The Ridge

Encountering My Past on Realtor.com

282 Quaker Ridge Road. Photo courtesy Keller-Williams Realty.

Last Friday, just a few minutes before band practice started, my sister Gwyneth sent me a text that knocked my feet out from under me. It was a Realtor.com listing for my home, a place I know more intimately than anywhere else in the world. Not my beloved California home, but a much older one, the home I revisit in my dreams: crawling through the closet passageways, consulting my oracular elders in the dooryard, singing in the front parlor, curling up on the great room couch, lying star dazzled on my back in the snow at midnight, or climbing high into the boughs of the balsam fir.

282 Quaker Ridge Road didn’t have a street number when my grandparents lived there. It had a black rotary phone on a party line and a long gravel driveway we walked down to catch the school bus. It smelled of molasses cookies or blueberry cake made with the tiny low bush berries that grew on granite ledges. It smelled of woodsmoke. It convinced, me, wrongly, that some things last forever.

My grandparents bought the house when my mom was seven, but it felt to me as if our family had lived on the Ridge from time immemorial and would continue to do so for eternity. Every Christmas would mean snow drifts and figgy pudding, dinner for thirty (at least), and carols in four part harmony. Every summer would mean repertory theatre, trips in the Queen Mary (a burnt orange American boat of a car) to get ice cream cones at dusk, and hours of reading Agatha Christie, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and, of course, Stephen King novels on the porch.

There would always be a line of generations before me to recite obscure Romantic poetry and sing old, blue songs like“When Rose Blows Her Nose On Her Petticoat, Her Hose Shows.”

My Grammie (far right) and her siblings and mother reciting “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Left - right: Kathryn Ball, Frank Gould, Hilda Gould, John Gould, and Louise Grant. Photo credit: Joe Ball.

The woods down the lane behind Gramp’s workshop would always be my refuge, where I could lie on my belly on a bed of moss and observe the tiny ecosystem it supported, or where I could nurse my sorrows in the shade of granite crags. And there would always be a bunk for me in the loft, with crickets to sing me to sleep. If I suffered from insomnia, my insomniac grandfather would lull me with his long stories and sage advice.

Though its lovely idiosyncrasies are more vivid to me than any other house I’ve ever known, I haven’t set foot in the farmhouse for almost thirty years. Grammie and Gramp sold it in 1994, carving out five acres to build a smaller retirement house up by the road. We spent their last handful of Christmases there, and, though I sometimes peered wistfully at the farmhouse that twinkled through the fir trees past the little pond, Christmas dinner was just as tasty and the harmonies were just as sweet in the new house.

Now I’m the oldest living member of my immediate family, which astonishes me and raises a lump in my throat. When both of your grandmothers live to 100, and when your great-grandmother lives to almost 103, it’s easy to assume that you will shelter in your elders’ lee, at least until you can collect Social Security. But I feel the harsh wind of mortality on my face now.

These days, real estate websites make it easy for all of us to be voyeurs. A friend of mine recently attended a party at an oceanfront mansion and raced home to look up its worth, just out of curiosity. And I can see what my family’s homestead is worth, too: $449K for twenty acres, a 2100 square foot farmhouse with poetry in its bones, a two car garage, and a brand new horse barn where my Grammie’s vegetable plot stood.

All weekend my sisters and cousins and I traded desperate texts and Facebook messages. Could we buy it? What would we do with it? My sister Maggie attended an open house last Sunday and marveled at the intensity of her sense memories. But she also realized that, though the previous owners did remarkably little to change it, it’s not really the same place anymore. Maggie got a little choked up describing the uncanny sense of a farmhouse almost, but not quite, the same, stripped of its houseplants and knickknacks and, most of all, family.

Maggie predicted, based on the number of out-of-state license plates in the dooryard, that someone would snatch the property up quickly, and she was right. It’s under contract after only three days on the market. As far as I know, none of my wistful relatives purchased it.

In a culture that has both fetishized and commodified homes, I can see why an early-1800s property with a pedigree (the Oliver O. Howard Homestead) attracted notice from a wider audience than my own sentimental kin. That’s fair. I have longed for and purchased other families’ homes, and the Oliver O. Howard homestead, by definition, belonged to other folks before it became the Grant place for half a century or so.

My cousin Janet put it best in a Facebook post: “This was my grandparents' home when I was a young child. I have dreamed about it and coveted it since the (kind and patient and nice) neighbors bought it decades ago. Almost everything I've done to any of my homes has been an effort to come back here” (emphasis mine).

Like Janet, and my mom, and my sisters, and my other cousins, I have also striven to recreate the sense of home my grandparents created on Quaker Ridge everywhere I’ve gone. Even as I paced my own home last Friday evening, restless with the uneasy sense that I needed to save Quaker Ridge before it slipped through our fingers again, I couldn’t help but notice the DNA of my grandparents’ home in mine. Is it a coincidence that my kitchen has unfashionable knotty pine cabinets and that I plan to keep them? Is it a coincidence that one of my Gramp’s paintings hangs in a vaulted, pine-ceilinged dining room a bit reminiscent of the Great Room on the Ridge? Did mere personal preference drive me to settle on a ridge that faces southwest towards gaudy sunsets I grew up associating with Grammie and Gramp’s house?

My unfashionable but beloved kitchen (excuse the mess).

OG knotty pine kitchen. Courtesy Keller-Williams Realty.

Though I am indulgent enough to wax poetic about it in this newsletter, there’s nothing special about my connection to my grandparents’ home. Almost every friend I roped into looking at that Realtor.com listing got misty eyed, not for my past, but for their own. We all come from someplace, and, whether modest or grand, idyllic or fraught with pain, we carry connections to those lost homes inside us.

I hope the next stewards of 282 Quaker Ridge Road have the good sense to love it as we did. If their senses are sharp, they may pick out the ghostly strains of my family’s song among the voices of the past.