The Golden State

Honey is quieter now but still mewling hungry and tired of being squished up in her car seat, long past her bedtime already. I park in the driveway in front of the garage and step out to release her and once she has tottered around on the front grass a bit to stretch her legs I get her to hold my hand and together we climb the back steps and I fumble for the key I keep on my keychain even though I’ve only been up here twice in five years. I hoist Honey up on my hip and open the door holding my breath. It’s been more than a year since the last time I walked in this door and I think what if it’s been colonized by local youths meth-users or pillheads or whatnot and I prepare myself to see something I don’t want to see. But it’s as pristine as it was when my grandmother presided, with its all-over faux-wood paneling which somehow comes together with her couches her dining room table her Indian baskets her hutch her milk glass her torchère lamp, everything left as it was, cozy and immaculate, my grandfather’s encyclopedia and his World War II books on the low shelf by his recliner. The house is an aesthetically closed circuit, not a detail out of place, its mobileness less apparent within than it is without. I breathe in the smell, the smell as it’s always been, the smell of old paper in a dry cedar cabinet. I eye the woodstove on its brick platform and think how cozy it will be in here and remember that it’s summer and I won’t need to use it. Or not yet, I think, and then unthink it, because we are not prepared to travel that line of inquiry.

I feel the enormous squishy heft of Honey’s diaper and set her down and consider leaving her while I go back to the car to get the diaper stuff but see too many incipient hazards about the place. So I heave her back up and trot back out to the car and pull out the tote bag with the essentials and trot back into the house and change her diaper on the living room floor, and she looks at me with a surprising amount of good cheer given the strange day she’s had, and I feel that we are two gals out on an adventure. I button the onesie and pull up the pants and consider the living room and the hazards and, patting myself on the back for being so conscientious and prepared considering my general frame of mind, take a bunch of clean rags from the pantry and tape them over the razor-like corners and edges of the brick platform under the woodstove, and since I’m at it I take my thirty-pack of socket protectors and stick them around, and I put the heavy brass lamp down on the floor where she can’t pull it down onto her head, and I feel the mirrors and still lifes the cowboy ephemera and weavings to make sure they’re secure on the flimsy walls, and then I lie down on the couch and watch as Honey makes her first lap around the living room, poking and stumbling on little legs that have only just learned how to walk. It’s very, very quiet and I wonder what we are going to do next. Then I consider what Honey has eaten today and I get up and make for the pantry and there are cans of baked beans and peas and I bustle around the kitchen and get them into a little saucepan and I survey the house. My house. My house. “This is my house,” I say aloud, and everything in the house contradicts me, down to its dubious foundation. “You’re a visitor,” the house seems to say. But it still welcomes me, even if we have mutually rejected the existence of an owner-owned relationship between us. We are safe in the house, I feel.

Despite the caretaking efforts of my uncle the house is beginning to show the signs of disuse. I can see that rain comes through the master bathroom window; there’s a small soft place in the wood at the sill. The shadows of deceased bugs are visible in the white bowls of light fixtures. Carrying Honey I slide open the screen door which complains a little in its tracks and step onto the porch and see that something has got at the feathers that once hung from the dreamcatcher wind chime, and its remaining wood and metal are in a little broken pile below. A cow skull propped against the house is minus a horn. I peer around at the neighboring houses and note the absence of any lights blinking cozily across the park. I note the mountains with the slightest bit of snow still on their peaks in the distance, neither the Sierra nor the Cascades, but some weird in-betweener range. I feel enervated rather than invigorated by the landscape. But the air feels warm and good and smells like juniper like I promised myself it would, and the light is otherworldly purple, indisputably beautiful.