4358 Lawn Avenue

[creative nonfiction]

Once there was a door that opened to you, and your grandmother stood behind it. Loud voices and warm light spilled messily from behind her while you and your sister shivered in the jagged Chicago cold. Overjoyed to see you on her worn front stoop, returned from the inhospitable East Coast, she ushered you in. In her excitement, she slammed the door in your parents’ faces, shouting, “The girls are here!” Your grandfather ambled down threadbare carpeted stairs that had weathered six pounding sets of his children’s feet. Smelling of cigarette smoke, peering through the smudged lenses of his glasses, he observed that you and your sister had likely not come alone. The front door was thrown wide again, and your parents were invited in, laugh-tears running down their faces.

Two skinny floors perched on stubborn city grass and cracked sidewalks. Inside, the house was plush and overfull, somewhat like your grandmother. Downstairs, the record collection spilled into haphazard domino stacks on the floor, vinyl popping and skipping tracks, music always playing. Three televisions competed, overloud, urgent play-by-play from Bob Costas or Bill Hazen. On the living room table: Frango mints in glossy green foil begging to be unwrapped, Marshall Field’s pixies with toothsome chew, warm caramel thick on your tongue. Sweating glasses of peachy Southern Comfort, muddled cherries murky at the bottom. Kirschbaum Bakery’s pristine chocolate-frosteds under a heavy glass dome.

A child of the Depression, your grandmother liked weighty things, crystal and silver, but could never bring herself to throw away rubber bands. Sorting through her kitchen drawers was an archeological dig: photos, magnets, paper clips, ragged-edged recipes, loose change. The basement and attic were tombs of Egyptian gods, chockablock with supplies for the afterlife. Jewelry boxes coughing up fake pearls, sparkle earrings, coppering necklaces. A library’s worth of books—moldering Nancy Drews, bodice-baring romances. Your whole life, you dream of carnivals, antique shops, street fairs. Of sifting and finding treasure, the house a magic seed of dreams.

The house is rooted in your family’s stories. Lights always on, windows popped open like buttons on a too-tight blouse, doors unlocked. Uncle Danny stumbling home, professing he’s Sober as a judge, Dad. Moonshine brewed in a bathtub for a party where the cops showed up and decided to stay. Farmhouse kitchen sink where your grandmother let you float tiny wax boats in lemon bubbles while she washed dishes, humming Irish lullabies. Wonky windowsills and blurry glass, Chicago lighting the skyline even at midnight, train whistles echoing against walls, lonesome.

You think of the house as is, was, and always will be. When your grandmother starts to falter, the house tilts, a boat taking on water. She forgets more than what’s in the kitchen drawers. New discoveries are made. The husk of a possum, petrified in the corner of the garage, thirty-seven cans of leaded paint in the basement. Black mold. Rot.

It turns out that everything your grandmother owned can be priced and valued as a teardown lot. One slow summer afternoon, your sister sends you a picture of a concrete crater, a ragged hole in the ground like a pulled tooth where 4358 once stood.

Two years pass before strangers build a glass castle where your grandmother’s stucco stoop used to be. The address numbers remain the same, but they’re trendy, angular, matte chrome. In the photos your family shares, you can see every new room set like a stage, clean and white, with gleaming silver corners. You know the house’s inhabitants will still get the light your grandmother used to love, the warm autumn tones that poured over her uneven windowsills, nudging her from her rocking chair with the thought that any minute, she should start dinner because her kids would be home, hungry, squabbling, loud, loved.

You wonder if the new owners will ever know that they’ve razed over decades of history, that they’re living haunted, on hallowed ground.