Newsletter from Jay Wilcox - August 2024: On Selling Grandmom's House
Good morning/afternoon/evening!
We're finally selling Grandmom's house. Our family's occupied this space since 1968, and as we empty its final corners, I feel a warm sadness--a wish that I'd somehow paid more attention. I touch walls I've never touched before. Places finally exposed by the absence of armoires, wallpaper the sun hasn't touched in lifetimes. If I can touch everything one last time, I'll never forget it.
It's a feeling like being naked, to come up against the end of something you always took for granted. There is no extra layer to remove now. Just the chill of knowing you can't come back.
Look, if you didn't spend at least part of your childhood in this house, you seriously missed out. I present to you the Platonic ideal of grandmom-houses--four floors of dusty splendor, stately oak corridors. Golden wall sconces? You better believe it! Chandeliers? Without a doubt! I even find myself nostalgic for its winter drafts, that thermodynamic cost of soaring ceilings, beams I still have to jump to reach.
What would it have looked like to "pay more attention?" How would that even be possible?
I mean, I love this house so much that I frequently explore it in my dreams, a template for extra floors and passageways, attics over the existing attic. Every addition makes sense--as if it had been there all along, waiting for me. How could I ever "pay more attention" to something infinite? At the end of my life, I'll wait for one more dream, one more chance to unfold a memory and build something new--a new way of appreciating everything that happened, of loving the people I was fortunate enough to know.
Hannah and Ursula and I all eat breakfast together on weekend mornings. We call it our "breakfast picnic" and put on classical music while we gather on the carpet in our library. These are the good old days. I pay attention to the way my daughter lunges for our food. She's not crawling yet, so her efforts actually push her farther back, and soon we have to rescue her from the room's far corner. She's outgrown half her clothes. We keep her in pajamas late into the day.
She's been to my grandmother's house. Last month, we took her on the longest car ride of her life to see it--to run her fingers over the crackling wallpaper and lie on the living room's grand piano while we played. We took a ton of pictures. She's so small in these rooms that are finally empty.
Again, these are the good old days. I say that to remind myself that I'm paying enough attention. If life is one bittersweet ending after another, let me also see new beginnings, the joy of change. Ursula squirms and laughs when we tickle her belly, and I see exactly where her teeth will come through, tiny promises just below the gums, the pain of something new.
Infinite Regards,
Jay