the house next to the house
the house next to the house
I was living in when I got married
fourteen years ago
is now a place where I have gone to two parties,
thrown by someone who wasn’t the owner back then.
back then this wondrous, spacious, wood-shingled
communal hearth of a gathering spot
was just a looming strip of dark façade
glimpsed past our vegetable garden
with its border of tall lilacs and butterfly bushes
and, along the alley we shared, past the laurel hedge
that grew as high as the power lines.
All I knew of it back then
was that it was owned by susan parish,
who was semi-famous locally for having acquired
the rights to the images of several of olympia’s
most prolific early photographers of civic life.
she had a dog, a shar pei, that we would see and hear sometimes,
but more details on that house and its owner
I couldn’t provide even if I could turn my mind inside out.
no one can do that, but no matter,
because now I’ve learned that life itself can turn inside out,
with you along for the ride, to see different sides of old places
and experience the passage of time’s three stages
simultaneously, like the layered lenses of a collapsing telescope.
there I was, placidly padding through rooms
that once likely held boxes of prints and negatives
depicting long-dead people’s frozen moments,
while telling numerous new friends
not only about my history with the house
we could see out the west-facing windows,
but also about my book building ghosts,
in which I paired photos I took in 2014 of empty olympia buildings
with archived photos of the same spots,
perhaps even unknowingly using images
from the susan parish collection, most of which
she sold to the washington state archives in 2001.
stranger still, though, was when I learned
that the current home owner, a friend of a friend,
was getting divorced, for her two parties took place
one and then two months after the official termination
of my own 13 year marriage.
there it is, out the window: the view someone else’s
been taking in, while doing mundane things like washing the dishes,
of your significant past timelapsing into irrelevance,
and then rising up, through good witchy magic,
to defiantly come to life anew
as part of something continuous and public and interconnected,
rather than the discrete, private, insular garden
you thought just two people needed to tend to occasionally,
before even actually boxing up that sentiment over time
like an old photograph some stranger might later find
in the archive of second- and third- and fourth-hand
lessons learned the hard way.