The House on Maple Street

The house on Maple Street, which my great-grandfather built in 1924, has belonged to my family for a hundred years. Next month it will belong to a young couple from Boston, whose two small children ran up and down the stairs shouting with delight when they came to see it. I am seventy-one, my knees are bad and the stairs are too steep for me now, which is the only reason I am selling.

My great-grandfather, Samuel Hale, was a carpenter, which explains why every door in the house still closes perfectly. He built the place with his own hands, using wood from the hills behind the town, and he carved his initials into the frame of the kitchen door. I have spent the last three weeks emptying it, one room at a time, and to my surprise, almost every room has reminded me not of my own family but of our neighbors.

I started with the kitchen, where I found a cake tin that belonged to Mrs. Dupont, who lived in the yellow house across the street for fifty years. Mrs. Dupont, whose apple cake was famous in three counties, used to leave one on our porch every October without ever knocking. My mother always returned the tin full of cookies, which meant that the same tin traveled back and forth across Maple Street for decades. I never did find out whose tin it was originally.

The living room reminded me of Mr. Abbott, who lived next door and was the first person on the street to own a television. On Saturday nights in the 1950s, half the children on Maple Street sat on his floor to watch cowboy shows, which his wife pretended to hate. When he died, his family gave my father his armchair, which is still by the window. I have decided to leave it for the new owners.

In the attic, which I hadn't visited in years, I found a box of letters from Daniel Reyes, whose family moved here from Texas when we were both eleven. Daniel, who lived at number 14, was my best friend all through school. We once tried to build a raft and sail it down the river, which ended with both of us in the water and his mother marching us home in silence. He became an engineer and moved to California, but he wrote to me every Christmas until he passed away three years ago.

The small bedroom at the back, which was mine as a child, made me think of Miss Carver, the music teacher, whose piano I could hear through the wall every evening. She lived alone in the narrow brown house behind ours and gave lessons to anyone who wanted them, often for free. I learned to play a little, badly, which never seemed to bother her. Years later I found out that she had secretly paid for two students from our street to go to music college.

The basement was the hardest room of all. It was where we sheltered during the great storm of 1973, when a tree fell on the Duponts' roof and the river flooded the lower end of the street. For two nights, four families slept down there, some of whom had hardly spoken to each other before. My father, whose radio was the only one that still worked, read out the news every hour. By the time the water went down, Maple Street had become something like a family, which it remained for the next fifty years.

Most of those neighbors have gone now. Their houses belong to people I know only by sight, people who wave from their cars and work in offices in other towns. That is nobody's fault; it is simply how towns change. But yesterday, as I was carrying the last boxes to the car, the little boy from Boston, who had come with his parents to measure the windows, asked me who had made the marks on the kitchen door.

I showed him the initials, S.H., and then the pencil lines beside them, each with a name and a date: four generations of children measured against the same door frame. He asked if he could add his own. His mother started to say no, but I handed him the pencil. He stood very straight, and I drew a line just above his head and wrote his name beside it. His name, as it happens, is Sam.

On my way out of town, I left a cake on the porch of the yellow house across the street, where a young nurse lives now with her husband. I didn't knock. I left a note saying that the tin should be returned full, to the house with the marks on the kitchen door, which from next month belongs to Sam.