On a cold and blustery January morning in 1987, Joyce, my soon-to-be wife, and I sat in the Black Dog Tavern with the real estate classifieds and saw a listing for land in Longview in West Tisbury. We met the realtor there, and walked back through the woods to a hilly lot covered in oak and brambles and bordered by an ancient stone wall. It spoke to us.
We built a small post-and-beam house, which we used as a second home until we added on and moved to the Island permanently in 1994. Soon after the house was built — well, technically it wasn’t totally built, the doors hadn’t arrived yet — we held our wedding reception there. And over the years it was the scene of countless ceremonies and celebrations, both large and small. My daughter Polly had a jubilant post-wedding reception there, there was our son Spike’s graduation party, and Joyce’s glorious 60th birthday celebration.
There was that Thanksgiving when we hosted 24 people for dinner in our living room, and countless other, more intimate dinners underneath the pergola on our deck.
And then there was the Klezmer Christmas. One of our son Spike’s friends was Jewish, and had never decorated a Christmas tree, so we “kidnapped” her, and she helped us trim our tree while we blasted klezmer music on the stereo, and the Klezmer Christmas became a tradition that lasts to this day.
Over the years we built several outbuildings, landscaped copiously, and cleared the backyard and put up a grape arbor. A friend gave us two shoots from her acacia dogwood when we first moved in that now stand majestically and resplendent in our backyard.
But now the house is no longer ours. We sold it to some very nice people who will now add new memories and traditions of their own. And I won’t pretend that this hasn’t been hard on all of us. Personally, my feeling of loss has been tempered by the feeling of a financial weight being lifted from my shoulders. Joyce, perhaps more than any of us, poured her soul into the house, but after several weeks of packing up 31 years of stuff — it’s amazing how much you can accumulate in 31 years — she was starting to feel a little distance from the place, and realized that, yes, life does go on.
It was the kids who seemed to have the toughest time. Polly and Spike drove down to help us with the packing, and to spend their last couple of nights here. Whereas Joyce and I had been gradually stepping away from the house, they came down to something that was not so much a house as a warehouse, full of boxes and stacked furniture.
Polly intended to spend three nights here, but after two nights she announced that she had to leave; she couldn’t sleep, the whole thing was disturbing, and it just didn’t feel like home anymore. Spike stayed through the weekend, and spent Saturday going through boxes and boxes of personal belongings and packing furniture into a truck to bring to his apartment in New York. By about 8 o’clock on Saturday night we were all ready to call it quits. Joyce and I went back to the guest house where we were living, and Spike said he just needed about another half an hour.
An hour later he called Joyce, and she said to me, ”I’ll be right back, Spike just needs a little help with some things.” I gave them about half an hour and went over myself, to find them pondering whether or not to bring some small item, in reality just postponing the inevitable, and I said, “All right, guys, let’s have a toast!”
We went outside by the grape arbor and looked up at the lights of the house. The stars were brilliant, there was even an owl hooting in the woods. Fighting back tears, I said, “Here’s to you, old house, you’ve been good to us all these years, we’re going to miss you.” And then we each took turns telling stories, a veritable Irish wake … about how our grandkids loved to stand right where we were and catch fireflies … about how Spike snuck half of the junior class into the basement for a party while we were sleeping … about how we would buy stuffed Beanie Babies for our old Lab Skully, and he would bury them all over the property. It was good for us; the more we talked the more we laughed, the better we felt.
We talked about how the house seemed to have a gravitational force all its own — people were drawn to it. It was a second home to so many of our son’s friends.
We missed our house like it was a living thing, but it wasn’t. It was a house, and when you took out all the furniture, it was a shell.
I don’t know what prompted me to say what I said next, but it just sort of popped out of my mouth: “A house doesn’t make a home … a family makes a home, and when the family moves, the home will follow.”
Spike looked at me and said, “Did you just make that up, or did you read it from some greeting card?” and we laughed — but we knew what I said was true.
