The Remembering House

7:30 a.m. on the Johnny Gunter porch. Robins churr and chatter above the orchard. Flicker shouts rhythmically from the Douglas-firs above the meadow. Somewhere up the canyon, Raven growls her approval of the approaching equinox. Sometime in the night, an infinite star-cast relinquished to morning fog that holds my world soft and close, impinging on all but the nearest Douglas-firs. Not a hint of wind or sniff of rain. Frost still pockets the meadow. I’m wearing the blue down parka I bought half a century ago, and Dad’s black canvas jacket drapes my lap in warm memory. Tomorrow would be his 94th birthday. I slide one hand and then the other beneath the jacket, trying to keep my fingers warm enough to hold journal pages open and write.

This winter my visits to the Johnny Gunter place have been rare as grouse teeth. Kim’s recovery from open-heart surgery has kept my affairs close to town. Last week I scheduled a hurried trip to prune an apple tree and leave fresh tracks in the driveway. While I stood in the living room preparing to head home, I was overcome with sadness. Without premonition, I started apologizing to the house for not visiting, for not taking time to work on the decaying floors and walls, and for not spending the night.

This morning I’m wondering how old houses speak to us. Are they simply echo chambers for current memory, a place that causes brain cells to fire in patterns that conjure images and emotion? Stellar’s Jay squawks YES. Or could the quantum valence of 2 x 4s and window glass and countertops be altered over years of human presence, changed in ways that cause them to breathe back a subtle energy that affects present consciousness? Might these materials become animated and learn to speak on their own terms, articulating the thoughts of previous inhabitants in the soft murmur of wood? Anything is possible at the quantum level.

Raven croaks a wise YES to all things, both the neuroscience of the living and quantum changes in the other-than-living. But hearing and understanding these two languages requires differing levels of attention. My guess is that the memory contained within our brain cells speaks most loudly, an obvious overlay that calls us into focused appreciation for our place in the world. My memories of the Johnny Gunter place are dominated by our family time here over the last thirty years. Celebrating old-fashioned Christmas with Mom and Dad sometime around the winter solstice. A two-day campout with friends to mark our twentieth wedding anniversary. The trauma of the clearcut next door.

While I remember Johnny, those recollections are few and faded. I was too young to really know him. For me, his spirit here is subtle. A house frame built of rough-cut lumber that he milled with help from my father’s father. The quirky blue window trim. A knob that was left on the wrong side of the root cellar door. Rusty bins containing every conceivable scrap of saved hardware.

Compared to neurological remembrances, the quantum level of material memory must be extraordinarily quiet. Hearing the language stored in lumber and plywood and glass requires a deep stillness of mind that I can barely conceive of in my usual to-do-list-driven state. Yet quantum memory bleeds through. This morning the fire in the woodstove is a conflagration of lumber scraps salvaged from the old bathroom floor. I couldn’t throw them on the burn pile. The decayed wood will warm these walls one more time. With its dying breath, the lumber will impart a last shift in the energy of this house that might later find its subtle way into the minds of the next generation of occupants.

On this fog-bound morning, the animation of a house strikes me as materialistic faith. It’s a belief that wood will go on living, that it will form and be formed. This faith drives me to keep the bulldozer at bay, to revive this house and keep it alive for a while longer. It is why I will die a poor and impractical romantic, why my ashes will fertilize the surrounding forest. From an old tree above the meadow, Pileated Woodpecker is drumming YES.