Excerpt
from the essay
The House by the Side of the Road
in Waking at Rush Cove
By Terry Fuchs
Waking at Rush Cove
... The verandas gave the house girth and confidence; a stately dignity like a ship's. And indeed, in our imaginations, they were at times the decks of a ship, or a frontier fort, a spaceship or a playhouse. With them we never needed to build a treehouse. The fact that there were two—the front one running the width of the house and another, deeper one at the side door—gave the good guys and bad guys of any drama their own fort. (A covered stoop at the back door provided a far-flung outpost.) Because of a trellis of elephantine, overlapping ivy leaves that enclosed one of its flanks, the side veranda had a green, jungly atmosphere of its own. But their versatility was only limited by our inventiveness at concocting games. On hot afternoons we sought their shade. On rainy days their shelter meant we could play outside. At night we perched on the railing while the adults talked in the wicker chairs they had wrestled out from the foyer after supper.
Those verandas were a kind of intermediary between inside and out, so that the yard seemed a logical extension of the house. That house should have been surrounded by maple and spruce trees, an orchard, and a gully, and it was. In my grandparents' back yard currant bushes swallowed the clothes post, grapevines and outbuildings bordered the path past the well pump, and corn spiked the field beside the orchard. Almost every day of our visits we trekked through the orchard on our way to the gully, and in the late summer and early fall the trees were so laden that they had to be supported by long poles and the fruit practically brushed the head even of a child. The gully was a taste of the wild. It sloped down behind the orchard through oak and maple and elm, and streams carved sheer banks in the clay under the leaves. There were roads at the bottom, but the seep of a new road had by-passed them and grass split the old asphalt and the abandoned concrete bridges were scaling away.
We roamed the gully. As we did in the house, we used our imaginations as well as our legs. We leaned over the sides of the bridges and dropped stones in Kettle Creek where it disappeared underneath. Only rarely any more did an adult, in a burst of enthusiasm and comradeship, accompany us into the gully, but we understood that we shared it with our parents and our uncles and aunts. We knew that they had swum in Kettle Creek and that they, too, had walked these weedy roads.
As at Granny's in Preston, that sense of shared experience was in the air at my grandparent's house. The fact that our parents had grown up in these houses gave us our earliest understanding of time's depth. Elsewhere time existed mostly in the present tense and the tantalizing promise of the future. Here we were confronted with the reality of our parent's youth. It was a rich and provocative discovery.
After my grandmother died I would have liked to have been able to buy the house and live in it, but, fresh out of school with no prospects for work, it was impossible. The house I finally did buy, a dozen years later to the month, was very different from the one my grandparents owned. Theirs was always as right as if a child's imagination had invented it. In part, of course, it had. Now, in that process that has little to do with actual furniture, my imagination is busy furnishing my own house. But that night when I heard the rush of a train across a field, I discovered that it did not have to start from scratch.
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