A Lucky House
by Penny Nolte
The house was built by my great grandparents who lived there all their lives, then my grandparents did, too. On the day of our visit everything had been removed. Except a stuffed owl up in the cupola, still guarding Grandpa’s attic from an aerial assault by bats. Much like the horseshoes, pointed up for luck, that he hung above doors to guard the house from other dangers. The power was already off as we roamed through the empty shell taking pictures without a flash in dim light coming through dirty windowpanes. On the floor, footprints of furniture showed clearly where everything used to be, our grandmother’s sewing cabinet, our grandfather’s “wireless” radio.
I don’t think anyone in the family ever threw one thing away. On the contrary, because Grandma was an only child, things had “come down” to her from long-lived aunts and great aunts scattered throughout the north country. There was plenty of room for it all in the attic, with as much floor space as the house itself. Everything had been stored, fairly neatly, over the years in trunks or on shelves and our grandparents would entertain us by “going through” things up there. We never knew what they might show us. In time, Grandma had no memory of what might be found there, either. But I remember as a child she opened a trunk of musty gowns, men’s suits, and a “flat” top hat that needed a soft thwack to open. Another time, there was a box of beautiful but bald dolls made of China. Bald, she told us, because moths had eaten the real human hair. There were weapons, too. Grandpa could bring out long rifles with ramming rods and swords in scabbards that hung from belts. These weren’t toys, but real relics of their ancestors’ service.
While I don’t have any pictures of the attic when it was full, I have the ones we took on that melancholy day in the empty house. With only twelve shots on the roll of film, we had focused the camera’s lens on seemingly random things. Like shellac that looked brand new where a carpet had laid over it for a hundred years, and more recent stains where overhead leaks had pulled patches of the plaster down. In some ways, the house was as fresh as the day our great grandparents moved in. In others, it was becoming a ruin.
A young family interested in preservation bought it and the next time I was inside all signs of imminent collapse had been repaired. I didn’t ask about the owl in the attic, I assumed it was gone. But the new owner was excited about showing us something in the cellar. So, we trouped down the familiar stone steps, past a new furnace, and out the side door that used to lead to a horse stall. There, he stopped and pointed upward. Over the door was one of Grandpa’s horseshoes. Still holding the luck in.
BIO: Penny Nolte creates gentle narratives of family and place. After a decades-long pause from storytelling, her work is beginning to appear in literary magazines including The Avalon Literary Review, Macrame Literary Journal, and Memoir Mondays. Penny grew up on the shores of Lake Ontario and now makes Vermont her home.