are real.
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It's actually unfair to call any town my home, past or present. I get very attached to places but I don't feel like any of them are home. My cats are my comfort. My books, my things, my interests, my art. But when you throw in people and work and schools and finances and family drama all the comfort crumbles. I am never home. I am my home. Though it was quaint and beautiful, I suffocated there - I hated living in that town. I might never go back there anyway. But this one hurts.
There was no funeral I could attend to give me closure about this. The google images spare me the reality of the event or the aftermath - there's a three year gap in the photos, so in one year's images it's there and in the next set it's simply absent, an undisturbed grassy lawn in its place like it never existed. In all of the photos (house or no house), the lack of human activity disturbs, as the house, a duplex with my grandmother's sister on the other side connected by a basement passage, was part of an accidental compound of three adjacent buildings all inhabited by family who were in each other's hair constantly - there was never a moment without people in the house, on the porch, in the garage, sitting in a glider in the yard, or walking across the street to another sister's house. And inside, the activity never stopped. There was always someone cooking, always a tv on, always a car pulling in or out of the driveway, always people barging in and out. My grandmother is long gone and everyone of her generation has now passed away. Most of them did not live to know about this. Without anyone in or around it, it's impossible anyway that it's the same house. Almost unrecognizable, like a page of scribbling that's been erased.
The solace I've sought in adulthood is the opposite of all that. I spend most of my time alone. The quiet of having no one in my life is sometimes deafening.
But no one can burn down your house, if you don't have a house.
