My siblings and I were flooded with childhood memories.

We had already been told no. After flying in from across the country to visit our grandmother’s house in Oxford, Ohio for the first time in fifty years, the realtor had given us two hours with a handyman watching. That was the deal. We had accepted it, said our goodbyes, and gone back to our rental.

Then my youngest sister wanted to go back.

Not all of us. Just her. Alone. She wanted to sit on the back porch of our grandmother’s house by herself for a little while and we were going to drop her off and come back when she called.

My other sister and I looked at each other.

Fine.

What She Knew That We Didn’t

Contents

My little sister has been blind most of her adult life. And somewhere along the way she developed something the rest of us don’t quite have, a sensitivity to energy, to presence, to the things in a room that you feel before you see.

She had always felt our grandmother watching over her. Not as a memory or a comfort she had invented, but as something real and active. Our grandmother’s neighbor, a woman we had all loved growing up, was part of it too. Two presences she trusted completely, looking out for her.

My other sister and I had a more complicated relationship with our grandmother.

We loved her. We flew across the country to smell her house . But she had also told us once as small children, that our parents had left us with her and were never coming back. She had played a game with us on the way home from the grocery store where she would only turn where we told her to, and we were five and six years old with no idea how to get home, and it went on for what felt like forever. She had taught me about the bogeyman under the bed.

Later in life I would learn she had been the one to tell my biological father not to contact me or my sister.

Our little sister came along later. She got a different grandmother. Warmer, softer, the grandmother who felt like protection and magic and home.

Same woman. Same house. We had just arrived at different times.

We were not going to take that from her.

The Drop-Off

We left her on the corner near the house as the afternoon turned toward evening and told her to call when she was ready.

She finally called as it was getting dark. My brother didn’t want to go back out. So my other sister and I drove over, turned onto that familiar corner lot in the dusk, and found her waiting on the back porch.

The fireflies had started.

We sat down with her and watched them come up out of the yard, the same yard where we had chased fireflies as children and caught them into jars on summer nights. Nobody said anything for a moment. You don’t need to when you’re all seeing the same thing and remembering the same thing at the same time.

Then little sis stood up and tried the back door.

It opened.

The Lookouts: While Sister went in alone

She was going in. There was no discussion about that. The only question was whether we were going in with her.

Siblings and childhood memories — Search in the Dark

Fireplace in the Dark — Fireplace by Flashlight

We were not going to jail for this.

My other sister and I stayed on the porch. We were the lookouts I guess, which felt like a reasonable compromise between participating in a crime and abandoning our sister to explore an empty house alone in the dark. We told her to keep her headlamp pointed at the floor and away from the windows. The neighbors would see the light. In a small town where people might still remember our mother and our grandmother, the last thing we needed was someone calling the police on us.

She nodded, clicked on her headlamp, and disappeared inside.

For the next thirty minutes, give or take, my other sister and I sat on that back porch in the dark whispering at the windows every time little sis’s light swung too high.

Get that light down.

Keep it on the floor.

She could not hear us most of the time.

What We Talked About in the Dark

While she was in there, my other sister and I talked quietly about the things you talk about when you’re sitting in the dark outside your grandmother’s house that you weren’t supposed to go back into.

We talked about little sis and her connection to this place and why we couldn’t quite share it the same way. We talked about our grandmother, the complicated version, and how those two things could both be true at once. You can love someone and also know clearly who they were. You can love a house that holds difficult memories along with the good ones.

We also talked about the spirits question.

We had visited the cemetery that day, paying our respects at our grandparents’ graves and the graves of the old family friends we had loved. And we had been very deliberate about something while we were there. We had not invited any unknown presences to come along with us. We didn’t want spirits we didn’t know following us home.

This was a sincere concern and we treated it as one.

We did agree that asking questions of spirits in that house was probably not a great idea either. You don’t know who might answer.

Little sis had brought a tape recorder for EVPs. She set it up inside and let it run.

We told her to keep the light down.

She Was In There For What Felt Like Three Hours

It was probably thirty minutes.

When she finally came out, she was satisfied in a way that was hard to describe. She had moved through every room by herself in the dark with a headlamp and her phone making a video. She had done whatever it was she had needed to do in there. We didn’t fully understand it. We didn’t need to.

We took off before anyone called the police.

The Finial

The next morning little sis raised a new idea.

She wanted to go back. Not just to visit. She had decided there might be original house plans hidden inside the newel post at the bottom of the staircase, tucked under the finial at the top of the post. She wanted to saw it off to check.

There was a discussion.

A long one.

We talked about going into a house that wasn’t ours. We talked about causing damage. We talked about the difference between a door opening on its own and actively taking a saw to someone else’s woodwork. It went around for a while and feelings got a little complicated and eventually she agreed not to go back.

Then she asked if she could go back in and find something small to bring home.

We are fairly certain she may have already taken a door stopper.

Something small. Something that wouldn’t be noticed. Something tangible from a house that had held so much of all of us.

We understood completely.

Three Sisters, One Grandmother, One Back Porch

Here is what I keep coming back to when I think about that evening.

Three sisters sat on a back porch in the dark watching fireflies come up out of the same yard where we had caught them in jars as children. We each carried a different version of the same grandmother and a different relationship to that house. We didn’t agree on everything that night and we didn’t need to. We were siblings and our childhood memories were everything.