Little House on Rose Street

My father, as a toddler, is in the front yard of his childhood home, naked but for a cloth diaper, clasping his hands in front of his face. He is toothlessly grinning, fat and happy. The house behind him is a small white rambler. A dirt road runs along the side yard into the empty countryside of rural North Carolina. The world of this photograph is neat and orderly, ideal even.

The little house on Rose Street still stands. The owners have kept it white, but black shutters have been added to the windows at some point through the years. An American flag flies from the porch. The dirt road has been paved. Neighbors have arrived, though sparsely, breaking up the formerly vast expanse of yard.

It is a miracle of the modern age to be able to walk a street through a digital map, to be able to call up this image from my father’s past and situate it in the present day, placing it alongside the analog I have inherited from my grandmother’s albums so that I might study them both together. So little has changed in seventy years. Everything has changed in seventy years. The juxtaposed images stir up a sense of dissonance I can’t quite identify let alone reconcile. Both pictures are equally real. Both are fantasy.

To see this house standing, almost exactly as it always was, as if there were no years between 1952 and 2022, fills me with an inexplicable longing to walk through the front door just to see if time has, indeed, paused there. I would greet my father as the boy he once was, hear him giggle as I pick him up and toss him gently into the air, as if in doing so I might reset the trajectory of his life so that he is still here somewhere, happily laughing.

~

I have never set foot inside this house. I have never seen it in real life, only in photographs I have tucked away inside my desk drawer: My father as an older boy, playing badminton in the yard, the aunts assembled in lawn chairs nearby, gossiping. Uncle Junior mowing the lawn, shirtless but in belted trousers, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Everyone appears uncomfortably hot, the oppressiveness of mid-summer Southern humidity evident in every photograph. The more I study the pictures, the more I find I can insert myself into any one of the scenes: I can sit down in a chair in the lawn, can feel the scratch of the woven fabric on the backs of my legs and the cool aluminum frame on the bend of my knees. I can even hear my aunt Louise’s raspy voice, loudly denouncing something, possibly everything.

It’s all right there. And it’s nowhere.

I feel the strange need to claim this house as my own—reclaim it even, as if it were mine by birthright, like lands wrested away by some foreign invader, lands I can only long for in my unmoored wanderings. In some ways, that’s exactly what came to pass.

If I cast a rosy hue over the space, if I were to walk through that door and settle in, make the house a happy home, would that change the narrative for any of us? When the occupiers have gone and the displaced are free to return, does it ease the sense of hiraeth to settle into the old homelands, or do they find the home they had always dreamed of was merely a fiction?