Autumnal Reflections

I wandered into the Pawtucket Tax Assessor’s office because I’d been told that they will tell you the history of your house. “Sure,” said the nice lady. “What’s your address?” I told her and she looked something up in one book and then went to another and within minutes she had the page with the ownership record of my home.

I knew we’d bought the house from Betsy Joslin, a widow, shortly before her re-marriage, and once I’d met a man named Rosenfield who’d sold it to the Joslins, but I’d buried that information somewhere deep in my shallow sub-conscience. But now, looking at the list of owners of Lot 547, Plat 66 dating back to 1914, it suddenly hit me that there are an awful lot of people who also said, “this is my home” as they entered my front door and slept in my bedroom, cooked their meals in my kitchen, ate those meals in my breakfast room. I knew that the Joslins had two children who I imagine played and whooped and screamed as they tore through the house, as did mine, but how many other children have there been who felt that the walls that protect my family, protected them? Did Rosenfield (1963-1970) have children sleeping in my sons’ rooms? Or Sherlee Gershman (1954-1963) or Samuel and Edna Orenstein (1952-1954) or Esther Halpert (1941-1952)? Who was Frederick R. Marquis, Jr (1938-1941)? Is he still alive, did he love this house the way we do? Why was he only here for three years? Or Thomas and Muriel Mitchell (1929-1938)? Did they have children who played in the same backyard ours did? Were they the ones who switched from coal to oil, and who was it who then switched from oil to gas? Conrad Paris lived in my house from 1925-1929. Was he forced to sell by the coming of the Great Depression, or had he seen the house as a starter home? In 1924 there were two owners, and I don’t know why. Rosalun C. O’Brien sold to Thomas and Catherine Gill, but why did Thomas Gill buy the house when he (or someone who had the same name) owned it in 1918—or was it a house in 1918, or just an empty lot waiting to be developed? I don’t know. Gill bought the house (or the lot) from the Oak Hill Lawn Company who had bought it in 1916 from M. Jenckes and E. H. Thornton (if I decipher the handwriting correctly) who were the first listed owners, in 1914.

Sometimes, not often, I think I see a shadow, or sometimes a flash of light, or hear a peep of sound and then it’s gone and I wonder if the shade of a previous owner ever comes back to check on us, and then I remind myself that I’m an enlightened rationalist. Still, I wonder who these people were? Who will be the next people, and the next who won’t even know of our existence, of our joys and sorrows, of what we did to improve the house they will think of as theirs? We’ve had the house the longest, since October 1977, but I know we are really only caretakers.

I’d gone to City Hall to get a dog license for Emma who has lived with us for a year and a half. She knows nothing of Morgan whose home this was for ten years and she had no idea that Wordsworth had lived here for 17 ½ years. Wordsworth had no inkling that he was dog number two, that Jonathan had been first. In time no one will know of any of those animals who gave us such joy.

At the university where I’ve been on faculty since 1969 people who have been teaching for decades retire, and then in four years, no student on campus remembers them. Only we somewhat younger old geezers recall the ancient days, the long gone people. Someday, I suppose nobody will know I was there either, just as nobody knew until I went to the Pawtucket tax assessor’s office that while I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Sherlee Gershman lived my house, thinking it hers. Who were her friends? Who came to visit? Why did she sell? And what of those shadows caught in the corner of my eye, that vague flash of light, that peep of a sound?