Houses on Hills

The first house on a hill:

It overlooked the apartment complex we'd just moved from. I was eight, but the symbolic weight of living room windows framing a life left behind was not lost on me. My sister was six and less philosophically inclined.

“The pool! Can we still go to it? I see it like a bathtub.”

“No.” I'd tell her. Stern. “We can never go back, we are here now, and will build our own swimming pool.”

In court terms: adultery happened; divorce happened. In ten year old sensations: the ground fell out, the darkness in the corners spread. Two houses now.

My mother's house, the wounded:

This hill was the kind that only flood zone regulators new about. The yard was full of trees, no way to see what was below us, and the incline was so gradual that my eleven year old lungs didn't notice.

But during tornado season, the creek behind our house would rise and rise. Flash flood warnings would flash on TV. Footage of tires, pieces of roof, entire trees, swirling in brown froth. I wanted it to come. I'd go down to the creek when my mother was too busy on the phone, telling stories of what she'd found out about my father. I did see a tire, a piece of roof, half a tree. I saw myself fall in and get swept all the way to the Cumberland, climbing on shore in downtown Nashville and going by myself to the Hard Rock Cafe, people staring, exclaiming, how brave, she's soaked, and getting a new, dry, free T-shirt.

But my mom would always reassure us, even with black under her eyes, even with the lawyer on hold.

“The water won't ever reach us. It can't get to us here.”

My father's house, the stubborn:

He moved in with the other woman and told us, always, that what he did was right, we just couldn't see that yet. Didn't have the perspective. They became rich. Even richer than we were before. He told us, always, it was because of her. She knew how to handle money.

From our house in the mountains we could see a lake and peaks like alps on all sides. But we used the cheapest toilet paper, the kind that feels like scratches, because she knew how to handle money.

With red asses we could sit and see mountains change shape in the sunlight, with the seasons. But my dad, it seemed, kept his eyes on the road that wound down and down, a vanishing point, watching all the people who didn't have his perspective become smaller and farther away.

My home, the child:

I moved to a sunny city with no-one I knew. I have a balcony in the hills. I sit, stoned, and stare at the palm trees, whose long skinny stalks remind me where I am.

There are hills I can see over, and hills that shadow me, their homes winking “someday” in the twilight. I can see in the windows of those on three sides. I watch them and wonder what their homes have been like.

By Suzannah Powell