God bless hurricane isabel

J got herself new dinner plates--no one likes them but her. as plates, they are okay. they look like something you might find in a model home where the interior design directive was "casual-formal tuscan." they are embossed with grapevines and covered with a milky glaze through which you can see a sort of plum-terra cotta color...anyway, her old plates they are not. because her old plates were each individually painted by J herself, with etruscan designs she copied free-hand from a catalogue, or with candy-colored dots, or with ladybugs, or with a madonna and child painted in cobalt blue on eggshell white--that one was my favorite. each one was different. they were heavy, hardy plates, some of them a little chipped on the rims. they clanked when you stacked them in the cupboard or after a meal. they had the integrity of diner plates and the elegance of J herself.

and now, she says, they are in the basement.

J's daughter was thirteen when i met her, and now she is nearly done with her freshman year of college. scandalous. her youngest son, weedy and good-natured when i met him on my first day of college, is now a remarkably talented guitarist who looks and carries himself just like his father, with the exception of his instinctively modern taste in dress and hair. the ferret they used to have, whom i found peering into my mouth one night that i spent sleeping on their couch, has been gone for a year or two. J has also, unimaginably, passed on one of her pet birds to another home--it made sense, though, since it was a rebound bird, acquired after the first of its kind escaped the house and was lost. she said she never truly bonded with it. now there is a chinoiserie birdcage housing in place of the utilitarian steel one they used to have, and it houses only the jewel-colored paralet, and the house is a little bit quieter. quieter, on the whole, since J's oldest son brought home his new dog from vermont, who is younger and less domesticated than all the other pets.

the bathroom upstairs and the basement underneath are refinished. there is new furniture in the living room, which somehow looks smaller and narrower as a result. also smaller seems the bedroom of J's daughter, where i am staying. the room used to resemble the interior of a teenage girl's mind--a tall loft bed that posed one uncomfortably close to the ceiling, affording a treehouse-style view of the neighbors' yard, arched over a desk and a pressboard set of shelves with a moody kind of shelter, and left the remainder of the floor to the overflow of clothes, shoes, homework papers, magazine pages, and cosmetic bottles that could not be contained by the actual furniture. J's daughter used, of her own volition, to sweep through the room about once a month and leave it perilously organized--it seems like she must have thrown out half the things in the room, but they always seemed to resurface eventually. sometimes she would do the same for her younger brother's room. that i was never able to reason out.

J said her daughter was displeased by the change wrought in her old bedroom, and when i said i understood, she looked at me with an expression i can't qualify with any word but "flabbergasted." on the subject of the plates, she said her family can't stand them and she can't stand her family's response to them.

i laughed. this is the house of J and her family. they are opinionated and loud, the way italians and greeks are characterized, well-read in the classics and savvy about pop culture. they sleep on sheets with a high thread count, they eat food that could be photographed for a homemaking magazine, they listen to books on tape and to public radio, they have a koi pond and a large kitchen garden. they entertain and converse with utter unself-consciousness. their house is always open. on saturday mornings, W brings J breakfast in bed.

they terrified me when i was first beginning to insinuate myself into their lives. i didn't know if they were the right kind of people for me to be around--they seemed dangerous, with their loud voices and dramatic absolute statements. but something about the way they fought with each other seemed not to be fighting at all. they seemed surprised and delighted every time i came over, and every time i offered to help, and every time i asked for help.

it took a while to get used to the freely-flowing emotions, the barking of the dogs and the shrieking of the birds, the shouts of family at family, the carelessness of parents to know where their children were at all times and vice versa, the unlocked doors.

i've been away from and come back to this house so many times, so many times. though i knew i didn't belong here, i felt like i did--rather, i felt like i could stay as long as i wanted.

sometimes, within the years, i got hit by the sudden reflection that i would have to say goodbye to them, that a day was inexorably coming when i would have no ready excuse for suddenly dropping by, that someday i would be curled up by the wood stove on a cold Sunday afternoon, or it could happen on the porch in the clammy heat of August, and one of them would look at me and say, "so where are you going from here?" i guess it wasn't all that clear in my mind when i thought of it then, but that's what i think must explain the holy misery i felt at the thought.

maybe i should have known that such people as J and her family don't work that way. or maybe this is just luck so far, and it will all fall apart tomorrow. i haven't known enough people like them... but that's a foolish statement, because enough people like them don't exist.

i wish that i could summon at will every specific memory i have in connection with this house and the people who live in it. i would hate to think those memories have disappeared, like the ferret and the bird. but i'm going to trust that they are simply socked away, like J's old hand-painted plates, and that they will continue to reemerge, like the mess in her daughter's room. just remembering that i have something to remember is far, far from forgetting.

the older i grow, the less iconography i need.

if tomorrow is the last day i ever see or hear from them, it won't be. they are the people i can always come back to.

i love telling this story:
hurricane isabel was on its way into town on a friday afternoon early in the school year when i was a freshman. i was living an hour away from school, at the time, and the next morning was going to be my first day opening the coffee shop where i was working. i didn't want to back out of the responsibility, but i didn't know if i'd be able to drive in from the DC suburbs the next morning, if the weather did everything people warned it would do. i had been visiting J at her office on campus a good deal, and we liked each other, so after my last class of the day, i called her to ask if i could camp out on her couch that night. she said yes, come right over. she gave me the directions to her house, and described it as a little grey bungalow. already i was in love.

when i got there, the house on the corner of glen and maple was indeed a little grey bungalow, with white trim and a wide front porch and a picket fence, and there was a wisteria vine and trees and candlelight in the windows. i walked inside and there was some kind of guitar-and-female-vocal music playing and candles winking and the kitchen was terra-cotta red and there were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with old books with stained leather covers and white curtains and dark wood and the painted plates on the tablecloth, and J cooking, and her daughter with long golden hair sitting at the table doing homework, and i nearly started to cry. i really did. i don't remember if i said out loud that theirs was my dream house. it happened to be, that night, her youngest son's birthday...when i found this out, i remember feeling guilty for imposing, and immediately being talked out of it, and truly no one seemed to mind. somehow that night, J's daughter and i ended up dancing around to irish music--can't imagine how i was that uninhibited. J made up the couch for me to sleep on. i was hooked, i was drugged, i was head over heels.

thus began four years.