by Sara Rubin
I must have been about 5 and remember going with my mother
to the house where her mom was still living. It was a simple wooden frame
house, on a small town street in Pennsylvania.
Every week my mom would go to her mother’s to help with
little chores, and this week she was washing curtains and pinning them onto
wooden framed stretchers to dry. The drying room had been an upstairs bedroom,
empty now of course, but for two big curtain frames. I can picture that room so
clearly that I could draw it, looking in the doorway. It was at the top of the
stairs, to the right, with two windows on the right-hand wall.
This house was my mom’s house too, or had been. She did grow
up there. But I never asked her which room had been hers, and where did the
five boys sleep? Where was Grandma sleeping the night her newborn son died? —I
didn’t know then anything about the baby dying though, that might be a story
for another time, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the impression
the bedroom had on me —
I had to wait around the room as Mom worked, and I didn’t
like it. The room was old and silent and hollow. It had little color; maybe the
walls had once been a light yellow, but had now faded to a pale plaster. It had
a strange smell, not exactly musty or unpleasant, just strange; sharp, like dry
wood in a room that had been quiet for too long.
I don’t know why it frightened me. It probably had to do
with the overwhelming “past-ness” of the room. It made me feel that I, in my
leather soled shoes that made small echoes as I walked, was an outsider, not
from ‘their’ time.
And there was no movement, nothing moved, except for the
specks of dust floating in shafts of
silver sunlight coming in the slightly clouded windows. There was only
stillness; no “present”. Even the dust motes drifting aimlessly were keeping
their own counsel, not caring about us or anything outside their silent world.
All these years l have been perplexed as to why this
experience in that abandoned bedroom lives so strongly in me…
But, now I feel I might be coming closer to understanding
it. Perhaps, I think, I had seen in the those unconscious random dust motes the
Inscrutable, the Other, perhaps the ancient Magic world of Druids or fairy
folk. Perhaps I sensed that those tiny floating specks were manifesting
something completely outside human experience; not good or bad, not loving or
hateful, just inscrutably Other. Unconcerned, completely separate, completely
different.
Maybe as a child I had sensed this separate silent world and
knew it was strange, and didn’t jibe with my own world— one where where mothers
helped mothers, where people did chores and lived everyday lives in simple
wooden houses with painted rooms— and it frightened me.
And made an impression that has lasted a lifetime.
