Elizabeth Fihlman
I sat with my back resting against the craggy bark of a tree, its surface so rugged and crumbly that little specks of its dark brown skin stuck to the back of my t-shirt. I let my fingers trace the unique ridges of its trunk. Tiny swirls and bumps decorated its surface; it was as if the tree had its own fingerprint. While small, scrawny, and on the verge of decay, it was not entirely helpless. Its short branches held enough leaves to create a patch of cool, shaded grass for me to sit on. The summers in Massachusetts were much different than any other place I had lived. The air was warm and sticky during the day, but cool and crisp once the sun set. The summer I lived with my grandma, I used to spend the day sweating in a tank top and shorts, but at night I often found myself tiptoeing around the house searching for an extra blanket.
I drew in a breath of the heavy, New England heat and exhaled as I lifted my back off the tree and laid my head down in the grass. As I studied each blade of grass, I thought about how the ground felt— a detail I never noticed until I had the time to pay attention. In every other state I had lived in, dirt was a clay-like material, and grass was soft and full: each blade stood so close to the next that I had to dig to get my fingers dirty. Here, though, the dirt felt like sand, just slightly darker and a little moister. Grass in my grandma’s town was always patchy and sharp even in the yards of those big, beautiful homes along the Cape.
While it was not right along the ocean, and its paint looked rough and brittle if you got close enough, I always thought my grandma’s house was just as beautiful as those Cape Cod mansions. The front yard was encased by the biggest driveway I had ever seen. Her yard stretched a whole block: one side of her driveway touched Main Street and the other touched High Street. Even though both entrances had a big bold sign reading “PRIVATE PROPERTY; NO TRESSPASSING,” it was common for people in town to drive across the yard as a shortcut.
In Wareham, Massachusetts, most houses are small and close to each other. The streets are always busy, either with construction traffic in the winter or tourist traffic in the summer. Every night at my grandma’s house, the purring sound of car engines out the window sung me to sleep.
The only historical-looking piece of architecture in the town is a cobblestone lighthouse that sits right next to a big wooden sign reading, “Welcome to Wareham.” My grandma’s house, however, stuck out like a flower growing on the side of a highway: something clean and quiet in the midst of a traffic jam. Its ivory-colored wood stretched three stories high and held several small, square-shaped windows surrounded by dark green shutters. A wraparound porch with a railing wide enough to sit and read on encased the house. In front of the house stood a little metal sign reading my family’s name: Cooney. To the left of the house was an enormous barn decorated with the same small, square windows and dark green shutters. I never got to explore much of the barn, though, as my grandma never allowed the grandkids to go in there. My cousins and I would spend hours walking around the barn as we searched for sticks to use in our tree fort. When we’d come back inside the house once it grew dark outside, we’d stand in line at the kitchen sink to fill up glasses of water, and my grandma would look up from her book as she rocked in her chair.
“You kids didn’t go in the barn, did you?” She’d ask with raised eyebrows and slight grin.
We’d shake our heads “no” and mirror her playful smile.
However, on just a few occasions, my siblings and I would sneak into the barn. While nobody in my family spoke about it, I truly believed my grandma was a hoarder. The barn was full, top to bottom, of endless piles of clutter: bicycles, shovels, picture frames, chairs, books, and some items that were too worn to be distinguishable. The air inside was so thick with dust that I had to pull my shirt over my nose to breathe comfortably. However, one item was at some point pulled out of the barn and adopted by myself and my cousins: a little red wagon. Some of my earliest childhood memories are in that wagon, gripping the sides so tightly my fingertips turned white as I shrieked with both fear and excitement. As my cousins pulled me around, the wagon’s metal basket and small, plastic wheels filled my grandma’s yard with a heavy, clattering noise. By the time I was big enough to pull around my little cousins, the wheels were so loose and the basket so wobbly that every wagon ride turned into someone scraping their knee and running into the house crying for their mom.
Through all the years I visited and lived in that house, the inside never changed in the slightest. The front door led right into the kitchen. A big window without curtains sat in front of the dinner table where my aunts watched my cousins and I play in the yard. On the windowsill my grandma kept a live police scanner radio. Though I eventually tuned out the familiar beeps and unclear, cracking voices, I am immediately brought back to my grandmother’s kitchen in my mind any time I hear radio static today.
At either end of the island in the center of the kitchen were two rocking chairs where my grandparents always sat like pieces of furniture. My grandma sat on the right side while my grandfather sat on the left, and even after he passed away, his rocking chair stayed in its place, untouched from the last time he rocked and read the newspaper. In front of the island also sat a little plastic crate full of worn-out toys for the grandchildren. Its faded black surface held a collection of matchbox cars, plastic action figures, and dolls with knotted hair that I spent my early childhood trying to brush out and watched my younger cousins do the same years later. The whole house was covered in old wooden floors that made a loud creaking sound during the day under my feet and sometimes at night too, when nobody was walking on them, and I was trying to fall asleep.
One Sunday evening during a football game, my cousins and I sat in a circle around my grandmother’s rocking chair while our parents watched the game in the living room. My grandmother held up a small, wooden clothespin.
“Now, I’m going to hide this clothespin,” she explained, “and if you find it, you must scream huckle-buckle-beanstalk.”
I exchanged a grin with my cousin, and she covered her mouth with her hand to muffle her giggle. My cousins and I closed our eyes and waited anxiously for our grandma to hide the clothespin.
“Okay, go!” She exclaimed.
My cousins and I jumped up from the ground and searched the kitchen. We opened every squeaky cupboard, fished through each rusty pot and pan, and scoured the dusty, wooden floors.
“Can you give us a hint?” My little sister begged.
“Well,” my grandma stated, “if it was a bear, it would’ve bitten you.”
As I crawled under the kitchen table, my eyes caught a little glimmer of metal from beside the leg of a chair. I pushed the chair aside, and to my elation, a small, wooden clothespin clung to the end of the tablecloth. I quickly grabbed the pin.
“Huckle-buckle-beanstalk!” I screamed. “Huckle-buckle-beanstalk!”
I ran towards my grandma and placed the pin in her hands as my cousins let out a sigh. My grandmother reached in her pocket and pulled out a small, fruit-snack package. As she placed the package in my hands, my cousins let out a collective, “I want one too!”
“Nope,” my grandma replied. “This is only for Elizabeth.”
My grandma is the only person in my life who calls me by my full name. “Elizabeth” is her middle name.
Past the kitchen was a small hallway leading to the dining room where Thanksgiving used to be held each year. Though the table stretched more than several chairs long, there were always a couple unlucky members of my family that didn’t get to a seat fast enough and had to stand and eat. Past the dining room was the piano room, which was possibly one of the smallest rooms in the house. I was too young to remember the actual piano that gave the room its name, but I do remember the large, bright green rug that covered the floor and the brown and off-white striped wallpaper. On Christmas day, the whole family would gather in the piano room and pass out gifts. The men in my family stood against the walls and talked about football and politics while they held beers. My aunts sat on the couch or in chairs while at least one of them rubbed the back of a small child as they retold the same stories. I always watched and listened in awe as they switched from laughing and loud conversation to teary, quieter talk in just a few minutes. All of us kids would sit on the floor and practice backbends, dress up and perform plays, or film our own music videos on an iPod.
While each room in my grandma’s house was separate and closed off from one another, the air inside felt warm and connected. Every inch of the walls was adorned with old photographs that told my family’s story. My grandma had eleven children, and most of them went on to get married and have their own children, so I have nineteen aunts and uncles and nearly thirty cousins on just my mom’s side. Living in that house allowed me to know each of mom’s siblings very well as their childhood bedrooms seemed to be left nearly untouched from the day they moved out. The stairs leading to the second floor were wide and steep, and their swirls of a homely brown hue pulled me up towards a long, slim hallway lined with bedroom doors. I was told that my grandmother’s house was once an inn, and each door had a little metal number hanging from it.
My mom’s bedroom was to the left of the stairs. I felt close to my mom growing up, but stepping into her childhood bedroom felt like catching a glimpse of someone I didn’t know— a little girl who covered her bedroom walls with rainbow handprints. Being the youngest of her ten siblings, my mom was allowed to paint her room herself, and the walls were decorated with glitter and bright polka dots.
The bedroom I slept in was on the opposite end of the hall. I am not sure which of my mom’s siblings it belonged to, but I am sure it was someone elegant and sophisticated. The room was small, and a twin-sized bed sat in the middle. Two little windows dressed in lacey, delicate curtains covered the wall above the bed. A desk sat in front of the bed, and it held a large oval mirror that rested above a small stack of books, a little beige lamp, and a bottle of perfume. I sprayed the perfume once; its sweet, gentle scent was a fragrance of soft memories that danced around the room for a moment. I imagine that one of my mom’s oldest sisters once sat at that desk as she read under the luminous glow of the glass lamp, its beige shade decorated with flowers the color of grapefruits. I never made my bed as a child, but every morning that I woke up in that room, I made sure to carefully tuck in the blankets and arrange the pillows back in their original spot out of respect for the orderly and graceful presence that still clung to those floral sheets.
Once I moved out of my grandma’s home after my family bought a house in Pennsylvania, our visits to Massachusetts became less frequent. As I grew up, I began to miss the wagon rides and backbends less and less, and my favorite house became just a collection of memories I would occasionally visit in my daydreams. During my senior year of high school, there was talk in my family about finding another place for my grandma to live as she was becoming too old to stay in such a large place alone. By 2021, my grandma lived with my oldest aunt, and her home was sold to a planning board which sought to demolish the house and barn and separate the land into four separate lots for the construction of a few townhomes. The project was set up for endorsement, and it passed 3-0 after “little discussion,” as the Wareham Weekly describes it.
The first time I visited my grandma after her house was taken down, I was greeted with, “so now, which one do you belong to?”
While she is ninety years old, I believe my grandma’s memories were lost with the house, which now exists merely as particles of rubble soaked into the sandy Massachusetts dirt. I gave my daughter two middle names: the first is Aveline, after my sister, and the second is Cooney, after that house and all the people who grew up inside its walls. While she will never ride in the little red wagon or play with the crate of matchbox cars and dolls in the kitchen, I tell her stories of the Cooney house before bed, and I make sure to describe every creak of its wooden floors and each photograph that hung on its walls.
Last summer my sister and I visited where my grandma’s house used to stand: 434 Main Street. An unexpected heaviness filled my chest as I stared at the yard, now completely unrecognizable and covered with partially built multifamily homes that blended in perfectly with the rest of the town. Scanning the area for something familiar, my eyes caught a tree, its roots clinging to the ground in protest. Its rotting, empty branches and dull grey trunk appeared surprisingly refreshing next to the bright yellow bulldozers. Its decay was something authentic and genuine amid the construction zone. As I stared into its small, scrawny body, I found myself yearning for the simplicity of being ten years old again, sitting under a tree and tracing blades of sharp grass with my fingertips.
Elizabeth Fihlman (’26) is studying psychology at Cedar Crest College.