In the garden of a house on a cobblestone street in the far West Village of Manhattan lives a tortoise named Sister Martha. No one knows why she’s called that, or how anyone knows Martha is a she. Or how old she is. Legend has it she was originally owned by a little boy who lived in the house fifty years ago. In the winter Martha burrows under the cool earth, disappearing right around Thanksgiving time, and reappears in April to live in the shade of the leafy green plants for the warmer months.
When during divorce I sold it, I thought I, like Martha, would simply move on to another leafy spot, carrying my home on my back. I had trained tendrils from the neighbor’s wisteria to grow up our drainpipe our first year in that house.
Over time it climbed up to our bedroom windows on the second floor and erupted each spring in fragrant blooms. We all sneezed. It was hay fever for all the happiest of reasons. We sneezed out of beauty. It was that diagnosis my children gave our family physician each year when I brought them in with seasonal allergies, “Dr. Jerry, we’re having a beauty attack!” they’d say as they filed into his office.
Over the years, I’ve often asked people to tell me what they think of when they think of home. I have asked this question at parties, in conversations with total strangers. I’ve asked seat mates on planes. “The smell of tuber rose makes me think of my first apartment, when I was twenty and happy,” a preschool teacher told me. “A pie on a table,” a dark and handsome architect said. His father was in the military, and as a child they moved often, sometimes twice in one year. A pie on the table, steam wafting gently, was the only constant in an ever-changing diorama of childhood kitchens. Was he an architect, I wondered, because never having had a physical home for long, he now wanted to design them? This was at a restaurant, the lights and music low. “Maybe,” he said. His gaze averted, then he looked hard at his plate, lost for a moment in the delicate calculus of memory.
Home as identity is a concept found in both the Scriptures and in shelter magazines. The credo “Your home is a metaphor of who you are” is a feature in Vastu design, the Hindu science of architecture, as well as in the Benjamin Moore paint catalogue. Literature is filled with quests for home. In dark corners of our own mind, that’s what we look for. When I was young I read the Odyssey with wonder yet impatience; was Odysseus ever going to get home, and if he did what was he going to find there. Songs like “Can’t Find My Way Home,” “Homeward Bound,” and “Take Me Home Country Road,” are musical variations on the theme.
“Pull yourself together, people flip real estate all the time,” my brother-in-law once told me. In my mind I see a home placed on one side of a child’s seesaw; the owner runs and leaps on the other side, the home jumps, flips, and lands back on the ground simply a house now, a property—free of the deep attachment we’ve always associated with home. In a kind of forced flip, I sold the house on the cobblestone street late in winter five years ago. It was the only true home I had known as an adult, a narrow, cockeyed house I had purchased when I was eight months pregnant with my first child for less than it would now cost to buy a studio apartment on the same block. It was a questionable purchase, given that the house tilted slightly, creaked when the wind was high off the Hudson River, and the windows rattled whenever cars rolled by on the cobblestones. And neither my husband nor I thought about what it would be like to move from sublet to sublet for eighteen months with an infant son, a port-a-crib, a small army of duffle bags, and a diminishing renovation budget. But when you fall in love you fall in love, and this home had my heart.
A while into the renovation, with bills mounting and a moving van returning to take us to yet another temporary apartment, I called the broker and told her I couldn’t take it any more. “Make me some tea and I’ll talk some sense into you,” she said. She reminded me that prices were rising so fast that I’d signed the contract at the last moment I would ever be able to afford a house in the far West Village, and besides, she said, shifting into mother speak, “you need a home where your son can grow up.” This I understood. We needed a home. And so I stuck with it, and once we moved in I told everyone I was never leaving.
I had come late to motherhood, and the house soon became a celebration of that new life. The kitchen wall had a growth chart in pencil, where each child stood patiently every year on their birthdays as I leveled a ruler over their heads. We wrapped the house in books, and on the top floor I made a small sanctuary with a chaise and a reading lamp where I spent long hours. I tied balloons to the iron grille on the stoop for parties, and decorated it with elaborate cobwebs at Halloween. My daughter’s lemonade stand one spring had a sign in green crayon that read:
“All prophets go to the ASPCA”—a young child’s misspelling that evoked teams of wise men making pilgrimages to the local animal shelter with the money she’d raised. In early afternoon the sun came through the trees, dancing shadows across the nicked and patched pine floors of the living room. My love affair with our house deepened as my children grew, and when we finally left I was given to unexpected fits of grief. Late at night I would walk the dogs over to the house from our rental across town; more than a few times I’d sit on the stoop and quietly cry. A small voice in my head unheard since childhood whispered, “I want to go home.” As with the end of many long love affairs, the end of this love affair with my house broke my heart.
One night that spring, unable to sleep I thought of Sister Martha, who would soon be waking from hibernation to emerge from the earth. Our wisteria would be blooming without us. So when my brother-in-law, trying to inject some bloodless reality into the situation, told me to snap out of it because people flip real estate all the time, I responded, “You don’t understand about the wisteria, and you know nothing about Sister Martha.”
It was not the first time I had experienced the trajectory of a home becoming real estate. When I was young, I spent summers in a tumble of young cousins in a grey shingled house near the ocean at the tip of Long Island. I grew up in the flicker of candlelight at the family table, in the flicker of bonfires where we raced waves on the beach, against the flicker of time running out on a myth of family tradition as embodied in the Great American Summer Home, ours one of many swaths of coastline and acres of natural landscape that stand testament to a time when those who could took their offspring to lakes and beaches and mountains to nestle together as family in times of leisure. My father and many who came of age in the Great Depression and served in World War II saw home in terms of legacy. The home was what they provided for their children and grandchildren and generations thereafter. It held the family together.
In many ways, the house by the sea was the house time forgot. We did not have air conditioning (the sea air is our air conditioner!” my mother proclaimed) or a pool (“the sea is our pool!” she similarly proclaimed). We felt ageless there; time stood still even as the waves kept coming, beating a steady path to our door. As a child I was haunted by images of the hurricane of 1938, shaky black and white footage of entire families on the roofs of their homes as thunderous waves came and washed them all away. Ours never washed away, though it disappeared nonetheless. As was the case with many houses founded on the notion of family legacy in the 19th and 20th century, economics and other exigencies conspired so that when both my parents died the house by the sea fell to us to sell. As perhaps my father should have realized, you can’t sink roots in sand.
We buffed the house, made each bed so not a wrinkle showed, swept the long halls clean of sand from toddler feet and waited on the beach as the broker welcomed intruders who sniffed and prodded, pulling open closet doors and inspecting views from all possible vantage points. One day, gazing up, I saw shock jock Howard Stern poised above my mother’s prized geraniums on the balcony outside her bedroom. The implausible image, his black shirt, black aviator glasses, and signature black tresses amid the gentle arrangement of pink flowers just beyond her boudoir, would have so mortified my mother that I couldn’t help but appreciate it as a ridiculous reminder of the difference between home and real estate.
On the last day of the year we sold the house, visiting friends in the area for New Years, I ventured back at sunset. Walking along the beach I found it under demolition, the windows blown out, the frames charred black. In the few fragments of broken glass still clinging to the sills, the last light of the day reflected red. When I was young and the windows were enflamed by the setting sun, it appeared to my naively intoxicated imagination as if the house was filled to the brim with roses.
My home on the cobblestone street in the far West Village is now featured on a high-end short term rental site. The online photographs show that the russet Provençal brick I had chosen to surround the oven in the kitchen and the pine mantle in the living room we stained to match the original 1879 banister are painted a dull white, neutralized, the whispers of our life removed. For a steep price, visitors can walk the halls where we lived, where our memories were made. Made, I realize, looking at the images, but not stored. Because I’m not looking at our home. I’m looking at a property the new owners have set up as a cash cow, an acquisition. Yet in the garden, maybe our wisteria still erupts each spring in fragrant blooms, and maybe the visitors sneeze, unaware they are having a beauty attack.
Most probably Sister Martha is still there too, burrowed deep under the earth in winter, returning to live in the shade of the leafy green plants in warmer months. Sister Martha alone there now carries what’s left of our home, carries it with her on her back. She holds our secrets.