"My grandmother is long dead. Her house, which she lived in for over sixty years, was sold after her death and renovated by the new owners. I found the listing online a few months ago, when it was being sold again, and I looked through the twenty-six photos of the house and garden.
The rooms downstairs have all been reconfigured into one open-plan layout. Gone is the poky kitchen and the dining room where I had once written an excruciatingly bad novel... The casement windows have given way to French doors that open onto a blank, green lawn. My grandmother's circular rose garden, once the focal point of the back garden, has been completely grassed over. The orchard is gone, and the conservatory ... In fact, the whole house, except for the iron-studded oak front door, is unrecognisable.
But this is what I wonder: if sometimes the people who lived there after my grandmother, and the people who will live there after them, walking through the new, massive, kitchen and dining area, found themselves thinking of a word or phrase, saying it out loud perhaps. A word like heart or star or breath, one of the words that I shook out from that blue book of charms, from Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, all those years ago, and which might still float around that space, even though the space has become so changed. And I wonder if there is ever a mysterious scent of apples in the autumn on the bare strip of grass where the orchard used to stand, or if sometimes the new occupants wake to the barking of a dog, and when they rise and go to the window, there is nothing out there."
Helen Humphreys, And a Dog called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life.
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