What do you remember? While our memories help to create the people we become, they also carry within them the lessons of our lives. Harmonie Lovin recounts her memories with ambiguous grief and her quest to find beauty despite the pain and chaos inside, All The Pretty Houses.
What do you remember? While our memories help to create the people we become, they also carry within them the lessons of our lives. Harmonie Lovin recounts her memories with ambiguous grief and her quest to find beauty despite the pain and chaos inside, All The Pretty Houses.
Hiraeth n. (Welsh) A spiritual longing for a home which maybe never was. Nostalgia for ancient places to which we cannot return. It is the echo for the lost places of our soul’s past and our grief for them. It is in the wind and the rocks and the waves. It is nowhere and it is everywhere.
Introduction
People often ask where I’m from, as I have no distinct accent or strikingly unusual appearance. It’s a friendly question, one that often isn’t intended as anything more than an ice-breaker. Sometimes I state my birthplace, while other times I simply say my current town. I’m well practiced at the answer. I’m also well practiced at how to avoid it. Typically, most military children move six to nine times during their school years. If only I had been that lucky! My parents were on the lam. Even as I type this, I can’t hide my laughter. It’s far from true, but admittedly, it’s my favorite answer.
Sometimes, on rare occasions, I tell the truth. I’ve lived in twelve states. Then the genuine intrigue comes pouring out, and the questions that I know will follow. “What state did you like the best?” “What was your favorite house?” “Why did you move so much?”
Some answers are easy. I loved South Dakota more than any other state I’ve lived in. Of the more than forty houses I can remember, my favorite was probably the one in Idaho. That last answer, though, is far more complicated and takes much longer to explain, but I’m finally ready to tell you.
All the days I’ve lived (and the memories that have been cultivated of those days) have brought me here. The story I tell is part of me. It’s ugly and beautiful. It’s a mixture of loss and grief, triumphs and perseverance. I don’t believe my life is extraordinary, but instead very ordinary. Shared experiences are rarely remembered consistently, and all of the details are seldom the same. These stories are my memories and my lessons from my journey here on Earth.
What do you remember? Memory can be a fickle friend. At times, it can take us to a place or a moment we had forgotten long ago, or so it seemed. Yet more times than I can count, I’ve gone in search of an item left in another room, picturing exactly where it is, like my freshly brewed coffee I left in the kitchen. I go to retrieve it, only to enter the room, glancing from wall to wall, and wonder, “What the hell did I come in here for!”
If I’m lucky enough to spy the swirly gray mug resting on the edge of the counter, I will have victory! Other times I admit defeat and walk out, only to remember it again! I’m not losing my mind or my memory. This is a phenomenon called the “doorway effect.” It happens because we have changed our environment and we become more consumed with the here and now and the new room we’ve entered than the reason we entered it.
Alternatively, I’ve walked into a house I’ve never been to before and suddenly remembered something from my past. It’s like a TV channel suddenly flips on and a segment of my life flashes in my mind. The science behind it explains it as our mind recognizing a current thought or feeling that’s parallel with a moment from the past.
I’m most fond of “mind-pops,” a term coined in 1997 that refers to memories unexpectedly recalled from one’s past. It’s not a memory you chose to think of. It may be good or bad, but all of a sudden it’s there for no apparent reason. Those fleeting memories, I say, are when I forget to remember. I think memories make up 99 percent of us. The 1 percent left is the present moment that, if you allow it to pass, will soon become a memory as well.
Of all our senses, the one with the strongest link to memory is smell. It can easily propel you back to a former lover, the high school locker room where you celebrated your first win, the hospital where your grandfather died, or something altogether insignificant. I love the smell of hot chocolate and warm, buttered toast. My mother would often prepare the treat for me as a child on cold winter days. Now, as soon as I bite into the warmth of the butter, drenched in the sweetness of the decadent chocolate, I’m instantly taken back there. It’s my comfort food and tastes like love to me, still, all these years later.
I feel as though I have been crafting the words upon these pages my entire life. Just under the surface of every moment and every memory, a piece of me has seeded and grown. Every place I’ve touched has, in turn, touched me. Each chapter of my life has told a story, and inside each one a part of me still exists.
As I sit on the oversize couch, with the down feather pillows allowing me to balance the laptop on my knees, the black keys beckon me to strike their letters. Yet, I find myself reflecting on the changes this house has endured. The bland yellow that adorned the tattered walls when I first stepped through the front door is now comforted in an earthy green, bringing new life. The cold blue of the master bedroom that illuminated sadness was the first to go, painted over in a fresh gray, along with crisp white baseboards.
I run my feet over the luscious rug that magnifies the original hardwood floors and wonder how many feet have walked these wooden planks. From visitors and family to creatures with four paws or little toes, the stomps of teens and the weary steps of the old. How many lives had this house known before I claimed it as my own? Had it been here waiting for me all along? If the house had memories, what would they be and what secrets would it try to confess? The house would never tell, and the creak of the floorboards and shifts inside the earth almost dare me to unveil them.
I gaze through the bay windows that look out into the well-manicured neighborhood. The little houses built in the fifties line together as they stretch down and around the circle at the end, then up again, creating an imaginary question mark. The bright beams of sun illuminate the snow that covers the rooftops and I’m slightly blinded by its glare. My eyes fall upon the large oaks with barren winter leaves and the pines in the distance. Suddenly, I’m struck with a memory I hadn’t thought of in so long, I’d almost forgotten it altogether.
I’m sitting in the back of the old silver car, gazing out the window. My mom is at the wheel, her blond hair happily dancing in the warmth of the summer air. There isn’t a destination, only a long drive down the backroads that provides cheap entertainment in the midst of a long hot summer. The old, tattered houses and fields surrounding them, full of black and brown cows, pass before me. I look out upon the green pastures and admire the horses as their tails sway with unabashed freedom in the subtle breeze of the midafternoon.
I stretch my small arm out the window and fan the wind. Its force pushes my hand back and up and down and forward. The rays of light shine down on my face and warm me with happiness that can only be experienced in the summer sun.
But when the car changes direction, with scenery I don’t recognize, my stomach becomes unsettled. The warmth I felt is replaced with a chill from the shadows of the tall pines that loom over me. As I look down the unfamiliar road, I ask my mother, “Are we lost?” As always, she replies with the same answer. “We’re not lost. We’re just going down the road a piece.” Down the road a piece.
The First
I was born on a cold winter’s day in Wisconsin. Before my first birthday we’d already moved on to Oklahoma. Just one year after that, we found ourselves in a new home, where the blazing sun scorched the grass and the days passed slowly, as though time was also too hot to tick by any faster.
My mom had just entered her early thirties and returned to her demanding career as a homemaker and mother of four. Although she’d closed her short-lived interior decorating business, it did nothing to curb her keen eye for detail. She spilled her talents into every corner of the house, including my and my sister’s room. It was painted in a pale pink with a homemade white picket fence that outlined our play area. It was perfect for her two daughters and everything two little girls could want: full of toys placed neatly on shelves and the laughter of two sisters that were happy to have one another.
My earliest memory is sitting on a bench waiting for my turn to jump rope. I distinctly recall watching the rope looping up and down in the empty garage of my sister’s playmate’s house. Suddenly I felt something warm and hot. As I reached down to investigate my calf, I was struck with a sudden and horrible pain. I had just been stung by a scorpion! I screamed out and began to cry. My sister immediately threw down the rope and rushed over to me.
April was a petite child with small features and long auburn hair and little more than four years my elder. She heaved me into her arms and bravely trotted across the street, back to our house and into my mother’s care. I lay on the couch as my dad scooped up a ball of tobacco and shoved it in his cheek. The pain seared up my thigh, and I looked up at him in search of rescue. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and pulled out the black goo, slapping the bitter wad onto my leg in hopes that it would draw out the sting. Sitting beside me, he spooned sweet vanilla ice cream into my mouth until my tears had been quenched. By the time the bowl was empty, the sting had subsided.
There aren’t many memories of the first house. I sort of recall my pet rock, Herman. He was gray and oval shaped, with fine white lines that ran along his smooth surface. I partially remember my and April’s bedroom. But I definitely remember the Texan heat and the sting from the scorpion. Otherwise there’s no indication of much else, just photos of my parents donning cowboy hats next to the red brick fireplace.
It’s said that negative memories are much easier to recall. Is it much easier to remember the sting of the scorpion than the pink room full of innocent laughter? Perhaps the memories contain the lessons that created the person I was to become. Had I remembered further back, my story may have been different. I may have been different.
I don’t remember much about Texas. I don’t remember much . . . until Colorado. Colorado is where it all started. Where I began to become me, and my family went from us to them. It’s where I can recount the beginning of the end, although I wasn’t able to see it then.
I was drawn in to reading this book as I too have lived in a lot of houses although maybe not quite as many as Harmonie Lovin; I can also state that our reasons for moving were very different.
This is a book, in many ways, of two parts. The first part is concerned with Lovin’s childhood and by extension, her relationships with her parents and her siblings. The second part describes the writer’s own experience of motherhood and all that that engenders, both good and bad.
Whilst living with her parents, Lovin is exposed to the discord that can manifest itself in relationships and how this can have an enormous effect on the family dynamic, in terms of how parental behaviour can influence to both nurture and undermine. The moving referenced in the houses of Lovin’s title is not a product of some enthusiastic wanderlust and so, as a reader, you are exposed to the life of a kid continually starting at new schools and trying to find their identity in a place where they know they don’t belong and also, that they know they will never put down roots in anyway. She has the support of siblings to a degree, but there is a sense of Lovin very much needing to find her own resolve to endure.
This is a memoir of reflection, as most are, and Lovin, in looking back, attempts to reconcile her feelings at the time with the years of experience that she has since gained. With regard to her becoming a mother, there are moments that resound with joy which Lovin is keen to relate and these contrast with more dire revelations about the impact that living with someone who is diagnosed with a mental illness can have on once solid relationships, as errant behaviours and uncontrolled impulses threaten to overshadow everything that once was.
This is a sad book – no doubt. But it is also full of portraits of family togetherness as well as the importance of the need to move towards happiness, despite having lived a life less stable. And ultimately, it is a plea for understanding where there may be none, or very little, at least; for tolerance; for help to be made available; for us to care and not write people off so easily.
A stirring memoir, well-written.