I’ve passed by this corner schoolhouse countless times, walking the road named after it. The abiding presence of the abode always slows my stride. Its placement in the wooded landscape, across from the old orchard, is what draws me in. The fieldstone facade angled there above the creek meets the bend in the road in perfect form. The schoolhouse came first. The road’s bend was once a schoolyard.
I have yearned all the times in passing to peer inside. An elder couple has lived in the house since we settled in the neighborhood. Last week a giant dumpster was parked in the dirt drive. Today on my walk I found the dumpster gone and my face pressed against the windows looking in. I could make out handwritten notes left on furniture, “leave this”, “keep for Richard”, “trash”. A fresh pumpkin sits on the front porch, a rocking chair, a blooming mum.
On the small iron table beside the front door a friend, I suppose, from the neighborhood, left a note, already yellowing, “. . . please let me know your new address.” The tone, addressing them by their first names, didn’t help my foreboding concern. I looked in the grass and brush, no fallen Sold sign, no Sale. I walked around the schoolhouse slowly, one lap, making pictures in the October calm. A hydrangea. The dried leaves of the patio grapevine. A Bethlehem star above the original doorway. Some Windsor chairs. The candle chandelier above them. The dining room window. Reflections. Looking again and again through the glass at the old school floor boards, the peeling paint on the wainscoting and crown molding, the residential modifications, the idealized values of the past settled among the disrupted new. A vacuum cleaner was left sprawled in the kitchen, still plugged in. Dirty dishes. Dim light coming from the hallway. A haunting in the history. Yet, all of it has the cliche’ mechanisms of romanticized cinema.
I walked the long way back home, Spinnerstown to Orchard Road, kicking the damp leaves, smelling the ground in the air, feeling a bit hollow – at once, the romantic fool, next the melancholic, always milking or inventing more grief.
(Walking / Schoolhouse, 10.25.15)
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