Favorite house from my childhood

Hi, I'm a new member, a mommy, a writer, and it has taken me over two hours bewtween breakfast, fights, diaper changes and fixing the X-box, to write this. I suppose I should try when everyone is asleep. Anyway, here it is. Thanks for letting me join!

My favorite childhood home was not a home, exactly, and it was not dappled in sunlight or wrapped in warm rich folds of breezy blue curtains and lighter than air robin’s egg shag carpeting. In fact, that was my childhood home, and while I could wax poetic for hours on the comfort of 49 Schuyler Street, the place I loved was the house my mother grew up in, a ramshackle bigger than life Victorian, alongside route 9N in a little valley of the Adirondack mountains. “The old house,” as my mom’s family called it, was set back from the road on a piece of Adirondack farmland that hadn’t been truly farmed since before I was born (think bellbottoms, Charlie’s Angels and Jimmy Carter). The 16 room house with brittle peeling no-color paint and dangling shutters my mother grew up ashamed of would be considered a fixer-upper these days, a majestic sprawling 1800s farmhouse in need of a little TLC, in realtor-speak.

The old house was like a poorly distant relative everyone likes well-enough, but is hesitant to hug because of the smell. Only the overgrown maples and oaks surrounding the house like sentries dared wrap their arms around the weathered structure, nearly swallowing it in their willowy embrace. No-one lived in the old house, my grandmother had moved into a trailer on the farm property long ago. You could smell the mold and age, the years and dirt and hidden treasure as you plowed through tall, ankle-scratching grass to get up on the sagging porch. Peeling paint and weathered flies crackled under your feet, but the hanging-at-an- angle wooden screen door made no noise as you opened it to push open the never locked heavy oak front door to step inside.

There was no electricity so we only visited in daytime, and it was only after my grandmother died that we went at all, to clean it out. Despite the dust and scent of rotting wood, the repeated warnings to watch your step, the floor is rotten (my oldest cousin Marren fell through one day), the ever present danger of ghosts in the upstairs guests’ quarters, and my cousin Jade’s greedy hands snatching up every colored marble and old doll I spotted, the old house was my favorite place to go the summer I was seven. I am still trying to figure out the irony of driving past the old house 20 years later with my current boyfriend, the man I might have married, just as the old house was struck by lightening and hours later burned to the ground.