Settle into Wildness

On hard books and houses

Hello, Poetry Friend

Callie R. Feyen and I were discussing hard books — not necessarily long or particularly challenging books, but books that, if we let them, make us, the readers, do the hard work of wrestling.

Specifically, Callie was talking about Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, and how that book came to her at a particularly tender time in her life. It should not have been the right book, but it was:

“I read to anchor myself, to remember myself. Something about that story settled me, settled me into my wildness.”

–Callie Feyen

Like the house I grew up in, this planter of my dad’s is no more.

Do you have a hard story that has anchored you? Settled you into your wildness?

For me, one of those stories is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Like Rebecca, its opening paragraph is iconic in literary circles, and, like Rebecca, it describes a house.

from Rebecca:

“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.”

from The Haunting of Hill House:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

I am a small person. I have lived in only four houses in my life, and three of those I lived in with my husband. My current home, a garden home right in the middle of everything, is my favorite. We have twelve windows, a skylight, and three trees.

Our previous house, two miles away, we hated. The only good thing about it was the trees. I still mourn the maple we lost in the drought.

Often I dream about the first house we lived in as a family: red brick, white pillars, huge yard, a post oak, and the worst air conditioning and plumbing systems known to man. Every time I dream about it, I wake up happy.

The house I lived in from birth until college is no more. After the new owner bought it, she planned to renovate, but the decay went too deep. Better to smash it to pieces and start over. I remember walking onto that tree-crowded lot after the bulldozers had come and gone, before the new foundation was laid. There was no more darkness.

bereft of house
the lot rests —
pale wild sky

Happy poeming!

Megan