We Flew In From Across the Country to Smell a Mail Slot
Four siblings. Flying across the Country. One house we hadn’t seen in fifty years. Going back to our childhood home, grandma’s house.
That’s how much it mattered.
My grandmother’s house in Oxford, Ohio sat on a corner lot a couple of miles from Miami University, where my grandfather had been a professor. He was gone before I was old enough to know him. But the house, her house, was where we spent every summer, every Christmas, every in-between visit we could manage until life scattered us and the house eventually passed out of the family.
We thought we’d never get inside again.
Then my youngest sister made a phone call.
The Phone Call That Started It
She had never stopped thinking about that house. When she found out it had been sold to investors who rented it to college students during the school year, she tracked down the realtor anyway. It happened to be June. The house happened to be empty for the summer.
At first they said we could spend a few nights. Then it became one night. Then when we arrived in town they said no, and when we reminded them that all four of us had flown in specifically to see this house, they gave us two hours with their handyman watching.
We took it.
My brother and two sisters and I had not all been in the same place in ten to fifteen years. Three of us flew in from different parts of Florida. One from North Carolina. We met at the airport, got in a car together, and drove toward a house we had all been carrying in our memories for half a century.
The Day Before: The Mail Slot
We went to the house the day before our official visit just to look. Just to stand on the outside of it.
It looked exactly the same.
Same windows. Same wrought iron door handle. Same spade-shaped lock, the original hardware, unchanged. Standing on that porch after fifty years felt like time had done something impossible.
Then someone noticed the mail slot in the door.
We took turns kneeling down and opening it and putting our faces close and breathing in.
Underneath the mustiness of a house that hadn’t been lived in properly for years, you could still smell it. Coal. My grandmother heated that house with coal. The front room where she always sat at the head of the dining room table had a big fireplace and that was where we fed it. That smell had soaked into the walls over decades and it was still there, unchanged, waiting in the dark behind a brass mail slot.
We knelt on that porch one at a time and breathed in fifty years.
The Deer
The next morning we drove back for our official visit.
Oxford is not exactly the countryside. The neighborhood has built up considerably since we were children, apartment complexes, traffic, the normal growth of a university town. We were driving down the main street toward her corner lot at around one in the afternoon when we saw them.
Two deer. Standing in the middle of the street.
Not early morning. Not the edge of a field. The middle of a busy street at midday, completely unhurried. As we slowed down and turned onto her side road they walked ahead of us, naturally, as if they were leading the way, and moved into her yard. They started grazing. One kept its head down. The other looked straight at us as we rolled down our windows.
We told them we saw them. We told them we missed them.
We knew who had sent them.
I had a print made from the video we took that day, one deer grazing, one looking directly at the camera, and gave it to each of my siblings. Mine hangs on the wall by my desk right now.
The Basement First
The handyman didn’t have a key to the front door. What he had was a key to the basement.
So our first steps inside our grandmother’s house in fifty years were down a dark staircase into the basement where we used to play pool as kids.
As we moved through the rooms down there, he flipped on lights. And the lights flickered. Not once or twice, constantly, every room, crazy. We have it on film. We didn’t find it unsettling.
We knew they were around.
What Hadn’t Changed
Almost nothing.
The wallpaper we remembered in certain rooms still covered the closet walls. The paint colors had changed in a few places but the bones of everything were exactly as we had left them. The eaves where we played as children, still there. The layout of every room exactly as we had carried it in our heads for five decades.
In the living room I stopped at the fireplace mantel.
The nails were still there. Small, ordinary nails driven into the wood below the mantel, one for each of us, where we had hung our Christmas stockings as children. My grandmother had been gone since 1980. No family had lived in the house since. College students had come and gone for years.
Nobody had pulled out those nails.
They had been there since we were small, holding nothing, for nearly fifty years. I stood there and could not say anything for a moment.
The Garage
The garage was never for cars when we were growing up. It was a living space, area rug, couches, a chest freezer, a safe. And a drum kit.
My uncle Bill, my mother’s brother, played drums in bands. One of those bands was the Lemon Pipers. If you grew up in the late 1960s you know their song, Green Tambourine. We were allowed to sit on the couch and be quiet and watch them rehearse in that garage when we were little girls.
Standing in that room again, I could hear it.
If you don’t know the song, here it is.
The Bathroom I Dreamed About
My grandmother’s bathroom had an unusual layout. Three separate cubbies, the tub in one, the makeup table in the middle, the toilet in the third. A long counter with a sink across from all three. Perfume bottles on the makeup table. A bubble bath bottle on the tub. A window.
I have dreamed about that bathroom and that house my whole adult life. Trying to hold onto the memory of it, to picture each room exactly as it was. In my recurring dream I look out that bathroom window and instead of the yard I see a grand marble ballroom, a huge staircase going down to the left, marble columns, lights hanging. Sometimes I walk down the stairs but I never reach the bottom.
When I walked into that bathroom and stood at that window I was completely still for a moment.
This was the room. The actual room. Not the dream version, not the memory. The real window, smaller than I remembered, looking out at an ordinary yard.
I had been dreaming about this window for fifty years.
“Let Me Just Absorb This For a Second”
That’s what I said when we first walked through the rooms. There’s a moment in the video I took that day where everything goes quiet and that’s what comes out.
Let me just absorb this for a second.
There’s a thing that happens when you return to a place that holds a significant part of your childhood. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s more physical than that. The smell of coal in a mail slot reaches something in you that bypasses thought entirely. The sight of small nails in a mantel undoes you in ways you weren’t prepared for.
You understand suddenly that the child you were still exists somewhere, and she is standing in this room with you, and she is glad you came back.
There was something else that settled over us quietly that day. Everyone who had ever lived in that house was gone. My grandmother. My grandfather I never knew. My mother, my uncle. The aunts and uncles who gathered there for holidays. All of them passed. The four of us standing in those rooms were the last people on earth who held memories of that house from the inside.
That felt odd and sad and like a privilege we hadn’t expected.
We all flew in from different places to smell a mail slot and stand in a bathroom and look at nails in a wall.
It was worth every mile.
Want to see what happened that night after we went back to the house? My sister got into the house alone!
