My mother’s house has loud plumbing. There is a musty smell to most of its rooms. The screen doors don’t close completely, leaving a crack where bugs can crawl in. In the summer, there are large flying insects waiting on the front door when you get home at night. The front yard is covered in clover but very little grass. The windows are big and the frames are rusted metal and hard to crank open.
My mother’s house is not air-conditioned. She is one of the last humans alive in the swampy North Carolina heat without any relief beyond whirring fans. There are tiny spiders that live in the corners and no one kills them or cares that they’ve taken up residence there. There are windows with glass so old it looks a little warped. There are pine needles in the gutters. The shutters need painting. The bathroom could use a wastebasket. In the bathroom cabinets, there are bandages and Epsom salts and weird brands of shampoo like Body On Tap that date back to 1987. When I visited a few months ago, I found a little jar of Vicks VapoRub that looked like it had been excavated from someone’s garden sometime around 1975.
I grew up in that house. My mother sleeps in my bedroom now. The mini-blinds are still peach, the color I chose for the room, but the walls have been painted dark brown. The stairs are very steep. The ceilings are high. The chairs in the dining room have curved metal backs that dig into your shoulder blades. The table shakes when you touch it. The backyard is carpeted with pine needles, ornamented with ivy and pine trees. There is an old garage with a creaky door and a roof covered in leaves. My mother’s car is twenty years old. My mother is seventy-five years old.
When I arrive at my mother’s house in the summer, a cacophony of small creatures surrounds her house—birds singing, cicadas buzzing, tree frogs humming. Because there is no air-conditioning, you have to keep the windows open at night, which means yielding to this rain forest symphony. Sometimes there are crickets in the actual room with you. If you leave your phone on for a few too many minutes after you turn the lights out, tiny unidentified bugs will hit your phone screen repeatedly. You are never alone.
Pine trees tower over her house, a threat during big thunderstorms, which happen at least twice a week in the summer. The thunder is louder than any thunder you’ve ever heard, partly because the windows are open. You don’t forget that her house is surrounded by tall trees, on a hill, when you hear that thunder. You remember the pine tree that was struck right outside the big dining room window. You remember how the whole world was just an orange and red flash. The tree splintered to bits. Weeks later, the bugs moved into it. My mother felt relieved that no one in the house was hurt. She said we had a lot to be grateful for.
And I do feel grateful every time I visit and a big storm rolls in. There is nothing like lying on that bad futon mattress on the floor of the den, listening to the thunder, watching the branches lash around in the wind, hearing the rain hammer the roof and the windows. You’re inside but you feel like you’re outside, as you wait for the storm to pass, as you wait for the cool breezes to arrive after the rain.
And in the morning, you hear the birds. The leaves of the trees dance in the dappled sunlight. The trees go on forever out there, straight into the sky. It’s hard to get up off that hard futon when you can stare up at those trees from the floor, through windows six feet tall.
My mom and dad were going to rent the house at first. A professor and his German wife owned it, but then they decided to move back to D.C., because the German wife hated our small Southern town. My mother told my father, “We need to buy that house. That is a great house.” My father found out the house was $24,000. My mother said to him, “That house is a steal. We have to buy it.”
This was 1971. They bought the house. It was the best decision my mother ever made. Her marriage ended ten years later. My dad died fifteen years after that. There were disappointments and heartaches, but that house was never one of them. The cicadas and the birds and the little flying bugs and the crickets and the squirrels and the chipmunks and the tiny spiders and the mold and the rot and the creaky stairs and the thunderstorms all agree with her. That house never disappointed any of us.
Our visitors were always a little disappointed, though. They didn’t appreciate the lack of air-conditioning, the bugs, the yapping dogs. How could they be so immune to its charms? They probably lived in houses with double-paned windows, sealed off from the birds and the storms, sterile and quiet and dull. They probably closed their blinds at night and cranked up their buzzing central AC units. “You might as well sleep in the middle of a shopping mall,” my mom often says.
When you leave my mother’s house, it’s true that you might feel some relief at the thought of returning to the comforts of modern life. But when you get back to your own house, your ordinary windows and doors that shut tightly will feel like a disappointment. Your dry California air and your swimming pool will feel like trifles compared to trees so tall they disappear into the sky. I used to think that my mother’s house was embarrassing, a ramshackle mess in a small town, nothing and nowhere. Now I know that my mother’s house is the center of the universe. There is no other place like it.