I'm taking a couple classes over at Loyola's writing center this fall - fiction and creative nonfiction - and figured I would save the shorter assignments here, as an alternative to flushing all that sweat down the drain (the shorter pieces only get the one readthrough). This one is from the nonfiction class. The teacher asked us to "write our way in to a place."

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From a history of Canaan, NH. by William Allen Wallace, published in 1910 by his son, James: “The road across Sawyer Hill dates back to an old path trod between Nathaniel Bartlett's and South Road. … These paths, which gradually became roads capable of travel with ox teams and horses, were built for the accommodation of the settlers only; there was no traveling for pleasure, and with the exception of Governor Wentworth when he passed over his road to Hanover, no one passed through the town expecting to find any direct route to any other town."

There is an invisibility to the place you begin - a sense of inevitable arrangement that is absent in subsequent homes or destinations. I do not remember ever thinking that our field, bisected neatly by the thin dirt road that crawls up Sawyer Hill, where our donkeys grazed alongside deer and turkeys and even the occasional moose, was particularly striking, even when, during mornings in early fall, a thin mist would hang over the grass, and the lone maple at its center, already burning with fall color, would catch those first beams of orange light against a backdrop of rolling purple hills. I now understand this scene, which I still see when visiting home, to be the stuff of office calendars and coffee table books (and even a certain wistfulness that comes over me in late September, no matter where I happen to be) but back then it was as though my eyes never really made contact with a sense of place. Part of it must be that there is nothing to compare that first place to, no initial reaction to recover from. And if you stay, if your formative years slide by within the confines of a single zip code, that initial topography can become the metric by which you measure distance from the familiar.

I used to tell people that I had moved when I was a kid. Or maybe not tell so much as nod when they talked about “their move” and agree that moving was difficult.Moved was a verb which I thought might, if I was lucky, cause classmates to see my past as checkered somehow, textured, and in the process lend me an air of pained extravagance; the way rich people complain about how tiresome having three houses can be, or New Yorkers the drudgery of dealing with famous friends. Of course, it never took long for the truth to be revealed by some reporterly fifth grader on the playground, who could see I was just barely not lying. We didn’t move so much as adjust. I didn’t have to change schools, or weather, or learn a new phone number and route home. When I was three, my parents, having the means and youthful inclination to carve a place of their own from the hills of western New Hampshire, decided to build a house a little further in to the property they already owned. In this way we moved, but only about 200 feet up the hill. My view, my metric, shifted only slightly.

I remember the first house in flashes: vivid intersections of memory and appropriated recollection that I have come to call my own. The sharpest of these is a vision of the living room ceiling, racing up to greet me, pausing, and then swooping back and away to become the kitchen floor. I was on a swing, which my mother had installed in the doorway that separated the kitchen from the living room. To the extent that I remember living in that house at all, it is in motion. A narrow staircase, papered with peeling wallpaper that featured smiling skiers with white teeth, led to an upstairs bedroom, which I remember as a studio of some sort, though that may be an elaboration. Whatever it was, it’s just dust and a mouse-eaten mattress now. The last time I was up there the floors were so rotted that any real nostalgic investigation would have been plainly dangerous.

Of course, what is rotten now must have, one cool morning a mere hundred and fifty years ago, smelled of freshly cut pine. The house dates back to the middle of the 19th century, and from what my father remembers of the original transaction, our predecessors were a family from Pittsburg who had built the house as a summer retreat; a reprieve from city life. One can only imagine what the approach must have been like on horseback. A white clapboard cape, green gables, tucked under the broad canopy of a few massive oaks. A porch wrapped around the front, steps up to which were the setting for the first photos of me, just back from the hospital, asleep on my mother’s lap.

Life sped forward. By the time the Old House - as it soon became known - comes back in to view, it is already so long since we moved that it seems almost uninhabitable. Cobwebs soften the corners of each room, and hay is now piled floor to ceiling where our old brown couch once sat. In the interim, the brother of a friend of my mother’s has lived there, Eva and Eloise, our donkeys, have taken up residence in a room off the kitchen, and in the little bedroom set off from the main building, my mother has installed a roost of chickens that will, over the course of a rather grisly four weeks one fall, lose their lives, one by one, to the paws and jaws of a local weasel.

A few years ago, while riding on a bus from Boston to New York, I fell in to halting conversation with a couple of girls from Seoul, South Korea. The bus had wifi and I had an iPad, so I asked them to point out on Google Earth where they had come from. After some fussing with custom Korean keyboards, the screen resolved in to a gray grid of concrete buildings, stretching for several swipes in every direction. They zoomed and pinched and consulted and finally pointed to a single grey square that looked very much like the thousands of other gray squares. It was as though they had located a beloved pixel. They nodded and smiled and asked me to do the same. I punched in my parents’ address, pressed enter, and the screen went green. A faint seam of lighter green, which I understood to be our road, was the only evidence of human interference. After some pinching and zooming of my own, I pointed to where the seam divided two fields and looked up. After a moment of silence, both girls erupted in to laughter.

The donkeys are gone now, as are the chickens, the dogs, the humans. The old house sags. The road that weaves its way up to the top of Sawyer Hill is still narrow and unpaved and the cars that do find their way by our house are either local or lost. My father still walks through the field and down to the mailbox each morning, but without animals down there, needing to be fed twice a day, it’s easy to forget about the house altogether, hiding beneath those oaks.