Saying Goodbye Is Often The Hardest Thing To Do

This weekend proved to be harder than I thought it could be, because even though I was warned, I wasn't quite prepared for someone posting photos on Facebook - and they hurt in a way I can't really describe, despite the fact that I have a dictionary and thesaurus easily available. There are just some times that the pain is so intense, so deep, that even the darkest of words can't really hit the nail on the head...

This is what I'm talking about:

This photo, taken shortly after the current owner of the property took possession, is the place where I grew up in a small town called Exeter, Maine. Not to be confused with the big city of Exeter, New Hampshire, the town I grew up in was mostly farms, the largest of which belongs currently to Crane Brothers Potatoes.

As you can see, it's nothing special, just a house with an always shabby looking garage where my dad used to spend a lot of time working on things like old television sets and things. My sister's room (and briefly at times over the years, my room) would be the two upstairs windows that face the road. My bedroom, for most of my life, was around the back side of the building with a window that looked out at the back yard. To the right edge of this photo, that building and roof are part of the former general store, where everyone in town came to shop unless there was something special they had to buy in Dexter or Bangor.

The red metal roof was brand new at the time I took this photo, which was after visiting with my mom at her new home and hearing her tell me "I didn't raise you in Howard Johnsons!" (A famous restaurant/hotel that featured a red roof when I was growing up.) I've driven past several times since I left home in 1981 to move to Fryeburg with my then-boyfriend (now husband), as my dad's grave is just a half a mile from here. I've witnessed the way the town is slowly changing from a center of commerce, as there used to be auctions at a big barn that stood on the property to the left of this shot and a rooming house across the street - both torn down now - and saw the general store become a sandwich shop, because EVERYBODY drives to the larger towns to grocery shop these days....

So I got to see the work in progress when the new owner painted the house a dark grey (which my mom hated), then the other work he did, such as removing sheds where we used to pile wood for the wood stoves in order to build a deck overlooking the back yard. As others noted over the years, it seemed to be smaller all the time, especially the "back forty", as we called the acre or so that we had to mow every summer...

Then, via Facebook and my mom, I was informed that the new owner had rented the place to people who really didn't care for it. They let the furnace blow out one winter, and instead of doing anything to repair it, they broke holes in walls and removed all the copper piping in the place to turn in for scrap. By the time the owner realized what had been done to the place by his tenants and got them removed, it was going to cost him more to fix the place than he'd paid for it in the first place...

So this past weekend, it was burned down by the local fire department as a training exercise - and some days, it doesn't pay to have relatives who are firemen, policemen, etc. who have never left the local area...

I had purposefully avoided going to see the "festivities", as the house held so many memories, including being the place where my father breathed his last when cancer got the upper hand in July 1980. Jim included photos and a couple of videos of the "training exercise" - and even trying to share these here, I have tears flowing down my face three days later...

The little boarded up window above the space we always called the "porch" was my brother's bedroom for a number of years, and it was the window Dad always insisted we should crawl out of if there was a fire, as the drop from the edge of the porch roof was less likely to injure us if we had to jump. Even if we couldn't get to that window, however, he always emphasized that it would be better to have a broken leg than to burn to death. The boarded over windows on the lower floor looked in on the cot where he lay the night he passed away...

This picture hit particularly hard, as there was one blizzard when I was a child in which the snow was piled up to the edge of this roof - and we all (meaning my sibs, myself, and a half-dozen of the neighborhood kids we played with) got into MAJOR trouble climbing up with our sleds and sliding down the back into the drifted snow in the back yard...

The last shot Jim posted before going to video to tape the "final burn" - and for some reason I can't seem to fathom, this seems to be the worst of them all. As when Dad last painted the house, the back side never got finished, and from that little vent on the wall, this strikes me as the window in the former shed that Dad and Pepere and remodeled into a laundry room/the place where Mom had her stove. The little vent cover would have been from the hood that took the steam (and occasionally smoke) that came off the stove.

What has been eating at me is this: it's the fourth place I've lived that is no longer there. The home in Fryeburg where my husband spent most of his life from the age of 11 until we moved into an apartment at the far side of his folks place burned flat after someone left a candle burning. 7 Oxford Street/6 Smith Street in Fryeburg was never rebuilt after it burned in the early 90's and is a parking lot. 

The place we were living when his mother died and where we had our second baby was taken down a few years ago when the guy who owned it after us sold it to Poland Springs for their new, wide driveway to their bottling plant in Fryeburg. Poland Springs had jumped the gun a little, buying the property and taking down the house before they had permission to put in the road, so it also is nothing but a cleared space of lawn. Although Google Earth still shows a photo that includes the house and garage at 46 Portland Street, it's been gone almost 2 years now.

The place in Gorham that we only lived for one year, which had multiple code violations for a rental, got torn down and turned into a parking lot as well. I had less of an emotional tie to that one, but it IS where we "adopted" a white cat we named "Zippy" and where our elderly black cat, Avatar, suddenly started coming to the door and calling "Hello" when he wanted to come in....

Maybe I should look up our old addresses and, after confirming that THEY are still there, I should notify current owners/residents to be careful. I seem to have cursed the places I've lived to total destruction......

In the meantime, I'm going to give the earth some time to heal once they've pushed the remainder of the house into the old cellar hole, dumped dirt over, and put in grass seed before I go visit for another photo. After watching the homes of both grandparents fall into neglect and slowly fall down piece by piece, I'm much happier that we won't watch that happen in the home where I grew up...but I'll never be able to go back like this song from Miranda Lambert speaks of...

There's no place for me to "touch this place and feel it"...not any more, anyway.....(Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me" is at the other end of the link)

https://youtu.be/DQYNM6SjD_o

ADDENDUM April 4, 2016:  Going to visit my mom for her birthday with the grandkids, I took a ride through Exeter on a mission. I wanted to get pictures of "the places I used to live" for a tongue-in-cheek post later this year showing all the parking lots and grassy knolls that have taken the place of some of the places I used to live in. I was hoping that the current owners of the "old homestead" would have the dirt pushed over the remains....but I was wrong and it became a very hard task to take the photos below....

Taken from roughly the same angle as the pic at the top of this post, the lack of the house is a little disturbing, but livable. I noted a very burnt tree that I didn't recall being that close to the house, so I walked several feet over, to where there used to be a garage that housed the oil delivery trucks that my dad drove when I was young, and took a "straight back" shot (below). As I was looking at it from this angle, I realized that the giant pine tree was one my sister planted when we were kids, and was once short enough that we were playing "Leap Frog" over the top of it. It's been 35 years since I moved out, so it's entirely possible that the unfamiliar tree was planted by an owner after Mom sold the place......

Then I moved in for some close-up shots.....

This was the one that hurt my heart, as that crumbled bit of metal was the hot air furnace that Mom and Dad had put in shortly after they bought the house. As you can see, the cellar didn't go all the way across the length of the house, so there was just cellar under the living room and dining room areas, and crawl space under the kitchen, porch and sheds. The small blue building near the trees marks where we used to slip down into the "woods"  between our house and the neighbors cow field and have "adventures" - mostly living out stories we were making up as we went along....

As I was taking this last shot, I almost started laughing at myself, remembering when I was given the duty of going down into the basement to get potatoes from the large wooden bins where we dumped them each fall after collecting them from local potato fields (the "leavings" after the harvester had worked the field were free for the taking, so we took a lot.....). I always hurried, because I was certain a velociraptor lived somewhere in the basement. The fact that there were no velociraptor bones in the cellar hole should have made me feel better, but I'm wondering where it moved to before they burned the place.....

So, I'm going to call it an end to this particular post and try to make another trip out in a year or so to take the photo I was hoping to have this time, with all the "remains" properly buried and the grass starting to grow. In the meantime, I'm making a list of all the places I've lived so I can do a complete "warning system" for those who happen to be living in places I used to live. Considering that this makes the FIFTH place to be taken down, I feel it's only fair to let those who might be caught in my House Karma Backlash to be aware that they should be VERY careful.....

*grin*