True Enough
The life of a house
I didn’t originally want to move into a house.
I grew up in isolation in the middle of nowhere and there was something comfortable about living in dorms and apartments.
There was a feeling that you were never truly alone. That if you were to scream, someone somewhere would hear it.
Apartment life had its drawbacks, of course, but I’d even built a community at our last place. I was friends with all the other dog parents in our building.
My husband liked to point to the rising cost of rent and explain about the benefits about getting out of a lease. But it wasn’t until we both felt like our big dog really needed his own yard during the pandemic that I finally relented.
The house we live in is the very first one we toured. It had the type of character that is only there when you really think about it. From the outside, it looked like a normal, average place that fit this neighborhood, but inside there were all these interesting uses of space. An extra squatty kitchen cupboard carved out in the space left under the staircase (that we fondly refer to as “the Harry Potter pantry”), rooms with odd corners because the builder wanted to maximize the space. I don’t know why, but these little things stuck with me and they’re part of the reason I still love this place.
Before closing on the house, we met the owner. He was incredibly nice and we kept in touch with him on and off the first couple of years living here—to ask warranty info, get referrals for repair work.
There have been a few unsettling moments of being a homeowner so far. The first was when we did work to regrow grass in the backyard where the previous owner’s kids’ trampoline used to be. All the seed didn’t take except in this one spot, where it took like crazy. It was primarily in the shade and the grass grew in long and lush…in almost the exact length and width of a human body. We joked about the possibility of there being a dead body in the yard, but then years later when the rest of the yard finally started filling in, we forgot about it.
Then one day, I watched from the kitchen as our dog disappeared behind the retaining wall in our yard. He didn’t move from the spot, his head to the earth where I couldn’t see. I called him back and eventually when he returned, there was something dark hanging from his mouth. I grabbed at it and gasped in disgust at a clump of long black hair. Human hair.
I’m a writer…and a lawyer, for that matter, so naturally I went to the ditch. Nothing was unearthed. Some mulch was pushed aside between the trees. Our dog had a bad habit of eating wood chips at the time, so I just assumed that’s what he’d been really doing there and accidentally had tried to consume a wad of a stranger’s hair.
“But where did it come from?” I asked my husband later.
He agreed it was creepy, but his explanation made a lot of sense. “Maybe it fell from a bird? They gather hair and stuff like that to make nests.”
We had a ton of birds frequent our yard and one had made a nest awhile back. So I wrote it off. Forgot about it.
A few years ago, there was a crazy winter storm here in Texas and our plumbing had some issues as a result. A plumber came over, stopped the major leak. It had taken a shorter time than planned and he offered to look at other stuff we had issues with.
I presented our bathroom sink that was having issues. He fidgeted with it for a while before opening the cabinets underneath and unscrewing the pipe. After a moment, he grabbed a huge clump of long tangled black hair and showed it to me like it was some prize fish he’d just reeled in. “Oh my god,” I said. “How long has that been in there?”
He laughed. “You need to clean this regularly.” He threw the hair away and screwed the pipes back together.
My heart started pounding, though, as I considered the hair. “We knew the previous owner,” I said. “And his wife is blonde.”
The plumber turned around as he finished, his eyes darting briefly to my own hair. It was long, sure, but definitely not black. Not even dark brown. “Hmm, weird.”
And that’s where I left that as well. Because what else could you do with it?
It felt like an odd sort of intrusion on our life in this house. Like someone from the past had popped in unannounced. But I couldn’t place who it was.
This Halloween we walked our son around the neighborhood for his first trick-or-treating. Most of the neighbors recognized me from my daily laps with the stroller. I chatted with one guy who told my husband and I that our HOA had been yelling about him over his truck parked in the street. We laughed and shook our heads in solidarity. Then he gestured over his shoulder.
“You guys are at the corner, right?”
“Yes,” I answered.
He nodded, glanced down at our son. “We’ve been in this neighborhood since the beginning…we used to party a lot at your house.”
There it was again, intrusion. Friendly as it was. The notion that this stranger had been in our house long before we had.
“Oh, with Abe?” I decided it was fine, though. We had learned from the beginning that the previous owner was friendly with everyone here. And he was a cool guy, so if he invited this neighbor over to party, then—
“No,” the man said. He narrowed his eyes. “I can’t remember their names…two kids…nice couple.”
“Yeah, that’s Abe, right?” I glanced over at my husband who nodded.
The man shook his head. “No, he was nice, but it was before him. The original owner.”
My son was growing restless and tugging on my hand.
The man smiled. “Anyway, it’s a nice house.” He adjusted his grasp on the bowl of candy. “Have a good evening.”
And we did. But once the porch lights dimmed and the candy had been inventoried and my son was asleep, the encounter with the neighbor lingered in my mind.
I wondered about the response the man’s words had evoked in me. So what if he used to “party” a lot here? Was it the vagueness of that description that bothered me? What kind of parties? Wild ones? BBQs?
But I landed on the core of what was really unsettling to me about all of this. It was almost an affirmation of this strange feeling I’d had since we first moved into this house. I found it all creepy at first. The quiet contained within these walls. The fact that any small noise couldn’t just immediately be attributed to some unseen neighbor.
The sense I’d had that the house itself was almost a living thing that creaked as it edged closer to middle age.
As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about the layers of a house. The way each family leaves something behind. Nail holes, paint flecks, maybe a strand of hair.
And maybe that’s what we were feeling all along. Not ghosts exactly, but the weight of all those ordinary lives pressing against the walls, reminding us that nothing we live in is ever entirely ours.
How many lives had been lived in this house before we came to it? And how many would be lived here after us?
