Only A House by Christie Tate

I keep a picture of my Grandma’s old yellow farmhouse on my desk. And now that the house no longer exists, this picture is a treasure, the thing I’d grab on the way out if my house in Chicago caught fire.

When my dad reported that the current owner had grown tired of her years’ long renovation project and razed the place, I felt a spasm of sadness right in my solar plexus. He tried to shrug it off. “It was only a house,” but what a preposterous thing to say. It was more than a house. Those summer weeks I spent tromping around the house and the barn, shedding my girl-ness and keeping up with my older brother, step for step as we waded through the creek, climbed into the hayloft, and scared cows with our bickering and scooting too close to their salt lick, were weeks that added whole dimensions to my life. Without the time I spent dusty, shoveling manure, and coming across feral cat remains in the old milk barn, I would never have discovered intrepid and rugged parts of myself. Without the farm parts of my childhood, I would have been all Dallas hair bows and pure white sneakers, ballet lessons and Catholic mass in the cool modern post-Vatican two building of the church where you could see the mall from the altar. The farm introduced me to shit on my shoes and cow-beasts with goop coming out of their eyes, their mouths, their asses. The farm values were different than the ones back home where everything was air conditioned and we paid attention to elbows on the table and wearing clothes that were in style—Guess jeans and LeSportSac purses. It all mattered so much in Dallas, but on the farm, all that mattered was having a sturdy pair of shoes and not taking the Lord’s name in vain. 

“They tore down my Grandma’s old house in Texas,” I tell my husband over breakfast in Chicago two days after Dad told me the news. I’d waited because I thought that letting the news settle would make it easier to say out loud.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” my son asks from the living room.  

I take a fortifying sip of my tea so I can talk without sobbing. “I’m sad because something I really loved—a house that meant a lot to me, that I grew up loving—no longer exists.”

When I mention it in therapy the following week, I can hardly get the words out, and the ones I chose—house, Grandma, farm, Texas, childhood, gone—didn’t seem to carry the right amount of weight, the weight I felt pressing against my chest. 

**

I took the picture with my old Kodak camera four decades ago. I must have stood at the edge of the yard, my back against the barbed wire fence, trying to capture the full length of the house in my lens. The picture is washed out and there’s a weird orange tint in the foreground, likely from age or something I spilled on it over the years. The house looks white, but I know it was a butter-yellow because I spent several weeks there every summer, and Dad took us for day visits at least once a month during our childhood. Whenever we drove away after a visit, heading the 45 miles back to Dallas, I would stare out the back window, trying not to blink until the horizon snatched it from my sight. I could hold it in my vision for almost a mile, but once we crested the hill at Highway 77, the gabled roof disappeared. The silo would remain visible for almost a half a mile longer. Even on I-35, I could see it for a spell. When all of it—the house, silo, A-frame red barn—disappeared, I felt a heat in my throat and a longing so acute I had to squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate on the radio to keep from bursting into tears. 

That house and that land were the first things I remember really loving. I knew I loved them because I felt such heaviness in my heart when I left them and such a quiet, secret delight when I called them to mind.

By fourth grade, I knew the route from my house to the farmhouse by heart: Take I-35 due south from Dallas for forty five minutes until the Forreston exit. We knew were getting close when we passed the Waxahachie exits, because that was the nearest big town to Forreston. When we reached the Forreston exit, we were allowed to unbuckle and stand up as Dad glided across the overpass that would carry us into the small farm community, home to a post office, a general store, an antique market, and three Christian churches (Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ). After we passed through the three block commercial district, we crossed over Highway 77. The cemetery sits just south of the highway, where, on a sad November Day when I was eight, we buried my Granddaddy, so after that, I always kept my eyes fixed in the opposite direction. I loved the shiny silver chutes of the old granary, which stood sentry over the entrance to the Texas farm land that included my family’s for over a century.

It seems impossible that it doesn’t exist, though none of it does. The granary is long-gone and so is the antique store. So is the yellow farmhouse, torn down after over 100 years. What’s left is a lean version of the past: a post office with limited hours, no foot traffic, and sparse attendance at all the churches. 

The Wikipedia entry for Forreston, Texas, takes up only half a page. The town was founded in 1843 along the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, and its heyday was 1940, when it boasted three cotton gins, several businesses, and a population of 350. In March 1999, Texas Monthly included Forreston in its roundup of “Best of Small-Town Texas.” In the 2008 census—five years after my Grandma Virginia died—the population of Forreston was estimated at 238, and in 2010, Forreston’s population was so diminished it was not listed in the census at all. There are no articles about Forreston from this century. 

**

“Give me the matches,” my brother yelled, but I was out the door already and across the yard before he caught me. 

“It’s my turn,” I yelled, the battle cry of the younger sister. I struck a match and held it to The Waxahachie Daily Light and watched the pages blacken into ash.

The yellow farmhouse sat on Route 4, and there was no city trash collection on set days of the week like we had in Dallas. Instead, there was a set of empty drums we called “burning cans” behind the house. In the burning cans, we lit matches and set fire to the trash of the day. The newspaper, corn cobs, chewing gum wrappers, Jiffy cornbread boxes. 

My brother raced to my side, carrying a paper bag full of cantaloupe rinds and eggshells. He grabbed the matches from my hands, and struck one for the bag he’d put in the drum next to mine. 

I loved the smell and the way the acrid smoke filled my nose and burned my throat. At home, we weren’t allowed to strike matches or set the newspaper on fire. Through the flames, I looked out over the pasture, watching the grass and trees shimmer through the flames at dusk. It never got old watching an egg carton melt and a plastic 2-liter bottle of soda curl up and disappear. 

**

Granddaddy died when I was in third grade, and my stomach burned with grief as I thought about Grandma all alone in that big yellow house. Did she know what to do with the cows and hay? Right after the funeral, Dad began to visit her every weekend and often during the week to help her wind down the farm business. One Saturday I tagged along, and as the house appeared on the horizon, its roof and chimney seemed to sag; the silo seemed to list to the west. Sadness covered the land, from the barn to the creek.

Dad and Grandma set up at the kitchen table surrounded by trifolded pieces of paper, an adding machine, and a check book. They hunched over the papers, talking quietly. Running a small Texas farm in the early 1980s was not a profitable venture. Every so often, tears would slide down Grandma’s cheeks, and she’d pat her face with a blue bandana.

I knew not to bother them. I escaped out the back door and followed the creek along the border of the property. I explored the barns for treasure and sought out the feral cats to see if any had kittens I could chase or cuddle. When I returned to the house to swipe a candy bar, Dad and Grandma were still at the table, the bandana between them. I headed out again, giving them space to sift through the adult things that came in all those white envelopes.

**

I didn’t know that burning a field was a way that farmers tried to restore nutrients to the land, so I was electrified when Grandma got a call during one of our visits that they were burning the field behind her house. I slipped on my tennis shoes and shot out the back door with my brother. If burning trash in a barrel was novel, how magnificent to see a whole field go up in flames!

We took the trail behind Grandma’s house, following the white plumes of smoke. Several men I didn’t know doused the edge of the field with gasoline. One of them held a rusted red can out to me and nodded. I took it and poured gas on the edge of the field, just like I’d watered Grandma’s marigolds back at the house. 

The fire advanced, and we retreated. Neighbors drifted over, and we stood watching the smoldering earth turn a tarry black, while poofs of smoke, fluffy as clouds, drifted heavenward. Someone went running back toward Grandma’s house. A few minutes later, red fire engines appeared with their giant hoses. Only then did I realize all of the farmers’ faces were tight with worry. Across the field, the fire had gotten out of control, headed close to the houses. Even as the firemen doused the field and the danger fizzled before our eyes, I pictured those terrible orange flames engulfing Grandma’s house. For weeks, when I closed my eyes at night, I saw a scarred patch of earth where the yellow house should be.

**

For spring break my sophomore year in high school, I craved adventure, but a trip to Mexico or a ski lodge in Creste Butte was beyond my $100.00 budget, so my best friend Lia and I opted for a few days at the farm. Grandma would head to town every morning around nine for her job managing the ladies ready-to-wear shop off the town square in Waxahachie. Lia and I would watch Young and the Restless and eat animal crackers from Grandma’s pantry. 

“Let’s lay out,” Lia said on the third day. We knew our classmates who’d made it to Padre Island or Cancun would return with golden tans. We removed the screen from Grandma’s bedroom window on the second floor so we could stretch out on a flat section of the roof. We didn’t have bathing suits so we made do with bras and underwear; we didn’t have suntan lotion either so we made do with Crisco. I dipped my fingertips into greasy white goo, and smeared it on my shoulders, arms, neck, torso, and legs. Best tan of my life.

“Did you and Lia lay out on the roof at Grandma’s?” Dad asked a few weeks later.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Mr. Calvert drove by and saw ya’ll. He said you weren’t dressed.”

“We were dressed.”

Dad lingered in the doorway, uncomfortable. “Maybe don’t get on the roof next time for all God’s creatures to see you.”

**

One August weekend between my sophomore and junior year of college, I planned to spend the night at the farm with Grandma. Nostalgia chased me from Dallas to Forreston. I was after that feeling of staying up late as Grandma dozed on the couch, helping myself to fistfuls of candy and painting my nails Avon red. The feeling of having the house to myself.

“You don’t have to spend the night,” my Dad said. It sounded like a warning. Later, I’d realized he was saying, “You can’t go back.” Whole books had been written about how you can’t go back, but I hadn’t read them yet. I thought all I had to do was step through the doorway of the farmhouse, and then I could re-enter the past.

“How do, Christie Lou,” Grandma said when I found her on the back porch watering her flowers. “Come here and love my neck.” I hugged her tight. 

We ate tamales filled with spicy pork that her friend Rosa dropped off, and just like old times, she retired to the couch after dinner so she could watch her religious programs. 

The house felt smaller. In the kitchen, I could almost touch the ceiling if I stood on my toes. Had it shrunk?  I couldn’t admit that some of the magic of being in the house felt like a ghost; I kept thinking I would catch it, just around the corner. Maybe when I slipped into bed in Aunt Gilly’s old room. Maybe when I showered in the upstairs bathroom next to the old timey hair drying chair with the giant metal bowl you pulled over your head. Maybe if I struck a match to the tamale husks.

I climbed into bed with sheets that felt stiff as cardboard and stared at the ceiling. I set the alarm so I could go on an early run, hoping to catch some of the magic from my own two feet on the road from the farm to town. The ceiling fan blew my hair into my face, and in the deep dark of the country, I was sure it was a critter crawling across my forehead. That had happened once in this very bedroom. I’d screamed and turned on the lights, tossing my pillow across the room and pulling my mattress away from the headboard just in time to see a Daddy long legs crawl up the headboard.

I rose early for the run to Forreston and back—two miles round trip. At seven a.m., the heat shimmered off the blacktop road and I felt thirst dry up my throat. Magic eluded me.

Church offered a few embers. As we climbed the wooden stairs to the First Baptist Church, I heard the piano playing and voices singing. We swung the door open and saw a smattering of worshippers—mostly folks with white or gray hair, stooped over their song books. A few looked up at waved, then turned back to their books. It felt like stepping back in time—the light was still a jaundiced amber from the brown paint covering the windows to keep out the heat. The piano looked decades old, its wood honeyed, its keys faded. The preacher wore a brown suit that could have been worn by Sherman Hemsley in a 1970’s sitcom. Nothing modern snuck into the frame. Maybe you couldn’t go back home, but you could go back to church.

**

After I graduated from college, Grandma sold the yellow house and most of the land when it became too much to manage. She moved to Covenant Place, a red brick assisted living facility in Waxahachie. By then, she was ill and tired, and I didn’t think to ask her how it felt to leave the yellow farmhouse. In those days, we were all action: Find a place, sell the farm, move her in, pay the bills. 

**

In our last time together, I visited Grandma at Covenant House by myself. Her new life miles away from the farmhouse felt wrong. The whole time I was there, I felt like crying. Screaming, really. “Don’t you miss the yellow house?” Something insistent and hysterical thrummed beneath my ribs. I wanted it all back: her plump body, that wacky hair dryer, the house, the burning cans, the fields, the creek. I was grateful she was safe and beloved, but this one-room efficiency along a sterile hallway with beige carpet wasn’t the yellow house. There was no breeze, no wonky screen door, no pasture of idling cows to watch as the sun blazed across the morning sky. 

When it was time for me to drive back to Dallas, a cry poured out of me, silent and steady. How different it was to say goodbye to someone sitting in a one-room apartment in a facility instead of a rambling farmhouse that was as much a part of her as her laugh, her freckled wrist, and her short legs that I inherited. I couldn’t speak, not one word would come out of my mouth. So much was already gone, but we could sit next to each other and let the memories unfurl with all their sharp, meaningful hurt.

**

If you type Forreston, Texas into Google Maps, you can trace Forreston Road from Highway 77 to the yellow farmhouse. A few years ago I saw that the long gravel driveway from Forreston Road to the farmhouse bore my Grandma’s name. “Virginia St.” though it’s hardly a street. How did Google know to name that strip of gravel drive “Virginia”? I marvel at the modern memorial for my Grandma who’d never owned a cell phone or typed a search term into a computer.

The house remains in the satellite image, as does the silo, a few of the barns, and several concrete slabs, the former foundations of structures lost to a long ago tornado. There is a metal trough just outside the shadow of the silo, and if you pan out, you can see the forking branches of the Onion Creek, whose dried up bed looks white like the sun-bleached skeleton of a steer.

**

One March day, ten years after Grandma died, my Dad and I took my children in my Dad’s Ford Explorer to visit the old place. I felt like a giant sandwiched between my two children in their car seats, my knees almost in my chest. I was only a few years older than they when we started the tradition of unbuckling as soon as we left the highway. 

Dad parked just outside the carport, as he had on every trip we’d ever taken to this patch of land. Mom pointed at a bird gliding across the sky, an eagle or a hawk, we weren’t sure. 

I walked around the house, and pressed my face to the glass front doors, half expecting to see Grandma rubbing her feet, sore from years of retail. Instead, I surveyed what the new owner had done to the place. Every inch of the first floor was filled arm chairs, tables, armoires, scraps of wood, chairs piled on top of each other. It all came right to the edge of the door; one more footstool and the door would never shut.

“What is all of that?” I asked Dad, and he said he had no idea. It looked like the set of a reality TV show about people who are not entirely well. 

We walked around the front yard, and I gazed at the big A-frame barn and the concrete silo that had formed the most important skyline in my childhood. I loved it still.

We didn’t linger, though I was slow to climb back in the car. My grief gathered strength as we headed north to Dallas. When I put my kids down for a nap, I lay across my parents’ bed. As soon as I closed my eyes, I could see the outline of the silo, barn, and the farmhouse. My heart fluttered with grief that made my muscles tense. My husband, who’d stayed back in Dallas for a work call, walked into the room, and I snapped at him, suddenly angry that he hadn’t joined us. “You missed it all. How could you?” I hadn’t told him I wanted him to come.

“One day we’re going to buy that land and everything on it,” I said and turned my back on him.

**

After Dad told me the house was gone and sent me a picture of the new, one-story blue one that stands in its place, I texted my brother. I’m not happy about this stumpy blue house that took the place of Grandma’s farmhouse. He reminded me that as soon as Grandma left for Covenant Place, it was no longer the magical place of our youth. He texted terrible, awful, untrue things, like It was just a house. I shook my head. No, no, no.

**

Can you mourn a house? A town that U.S. census says no longer exists?  

When I visit Dallas for my thirtieth high school reunion in September, will I take an afternoon to drive to Forreston to see the farm? To pay my respects to my long-gone family and my memories of them? The question reminds me of the calculus people do when someone they love dies—do they view the body after the death or do they refuse so they can preserve the memory of the person they loved sitting at the table, telling a joke, eating twirled strands of spaghetti?

I’d like see what’s still standing. Maybe I’ll knock on the door of the squat blue house and ask if I can walk around. I’d like to measure the paces from the house to where the silo stood and see if the old cattle guard is still there. I want to see if the hill in front of the house is as steep as it felt when I rode my bike down it and made up a song called, “I’m free,” which I later sang to Grandma and Granddaddy who were sitting side-by-side on a swing.

I’d like to kick the foundations that still remain of the barns my Granddaddy, his brothers, and their farmhands built decades ago. I’d like to draw near to a cluster of cows to see how close they let me get. 

I’d like to sink to my knees in the side yard and bow to the ground offering my thanks for how it held me and the yellow house, and my Grandparents, and my Granddaddy’s family before that. I would like to thank all the spirits that graced and presided over the land, including the Tonkawa Indians, who were removed to Oklahoma in 1859 when the United States government stole this land from them years before my family became its stewards. 

I’d like to walk the perimeter of the property and tell it how it saved me. How, when I would sit in my third and fourth grade classrooms, memorizing spelling words or the timelines of the saints’ lives, I would remember its rows of cotton and corn, its weathered barns, and the crooked fences that lay inside me like a map to another world. That there were some years when I held my breath from summer to summer, waiting for a chance to spend the day on a tractor and sharing a jug of water with my Granddaddy under a shade tree.

I’d like to grieve in person, letting my tears fall into the cracked earth and the short grasses. I would like to lean on one of the cottonwood trees or elms by the creek and feel the rough bark on my hands. Maybe scoop a clump of dirt to seal in a jar to place on my desk next to the framed picture of the house. Maybe take a stick and a few rocks to lay on the edge of a shelf where I put precious things like the nest of my daughter’s hair clippings, my kids’ bronzed baby shoes. I’d like to see my hands dirty from collecting whatever is possible to take and bring back home to Chicago. With my body, I’d like to honor the yellow house and all the ways it’s seared in my memory, still standing on the edge of a Texas field that my family calls home.  

Christie Tate is a Chicago-based author and essayist who grew up in Texas. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Atticus Review, Carve Magazine, McSweeney’s, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere.  Her debut memoir Group was published in Fall 2020 by Avid Reader Press and was a Reese Witherspoon book club pick.  

21 December 2021