I didn’t want to think about my mother right now. I had other emotions to get control over. Walking through the house, I looked in each room and inhaled the scent of home. How had I thought I could live anywhere else? It felt right here as if being in this house fixed any problems in the world. I would finally get to have Christmas in this house. As a child, I had yearned to spend Christmas here with Gran…and with the Sullivans.
Stopping at the kitchen window I could see the neighbor’s house. In the summer, it had been harder to see the Sullivan house from Gran’s because of all the green leaves and plants. However, most of now colorful leaves had fallen and there was a clear view to the Georgian style house that had been built in 1778. It was still a pale yellow. The new owners hadn’t changed the color. Except for the lack of a basketball goal outside it looked the same. Eventually I would go introduce myself, but I wasn’t ready to see someone else in the Sullivans’ home. The memories there were many.
While the Sullivans’ Georgian style home was three stories and impressive in size, my Gran’s house was smaller. My new home was a simple two-story colonial blue Greek Revival built in 1856. Downstairs was the kitchen, living room, dining room, and a laundry room with a toilet in it. Upstairs was two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The master bedroom had an en-suite; the second bedroom that had been my mother’s then mine was larger but the bathroom was in the hallway at the top of the stairs. There was a small attic at the very top, but it was small. The house had a front-gable roof so that left only a small triangle of space up there.
Heating was going to be interesting. There was a fireplace in the living room and master bedroom and a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. That was it. No more heat. No central heating and air. The summers here had never been unbearable without the air conditioning I was used to in Nashville. Gran had always left all the windows up and box fans going in the most used rooms of the house. I’d loved it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to love not having a furnace.
First thing I needed to do was find wood or I would freeze soon. Gran’s woodshed was only a third of the way full, and I knew that she had needed a full shed. In the back of the house, there was a rack that also held a cord of wood that stayed close to her back door. Every August before I left to go home, Gran had already had wood delivered and filled up all her storage for the winter. When I had asked her why, she told me the cold came quick here.
I wrapped my arms around my body and shivered as I walked upstairs. She was right. The cold was here. I had almost had the movers put my things in my old bedroom, but then I decided I would need the fireplace in Gran’s this winter. I headed to her bedroom at the end of the hallway and paused at the doorway to her room. The same blue and white quilt and white iron bed stood in the center of the room. The fireplace was in front of it, and there was wood already stacked to the side of it neatly in the holder.
Several pictures of me through the years sat on her mantel and one of my mother. The rocking chair where she had rocked me to sleep when I was little sat to the left of her bed, beside the nightstand with a crotched throw hanging over the back. It was as if she had never left. Her things still the way she would have kept them.
My suitcase and at least ten boxes worth of my clothing, shoes, beauty supplies and more lined the right wall. I would have to go through Gran’s closet and pack her things up. The small attic she rarely used was about to be full. Tears were starting to clog my throat again when a knock on the front door startled me.
I turned and hurried back to the stairs, not sure who would be coming to see me. No one knew me really, not anymore. I reached the front door and opened it just after they knocked again. The face that greeted me brought a smile to my face. I hadn’t been expecting this.
“Well, it’s true. Sailor Copeland has returned to Portsmouth,” Jack Tate said smiling at me. He had most definitely changed. His beard almost threw me off, but when he spoke, I was sure it was Jack.