Scratches in the Hardwood: Traces of Seventy-Five Years

342 Holyoke Road by Marion Killacky

My parents built the house in the early 1950s. It was small, single story, about 50 feet by 25 feet with an attached one car garage, one bathroom, three bedroom shared by six of us until the attic was renovated into a bedroom for my two brothers and me. I grew up in it. My Dad passed away on December 26. My Mom couldn't live there alone after that. She's in a long-term care facility now, a beautiful one, with her own little apartment. Last month, we sold the house privately. 

Movers carried the dresser out in February, in about three feet of snow, then the bed frame. The dresser has a large mirror mounted on top, the kind that catches the whole room behind whoever's standing in front of it. The wood is solid all the way through, no veneer over particleboard—the kind of furniture nobody makes anymore because nobody expects to keep anything that long. My parents bought that combo when they built the house. It sat in that bedroom, against that wall, under that light, for roughly 75 years, and it left through a couple feet of snow on a truck ramp. 

Seventy-five years without direct sun—I keep doing that math in my head, more than I do the math on anything else from that week. As a kid, I assumed it was going to stay that way forever. The changes came gradually, and some things didn't change for so long that it was easy to mistake slowness for permanence. I noticed the small changes and chose not to look too closely. I knew what was coming; I spent years managing not to think about it, right up until it was unavoidable. 

Once the furniture was gone, I saw small scratches in the hardwood, faint ones. I have no idea if they happened decades ago or that week, while the movers were maneuvering the dresser out the door. Seventy-five years compressed into a set of marks I can't date, no different from the years themselves, most of which I can't place exactly either. The wall behind the headboard was a shade lighter than the rest of the room, a pale pattern where the sun had never reached. My Dad slept in that bed until December. My Mom slept in that bed for over 70 years. Six of us in a house that size, sharing one bathroom, and somehow the walls felt like they held more privacy than that math suggests they could. That mirror held every version of my parents getting ready for work, for church, for whatever came next, for over 70 years, and it held me too, some mornings, standing in their room asking for something. 

That mirror caught the rhythm of a house that ran hot in summer and cold in winter no matter what anyone did about it. For most of those 70 years, there was no air conditioning. In summer, the windows stayed open and the whole house fan ran all night, pulling the cool night air in from outside and pushing it through every room. Upstairs in the attic, the small window unit for my brothers and me barely made a dent—the heat just sat up there while the unit hummed away doing next to nothing. Winters ran on a wood stove, which meant somebody was always splitting wood, always feeding it, always checking it before bed, and the rooms farthest from it never got quite warm enough. The whole house smelled like woodsmoke all winter long, that dry, faintly sweet smell that got into the curtains and the couch cushions and never fully left, even in July. A couple of mini-splits went in about six years ago, no ductwork, just those two units doing what they could for a house that had gone 70 years without any of it. My parents got a handful of summers with them before the house sold. 

In the kitchen, there was a silverware drawer. Every morning I reached in without looking and pulled out a spoon for cereal. I never thought about that drawer once in 40 years except to reach for it. Now I think about it more than almost anything else in that kitchen. 

The cellar door had a specific squeak, the exact same pitch on the way down as on the way back up. Between that hinge and the distinct rhythm of footsteps on the cellar stairs, I could tell from any room in the house not just whether someone was going down for something or coming back up with it, but exactly who it was. Nobody ever oiled that hinge or tried to quiet those steps. At some point, it stopped being a maintenance problem and became a way of knowing where everyone was.

The last time I went to the house, the bedroom was empty. No dresser, no mirror, no bed, nothing left but those small scratches in the floor, the pale pattern on the wall, and breeze coming through a window that used to be someone's whole summer. 

The combo is in her bedroom at the facility now, mirror and all. Same dresser, same bed, and they still don't look right in there. The proportions are off somehow, or the light is different, or it's just me looking for reasons this doesn't fit anymore. She falls asleep looking at the same wood grain she's looked at for most of her life, in the same bed, in an apartment that is by every account nicer than the room she left, kept at a temperature the old house never quite managed. None of that seems to matter to the two pieces of furniture sitting in it. 

We sold the house quietly. A handshake, a closing date, no listing, no strangers walking through. Nobody outside the family will ever know which floorboard creaked, or why, or the pitch of the cellar door hinge, or how six people made one bathroom work for as long as we did. The new owners will refinish the floor and sand out scratches they'll never know the story behind. In a year, there will be no evidence we were ever there. 

I'll still be thinking about that dresser and bed sitting in an apartment that doesn't suit them, and standing in an empty room in last month looking at a wall the sun never touched—in a house that held six of us, that I grew up in and thought would always be there, and won't walk into again.