To Call or Not to Call the Johnsons

I'm headed to Utah next week for Women's Conference and to meet up with friends. It will be my first outing without the family in tow and I'm excited. In addition to seeing friends, I will spend time with my brothers and kids and also meet up with three of my uncles. I'm gifting all family members with either a hard copy or CD of Grandma's 1981-1983 journal. My mother and I have been the only ones to lay eyes on these writings. Nobody is expecting anything so I hope it will be a pleasant surprise.

There is also another matter on my mind. Thanks to my recent Facebook reunion with my childhood friend Jeralyn, I was able to get the name and number of the people who have lived in my childhood home for the past 20 years; their last name is Johnson. I asked for this information because I have this voracious longing to step over the threshold for a final time. I thought calling and asking might be less awkward than just showing up.

We left my white brick Highland house the summer I turned 13. The last memory I have is of taking a nap in my furniture-less, bare bedroom floor while the sun poured onto me through the large window. I felt so warm. The muffled sound of the lawnmower outside was the last sound I heard from the inside. The departure was forced and traumatic for my parents. We lost our home to the bank. I got over it pretty quick. Foreclosure isn't the end of the world. I shared a great bedroom with my sister in our next house and made a new space for myself. However, I never loved a house again with the fervor and loyalty that I innocently and wholeheartedly gave my white house. When people ask me where I'm from, I always say Utah. Secretly, inside, I want to say I am from my white brick house on 9600 North; for that is where I was planted and grew just like my dad's vegetable garden in the backyard.

It's a strange thing to drive past something for years that feels like it belongs to you in your heart but in legal reality truly belongs to someone else. I have no business being there in the present but I'm always there in my memories. I have a sort of nostalgic compulsion to return. At once I am compelled to ask and to enter but I'm terrified. It sort of reminds me of a terrible experiment I created as a nine-year-old. One of my cats was hit by a car and died. I was curious about decomposition. I placed the cat corpse in an empty cat food bag and placed everything under a few loose bricks in the backyard. I waited a week and came back to take a peek. Words can't describe the horror. You'd think that something that was dead could not possibly be full of such horrific life. There were definitely changes that took place while I was gone and I wish I would have never witnessed what those changes were. It's the same with the old house. Will I be satisfied or at peace looking in a home that is filled with different furniture and a different family? Will I be traumatized to find disrepair? Will I be any less traumatized if I find all the fixtures, carpeting, doors, etc. familiar to my childhood memories replaced by newer, more fashionable accouterments? What do I hope to accomplish? Like the dead cat, wouldn't it just be better to leave my house how it was in my memories? Why is this house so ghostly in my feelings? Why does it feel like I need to have a sort of "viewing" to leave this "home" in the past?

Family picture in front of the house. I'm the fat-faced baby in the ridiculous flower jumper.

I found this poem by Emily Dickinson that brilliantly describes how I'm feeling.

I years had been from home,

And now before the door,

I dared not open, lest a face

I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine

And ask my business there.

My business, -- just a life I left,

Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,

I scanned the windows near;

The silence like an ocean rolled,

And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh

That I could fear a door,

Who danger and the dead had faced,

But never quaked before.

I fitted to the latch

my hand, with trembling care,

Lest back the awful door should spring,

And leave me standing there.

I moved my fingers off

As cautiously as glass,

And held my ears, and like a thief

Fled gasping from the house.