Unheimlich

Four years ago, I drove by our old house.  We left three years before, and that was the first time I’d gone by. We moved when the borough changed the zoning so a cell tower could be erected less than one hundred fifty feet away. It would be the tallest structure in town. For seventeen years, we lived there, longer than either my wife or I had ever lived in any house. Both our children grew up in its rooms, played in its yard.

Unheimlich is translated as the uncanny, but literally means “un-home-like.”

The farmhouse was two hundred years old when we bought it, one of the earliest homesteads in Danville, PA. Within those walls, babies had been welcomed into life, while others breathed their last. When we moved in, my wife hoped it was haunted. Seventeen years but no ghosts.

Fresh out of grad school, my wife and I did not have much money and didn’t want a big mortgage. This house had enough space for an eventual family and was in our price range. It needed a fair amount of work: “sweat equity” is how my father phrased it. My wife, Claire, had been hired as a professor of Creative Writing at nearby Bloomsburg University. I would be an adjunct—a person with more time than money.

From my car, I can see the changes the new family has made. The First Law of Thermodynamics guarantees that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but I see evidence to the contrary. Gone is the flowerbed that I constructed, borrowing a jackhammer to remove an asphalt parking space, hauling dirt from the wetlands and discarded railroad ties from near the train tracks. Rose the Bunny hid Easter Eggs among the tulips for my three-year-old daughter, Blake. In its place, a jumble of dirt, rocks, and wood. Maybe the Second Law—entropy—is more relevant. Gone is the Victorian front porch—the roof, the rail, the flooring—that I had repaired (imperfectly, I confess) and painted, that Claire and I had sat on as we drank our Irish whisky and Cabernet Sauvignon, watching fireflies erupt from the dusk. The front of the house is a galaxy of absence, holes where the beams that supported the porch had been, a void beneath the front door instead of steps.

To me, everyone else’s house is unheimlich. For a long time, I assumed it was because I was introverted and just didn’t like being around people, but last weekend, Claire, my son Julian, and I stayed at an Airbnb in Hamilton for Blake’s graduation from Colgate University. I was intensely unsettled. I thought of the house of the Pekingese breeders we had visited the previous week, our best friends’ house in Bloomsburg, even my parents’ house in Oak Harbor—in none of them have I ever been comfortable. And then Larry’s house, when he brought me into his bedroom before we drove up to a Royal Ranger campout in the San Gabriel mountains—he needed a shower but wouldn’t let me stay in the living room. It was my first out-of-body experience—my eleven-year-old body seated on his bed facing the mirrored closet doors, while I was cowering under the bed. He toweled off slowly and dressed eighteen inches in front of me.

I shudder imagining how the inside of our old house has been altered. I did all the work outside, but the work on the interior generally required more finesse and expertise, the participation of my father. My father and I have what I presume is a traditional father-son relationship, essentially non-existent. The only time we interact is when he helps me with house projects, once every few years or so. In the truck on the way to Home Depot to buy materials, he tells me about his new church, evangelical but not Pentecostal like the one we attended when I was young. I don’t ask if the Holy Ghost tries to speak in tongues through him anymore. Once out of the truck, my father is focused. One trip we built a bathroom on the first floor so Claire would not have to go upstairs during her first pregnancy. After Julian was born, my father and I remodeled the kitchen. Honestly, there was very little “we” involved—he tended to do the work and I handed him tools. These jobs were gifts to me and my family, something unique he could provide. But all that stayed with the old house. Scant trace of my father in our new house, just the bamboo floors upstairs.

The old house always felt more like a home than our new house. Was it because our children were younger then? Blake has just graduated, and Julian will head off to college in a year. Or was the fact that it was so much smaller, and thus the four of us were always physically closer? Or does the work that my father and I put into the house make it more heimlich?

Although my father doesn’t admit it, his body no longer allows him to work the way he once did. And most of the projects planned for our current house are beyond my skill set. For the first time, I have hired a contractor.

In seven years, Claire and I will retire to a small bungalow in Pasadena. Our children will be on their own. My parents will likely have passed. I’d like to believe that the kitchen and bathroom that my father and I built will survive another fifty years, will outlast me, and as long as I never enter that house to see evidence to the contrary, those gifts will persist.

Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Hardin lives in rural Pennsylvania. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Born Again, from Moonstone Press (2019), has had poems and flash CNF published in Seneca Review, Wisconsin Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Moon City Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart.