Rubble Squats
Life Marked By
Stones
It’s gone and I’m beyond distressed. Fires, tornadoes, hurricanes,
mudslides, tsunamis, floods . . . houses get ruined, destroyed, daily. Rubble
squats where once stood a home, a place that wrapped its walled arms around
people and kept them safe, secure, and warm. Those walled arms allowed them to
slumber, ceiling overhead, the dark kept outside where it belongs.
Homes vanish at nature’s whim, the carelessness of humans, or by
choice, to make way for something else. Those something elses can and do take
the form of offices, stores, shopping centers, resorts, playgrounds. Those
something elses take the form of highways on which we partake in the dance of
travel, of movement, of getting where we want to be, where we think we should
be, and where we think we must be.
Vivid pictures of that home had slipped across the miles and years
of memory and into my expectations. A white house on a corner lot—brick
fireplace on the east side. A bay window in the dining room, also facing east.
Brick steps leading to the front door were embraced on each side by tall azalea
bushes whose color blazed bright every spring. Five-foot-tall elephant ears once
dwarfed the children in their shadows. Old-growth heirloom camellias, a
hydrangea bush that blushed blue before summer’s heat dried its blossoms.
Camphor trees with roots once dug for sassafras tea in the years ignorant of
its toxins. Wood floors, polished to a reflective sheen. A swinging door gave
passage from the kitchen to the dining room. An arch opened the living room to
the dining room. An extra room off the kitchen and dining room had its windows long
ago closed in. Its wall became shelves for hundreds of books. Windows
throughout the house had separate panes of glass held in by wood painted bright
white to mark the sections that let in light. A single bathroom for a family of
six. A pile of leaves behind the garage composted and fed the abundance of
worms just beneath the soil’s edge. A single-car garage on the side of the
house stored a push mower with rotating blades, clippers for the azalea bushes,
paint, tools, the things that make up a life—a home.
In the days preceding my journey there, I imagined pulling up and
marveling at the yard and how small it would seem through adult eyes as opposed
to child memories. I would have been courteous to the current occupants and
grateful for any time they allowed me to observe and maybe even step upon and
touch the ground on which my child feet once walked.
Possibility figured in my imagination—perhaps once again those
wood floors would hold me up as I walked into the door, perhaps my eyes would
look through the bay window and see as an adult as well as a child.
Google Maps could not find the location when I requested
directions from my Central Florida home to those brick steps three hours north
of me. I hadn’t lived there for fifty years. Maybe my memory had failed me on
the exact address. The street was there and that was enough for me.
We exited I-95 and wound our way toward the neighborhood and
nothing was familiar. The house on the first corner held no recognition for us.
Once several blocks long, the street was short—only three blocks.
West of where the house and street should have been were massive
piles of rubble—the remains of my childhood home. Stunned into mute grief, we
continued to drive in the neighborhood. We found the cemetery we once used as a
shortcut on our way to school. I scanned the grounds through the locked gates,
and as I turned away for a moment, I saw a young man on the street. I called
out to him, we spoke at length, and he confirmed what I already knew. Eighteen
months earlier, the DOT razed the west end of the neighborhood for an I-95
exit.
So recent, yet so long ago. Time didn’t matter because gone is
gone. I turned again to the cemetery. Entering a locked cemetery absent
malicious intent didn’t seem wrong to me. I climbed through an open area in the
fence. I explored the area alone, with reverence, respect, and silence. It was
and is still a cemetery for Black people. In the years it was our path to
school, the burial ground was overgrown and untended. It now has a sturdy fence
and the locked gate discourages vandals. Grass grows around the graves. A paved
road provides access. Flowers adorn many areas, and new graves are interspersed
with old—some dating from the 1800s. New headstones stand near cracked and
broken markers, some with dim letters that appear to have been etched by hand
into unyielding stone.
 |
| Do the old-growth live oaks miss the feet of children playing at their roots? |
I took that path to learning and I continue to learn. Part of what
I’ve learned since my feet stepped on those grounds and since I was awed by the
azalea bushes in the spring is gratitude. I am grateful for the years I spent
in that house. I’m grateful that the cemetery is well tended, that the souls
there rest undisturbed. I wonder, however, if the feet of children are missed
by the ground and the old-growth oaks towering above miss the shenanigans and
laughter.
What remains of my life on that street and all my childhood
memories is a cemetery. As I processed the initial, stabbing grief of losing the
home I knew and loved, I instead stepped lightly around another place of grief
and loss and love.
