Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents by Lise Funderburg & Lise Funderburg

Author:Lise Funderburg & Lise Funderburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor, LCO010000 Literary Collections / Essays, FAM000000 Family & Relationships / General, Family & Relationships, Form, General, Literary Collections, essays
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Now it is 2018; I am fifty-eight. I’m sitting at her kitchen table, the same white table in the same white kitchen in the same white split-level, imploring my mother once again to come see the house I have bought. I’ve come home for a brief visit—it’s funny, I realize, that I keep referring to the house in the suburbs as “home,” forty years after leaving it—and after the usual mournful rehearsal of her friends’ and relations’ illnesses and operations and Alzheimer’s, punctuated every now and then by her wry asides (Nobody ever just drops dead anymore!), I try to cheer her up by proposing a week in the country at my place. She sighs.

I didn’t buy a home until I was in my fifties, and for a long time I told myself that there were practical reasons for this. I’d been a freelancer for so many years, after all, and was never sure whether I could make that kind of financial commitment, given how erratic my income could be. Manhattan real estate was so crazy, I told myself: renting was so easy. I needed money for the two boys I was helping to raise, I told myself: their tuitions, the vacations, the school clothes. This was the kind of thing I told myself year after year, long after my peers had bought homes, long after my friends had stopped asking why I didn’t finally settle down and own, long after the stability of my income was no longer a cause for concern. Whether my rationalizations had any validity, I can’t say. But I do know that, during all the years I was a renter, I felt free. If I scuffed a floor or put a dent in a wall, it wasn’t mine; if something didn’t work, a ceiling fixture or air conditioner, I wasn’t responsible for fixing it. For most of my adult life, wherever I lived, I felt exhilaratingly unburdened, unconstrained by the implacable demands I had come to associate with houses.

Then, a few years ago, I fell in love with a little nineteenth-century farmhouse at the end of a road near the river and bought it. After a year of renovations—I could have lived in it right away, it’s true, but I’d waited so long and I wanted it perfect—I moved in. The boys are grown, I have no pets, I live alone. There is no threat that some small child will crash into my Robsjohn-Gibbings end tables, that some puppy will break the Venini bowl or the Salviati vases. I am happy, I realize. Everything looks perfect, people say who come to the house, including my cleaning lady, Chelsea, with whom I spend more and more time talking about our kids, her bright daughter Madison who wants to be a writer, my boys just graduating from high school and college. She likes to joke that I’m so neat she barely has to clean.

It is to this house that, lately, I’ve tried to get my mother to come for a visit.

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