The House at Royal Oak (24 page)

I recall the former owner's description of our house. “One of the prominent structures of Royal Oak,” he wrote, “the house sits along a historic road, on high ground.” The prominent structures presumably being our house and the falling-down church, I had to wonder what he meant by
high ground.

Outside I take another look around and it crosses my mind that I'm about to find out. The rain has let up but the wind is wailing at thirty-five, maybe forty miles an hour. The ground doesn't look especially high around our house and in the side yard a pond has appeared, complete with three ducks.

Now with more light what I see is astonishing. It takes long minutes to comprehend the new landscape. In place of the road, a wide, shimmering canal stretches out of sight. The house diagonally across from us on the creek side is, unfortunately, completely surrounded by water, rising almost halfway up the front door.

In a canoe, neighbors paddle our way. High tide in two hours, they call out helpfully. Walking around to the front of our house, I see water lapping at the stone steps below the gate. I check my watch, realizing that everything we've tried to build here could all wash away before tomorrow.

A crack like gunfire interrupts my thoughts and I look up to see the old locust on the north side of the house crash down on the power line thirty feet from where I am standing.
The neighbors paddle away. If water reaches the porch steps, I decide we'll start rolling up the rugs.

With an hour to go, I station myself at the old iron gate to keep an eye on the tide as it advances in small muddy swirls, each swirl not especially dangerous-looking by itself, but each one lapping determinedly higher under the gate.

Okay,
I say out loud to no one,
I finally get it.
You are not all set, you will never be all set, and you will never think like that again. The gods do not like it. That is why the wise talk about the universality of change. That is why your grandmother and your mother always said, “I'll be there, God willing, and the creek don't rise.”

A few minutes before ten, with water licking the toes of my boots, I watch, hardly daring to breathe, as it stops rising; it just stops. In disbelief, I stare as the water touches the tips of my boots again and then again before it starts inching away.

Almost imperceptibly at first, it retreats. Over the next hours the receding water picks up speed, leaving a long tail of mud and debris, plastic bottles, strips of rubber tire, lumber, and soda cans, along with handfuls of pottery shards. A canal still flows where the street used to be and the lawn across the way is still a lake, but unmistakably the water is ebbing.

I keep watch for another half-hour to be sure it doesn't start rising again and to warn neighbors away from the downed power lines dangling in the water. Two young children row up the canal. As they climb out, smiling and splashing their way toward me, waist deep in the dark sinister-looking water, I shout at them to get away. In the wind they can't hear me. I wave my arms frantically until I see them climb back in their boat.

Hugo comes outside and we watch a weak sun break through the clouds. The wind lets up. We walk around checking for damage, looking up and down the canal for an electric company truck, not really expecting to see one unless they have an amphibious vehicle. A flicker of light from the deserted cottage on the other side of the fallen locust catches my eye and I turn in time to see an enormous white bird, head high, emerge from the doorway in ridiculous mincing steps.

It's a ptarmigan, Hugo says. With his medications and whatever rearrangement of his neural pathways has taken place, he now possesses the gift of an exotic vocabulary at the tip of his tongue. He seems surprised, almost dismissive, that I don't know what a ptarmigan is. A type of grouse, he explains, found in northern Canada. He spells it out. I flatly say I don't believe him.

The white bird hesitates outside the cottage door. With jerky movements of a long scrawny neck, it surveys the mucky, transformed landscape, the piles of detritus at its door, the new canal and the lake beyond. It takes a sidestep, then another, skittishly detouring around a downed tree limb. Noticing us, the bird stops short and I see ruffled feathers sticking straight out the top of its head that remind me of a peacock.

The bird retreats—I can't say for sure but my impression is that it can walk in reverse—to the cottage. Once we back off to our front porch, it reappears. Darting glances right and left, it advances with a few steps forward, a few back, more forward, until it crosses the ravine. Under the willow on our side of the ravine, the bird stops.

It is very white, I see now, and has unexpected brown eyes. Some of the white head feathers, like an off-kilter bridal
wreath, are sadly broken or twisted. Fixing a long stare on us, the bird unfurls its tail in a great luminous crescent, casting an unworldly glow across the mud. Without a doubt a peacock, not too much the worse for the storm.

The next morning Hugo reported the amazing sighting to Roland when he stopped by to see if we were okay. Before Hugo could ask what peacocks eat, Roland said, “I know that old peacock!”

“You
do
?”

“Sure, I do. He lives in the woods back of my house.” A
white
peacock?

“Sure. He's been around a long time. Probably got away years ago from one of the big farms. Came down your way after the wind let up to see for himself what all the commotion was, the water rising and all that. Won't stay though.”

“Even for food?”

“Nope. This one wants to be on his own. Won't stay unless you fence him in or clip his wings. My grandma kept peacocks and that's what you have to do—nip the wing feathers so they can't fly. Of course if you do that, then you have to watch out for foxes.” Peacocks like corn, he said, and will go into a field after the harvest and eat all the corn kernels that are left.

I set out canned corn for the peacock, but didn't try to fence in this bizarre, roving symbol of—what? Curiosity? Adaptability? Endurance? Luck? Maybe all of these. The bird stayed in the boarded-up cottage, coming out twice a day to eat corn on our porch steps. After three days, when all the water was back in the creek, it left for good.

OF COURSE OUR LITTLE BYWAY WILL CHANGE, IS
changing, and neither we nor the house will stay renewed. A developer is proposing to construct a “faux marsh” up the way so more housing can be set closer to the waterline. New cracks are opening in ceilings we patched so carefully. Last week a hawk almost got Annabelle.

At the same time, sensations and rhythms have imprinted themselves. The scent of a freshly mown field, the first sighting of the osprey pairs in spring, early summer calls of the bob-white, the clammy smell of the late-summer creek, the geese families arriving in fall, as you come to know the land and water and anticipate the signs of change. The
search for renewal, for something more than the old life, all this says, worked.

It still didn't seem completely like home, though. Maybe you can't have both renewal and a comfortable at-home feeling, I reasoned, even after we built a bedroom addition onto the house and moved in for good in the fourth year. I can't remember exactly when I stopped saying it wasn't home.

It was sometime after I found, on the north side of the house where runaway bushes, wisteria, and brambles separate us from a line of tumbledown cottages, a patch of white-flowered mint.
Wild mint,
I said to no one.
I could make a julep if I like. There are no cultural police or ordinances to say you can't. You could make a julep and sit on the porch.

Old French from the Persian,
gul
for rose and
ab
for
water, julep
means a syrup or sweetened liquid used in drinks or desserts. In English, an early reference is to a julep made of violets. This cooling drink is a traditional way to celebrate summer, I remembered reading in a history of local cooking at the library, a way, as a Marylander once expressed it, “for noble minds to travel together upon the flower-strewn paths of happy and congenial thought.”

Just now the house is empty; new guests won't arrive until tomorrow. There's time, I tell myself. There
is
time. You could make a julep, sit on the porch, and rejoice that the path, not always happy, congenial, or flower-strewn by any stretch, led us here together. You could sit here and remember all the family, friends, and strangers who helped you along the way. And I did.

It was after that and after I walked down to Oak Creek, just visible from the porch, yet one more time that I stopped
saying it wasn't home. Every day, every hour there is different. In the fall you might catch bronze or flame-orange reflections of shoreline trees. In February, a white-and-black symphony of frozen waves. On a still afternoon in shimmering heat, opaline water merges with sky. At sunset on an ordinary day the creek might suddenly turn into rainbow ice cream or a wide smoky pink-violet ribbon surrounded on all sides by dark blue.

You might glimpse a duet of dragonflies or barn swallows, ducks, swans, geese, gulls, a splash of fish, a snake gliding surreptitiously past that beautiful swimmer, the blue crab, or a hawk cruising for songbirds. In the distance, a white dot of sail tracing the horizon. Closer in, a workboat noisily patrolling for fish. At the shore, statue-still and silently fishing against a mural of high marsh grasses and mallows in flower, a blue heron, a great white egret, or a belted kingfisher. Overhead, a pair of acrobatic ospreys.

The fragrances of the creek, wild, tame, or an intoxicating blend, as brine mingles with grasses, marsh, diesel fumes, and the sounds rising from it all—wind, birds, and engines—join in a chant of purpose and message. When you walk down to the water's edge, there is no telling what you'll find.

Then, too, something changed about the house itself over time. She—houses like ships are indisputably feminine—is still beautiful, still restored, and lately flaunts a brass plaque attesting to her historic merit. Hopefully, this will give her a better chance at survival than when we first found her and I expect she will survive longer than we ourselves will. But

something changed. Hugo no longer caresses a swath of plaster he's just repaired, lovingly checking to see if it's as perfect as can be. I no longer hunt for the ultimate house accessory. The recollection of tracking down the perfect doorknob for the parlor—slightly decorative but not too ornate, a reproduction rather than a costly original, but a careful, subdued one with just the right patina—makes me shake my head now in wonder.

Still as fine as the day we finished work, the house has faded in my day-to-day awareness to slightly blurred background. Walking through the rose, yellow, and cream rooms, I may be looking for Hugo. When he takes a nap, I wake him up after fifteen or twenty minutes to be sure he's all right, and probably always will.

The other day he admitted that at the start of this journey he was scared and unskilled. We're older now, he pointed out, and know more. If we ever move on, it won't be because this wasn't good, worthy, even wonderful. The reason would be that it isn't possible for us to think in large increments of time anymore. How would you like to spend the next thirty, twenty, or even ten years is a question for the young, not us. But home, yes, and so much sweeter because of the bitter.

The fields, too. Last autumn the back field turned entirely yellow again, not brilliant buttercup yellow this time, but a paler, softer, impossibly gold-orange-yellow. I walked out through the gate to see if the buttercups had come back and instead found soybean plants drying in the fall light. Without a doubt the scene was more beautiful than before. I picked my way slowly along the edge of the field, which was fringed
with majestic goldenrod spires, small white daisies, a reprise of June's flowering chicory, and some newcomers. First I spotted tiny sky-blue morning glories twining up through the soybeans' teardrop leaves and almost missed a knockout of a flower, buttery with touches of blush on the outer petals and, at its center, exactly matching pink and yellow stamens. Three or four perched on a stem, they seemed like miniature butterflies. I stood perfectly still, letting the scene wash over me, symbolism and all, not wanting to think or analyze for once, just taking it all in.