Haunted By a House.

I keep having dreams about a house. It is almost as if the house is calling to me. In the back of my mind, there is the dream to own this house, but that's pretty much all it will ever be -- a dream. I'm not even sure if the house will still be standing in another five years.

Let me explain.

When I was a little more than a year old, my mother and father were both working and I started going to a babysitter named Vernice. We were living in a small community at that time, and Vernice and her husband Joe had lived there for twenty-five years. They were a couple in their mid-forties and had never had any children of their own. Joe worked as a civilian at CFB Gagetown and Vernice was a homemaker.

Throughout the years as I was growing up, Joe and Vernice were the solid foundation I needed. To this day, I refer to them as my "godparents", not because they were named such in a formal religious ceremony, but because I have always felt that they were the parents God gave me after my own parents became too pre-occupied with their divorce, work, et cetera, to really be there for me. I tell you this, not because I am bitter, but because I am profoundly grateful to the core that Joe and Vernice came into my life.

This was the house that they bought when they were first married in 1947. At that point it was little more than a shack, Vernice told me, but over time they had turned it into a home. It was small, but suited their needs perfectly, and it was the house I grew up in. For twenty years, when someone would say the word "home", this was the vision that passed through my mind. Although the outward appearance of the house changed (the weeping willow was cut down, and the verandah was first screened in, then turned into an actual room, with the former picture window becoming a doorway), the heart of it was still the same.

When I was twenty-one, Joe's multiple sclerosis had reached the point that living so far from "town" (ie a place with doctors and grocery stores) was no longer practical. Vernice didn't drive at that point, so they moved to the town where they grew up. The house being sold was a huge blow to me. Although intellectually I knew that there was no alternative, the little girl in me felt like the rug was being yanked out from under her. I felt like I was losing not only my home, but, in no small way, my happy childhood as well.

Over the course of a year, though, my feelings toward "home" shifted to include Welsford as a whole, rather than just the house. At one point, I knew almost every person in the community, and if I didn't know them, they certainly knew of me! So I still had links, connections, to that happy childhood. But a part of me began to feel an overwhelming need to "get the house back".

When I was twenty-three, Joe died. It came hard and fast in the form of a brain aneurysm while watching a Blue Jays game on television. Even now, nearly thirteen years later, I can't type this without crying. I was beyond devastated. There really and truly are no words.

Since then, my ties to Welsford have drifted away, and the places associated with my happy childhood memories are gradually disappearing. I subconsciously take stock whenever I drive through on my way to see Vernice in what will forever in my mind be "the new house" in Oromocto. My friend's parents sold the store at the corner and moved away around the tiem Joe and Vernice moved. The covered bridge was taken in a flood in 1998, the same week we found out my father-in-law had terminal cancer. The school where my father was principal and what brought us to Welsford in the first place closed its doors in the late nineties. The Anglican church I attended with Vernice and where Joe used to light the wood furnace for winter Sunday services was deconsecrated in 2003.

The house itself looks sad. Every time I see it, I feel a pang of needing to rescue it. When I was growing up, the hedges were always neatly trimmed (by me, towards the end of things) and there were flowers everywhere. The hedges are no longer hedges, but spindly trees reaching for the sky as if desperate to escape the yard. There have been cars parked on the carefully planted lawn, and the last few times I have been past, there has been a faded Canadian flag serving as a curtain in one of the front windows. Although I would do almost anything to spend just two more minutes with him, I am so glad that Joe isn't here to see this. I take comfort in the fact that I can still see a glimpse of him in the spring, when the tulips and daffodils he planted so long ago come up and bloom, despite the fact that the slate path beside them is now overgrown with brush and covered in dead leaves. Every time I make a point of seeing them, it's a double-edged sword. I have to fight to keep myself from scrambling up the steep bank and uncovering the flowerbed.

Even though it has been fifteen years since Joe and Vernice moved from Welsford, I still care deeply about the place -- not just the house, but the community itself. Two weeks ago, there was an advisory meeting that a new highway will stab right through the heart of the place where I grew up, and although I'm not directly affected, I feel like I'm losing my home, for the final time, all over again. It was difficult to tell from the small graphic and article in the newspaper which seven houses will be levelled, but I have heard from Vernice that the old Wilson house is slated to go. Only three doors down from where Joe and Vernice's house stands, this was where I befriended an elderly spinster who introduced me to the books of Lucy Maude Montgomery and James Herriott, who used to french-braid my hair, whose land was home to Joe's garden, provided for in the deed for as long as he wanted to use it. (Her dog was nippy and hated everyone, but I loved her anyway, and will never forget the day she actually let me pat her on the head.)

I have dreamt of the house and Welsford every single night since seeing that newspaper article. Although the highway won't actually be physically started for another three years, it brought into focus all of the feelings I've been having. "I won't live to see it," was what Vernice said when we talked on the phone last week, and I know in my heart she's right. And each morning I wake up with an urgency to hang onto her, the house, the daffodils, the land, and the memories I have left, as hard as and for as long as I possibly can.