Terra Orndorff

Home is not a Place

The house my husband and I raised our children in once belonged to my maternal grandparents. After nearly two decades, our remodels rendered the interior virtually unrecognizable, but childhood memories still play in my mind. Weekends I spent helping Grandma Charlotte in the kitchen and playing Connect Four with Grandpa Buck in the living room. Seeing those days in my mind I am reminded that home is not a place. Even if I didn’t live here, if we hadn’t raised our kids here, I would still find comfort and solace in the memories of those days. Still find home.

Home is not a place, it’s a feeling. Remembering that has a way of taking me back through time.

My worst enemy as a child was Anxiety. Rare were moments I saw the bright side and didn’t fear the absolute worst. I could break down childhood trauma and pinpoint the reason I let Anxiety so close. Claws entangled my very soul, and the accompanying nightmares led to the placement of a Precious Moments Bible under my pillow.

Anxiety may have been my worst enemy, but I also had best friends. I had brave, loyal, and comforting friends. Teddy and Blankie never left me alone and never let me down. Teddy, a not at all soft, dark brown bear with rotating limbs, waited in my crib for me to come home when I was born. Years later his one good eye (the other – long since fallen off and replaced with a button) continued to scour our surroundings for monsters. The scar up his back remained as evidence of the back surgery to fix one of his legs after it fell off. Blankie, soft, comforting, covered in friendly baby animals, and once trimmed in satin, carried me home from birth. Years of use eventually eroded that trim away. Teddy and Blankie joined forces to fight Anxiety and the monsters under my bed. I repeatedly assured them I would take care of them. If a tornado came, I’d take them to the basement. If there was a fire, I’d take them outside.

I vowed to protect Teddy and Blankie with the same determination they protected me. As a child, if I closed my eyes, I saw Blankie form a shield around me while Teddy drew his sword. Together they saved me. They protected me from all the things in the big world I feared. Adults frowned on my taking them everywhere, though, so I left them home.

That judgment from grown-ups is why, during the summer of 1989, Teddy and Blankie stayed home as I walked around the pond to my paternal grandparents’ house and the fish farm they owned. Dad worked for a local farmer during the days, and Mom worked at a naval base forty minutes away. A preteen, I never understood how I could run all through the woods, be gone all day, and no one batted an eye, but I couldn’t stay home alone. To be honest, though, I didn’t really mind. Mammaw Mae, my dad’s stepmom, was fun. We worked in the garden, picked berries, cooked, and cleaned catfish. We were a lot alike, Mammaw and me. Both outsiders. She married a man with a gaggle of kids who never warmed to her. I was adopted by one of those kids when he married my mom. We were cut from the same, big-hearted cloth and were allies in everything. And on Fridays we went to town.

Town day was always fun, if not exhausting, and June 23 started like any other Friday. Leaving mid-morning, Mammaw stopped at the sawmill to pick up Grandpa’s check. I adored the smell of the sawmill; those aromas of wood and sawdust transported me inside a giant oak tree hollowed just for me. I still get lost at lumber yards even today. The familiar scent of the trees returns me to childhood. After the mill, we stopped at the bank and then Grandma Booker’s house. Grandma Booker was not my actual grandma, but all the kids called her that. An extremely sweet woman, if you closed your eyes to picture a storybook grandmother you pictured Grandma Booker. She and Mammaw began a friendship years before, a family friend we all loved. Teddy’s open-back surgery? Grandma Booker cared for him. I only entrusted him to her for an overnight medical procedure.

I still see the brightness inside Grandma Booker’s house. So comforting and warm. Highlights magazines littered the dining table as I sat working a puzzle, sipping a glass of sweet tea. Mammaw and Grandma sat in the living room, catching up on the week’s events. On this day the ringing of the hallway telephone interrupted the conversation. I kept right on with the puzzle, but the second Grandma Booker handed the phone to Mammaw, my heart sank. Anxiety taught me years earlier to expect the worst, and it took my hand in that moment. The truth never looks so bad if you expect something much crueler. I instantly thought, my house is burning down, as Mammaw hung up the phone.

Turning away, gathering her purse, Mammaw simply stated, “We have to go. Your house is burning down.”

Just like that, town day ended. Anxiety always stood at the ready to take my hand, to guide me to darkness, but it never taught me what to do when I got there. Silent, I slid into the backseat of Mammaw’s big blue 1980’s Lincolnesque car. The four-door boxy sedan sported a hue somewhere between the baby blue of a robin’s egg and the color of a cloudless sky. I kept a blanket in the back seat for warmth in the winter and protection from the hot leather seats in the summer. Today I balled it into the floor.

We drove south on Indiana-59 and turned right onto County Road 425 South. Living so far in the country I practiced those directions repeatedly, until they came to me as easily as my birthday or Mammaw Mae’s telephone number. She always taught me that if I ever needed to call 9-1-1 it was important proper directions were given. Strangely, as we turned onto our road, that is what I thought: I hope they gave good directions.

The road was populated by farmers. It also felt like a roller coaster. Peaks and valleys littered the length of road. The usual two or three minutes to get home from the main road felt like twenty. Each peak caused my stomach to lurch, even more than usual. We passed a house, a field, a house, a field, a house, yet I saw nothing. I felt the fluctuations of the hills and the firm grasp of Anxiety, claws digging into my soul deeper with each summit. Just before we reached the final apex, the one that would show me my house, I started to cry. It overcame me, all at once, before I even realized.

“Why are you crying?”

I said nothing. In hindsight, Mammaw asking me that may seem cruel to an outsider. After all, not a half hour ago she said my house was burning down. It was hard being a Stephens, though. We had to be strong. Emotions held in check. The world was tough, and we had to be tougher. Although Mammaw and I were in many ways the same, she had much more experience being a Stephens. Still young, I had a lot of learning to do. So I cried.

Topping the hill revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Silos of fish food. Grandpa’s dock. Fish cleaning shed. Garage and barn. Anxiety gave me brief pause and then I saw it. Only a black pile and smoke remained where my house stood that morning. That overwhelming feeling, incapable of definition. Emptiness. Not just empty, but hollow. Blank. Pain. Disgust. Fear. I thought of three things in that moment. Teddy. Blankie. The dogs, Sissy and Skippy. It never occurred to me to wonder where I would sleep that night. I didn’t think about how, by the grace of whatever supreme force you look to, no one was home or hurt.

In the ash, one recognizable item survived. A drill press in the garage. Nothing else remained. Sitting in Mammaw’s house, I knew Teddy and Blankie also succumbed. I failed to protect them. They were gone. Not misplaced or missing. Vanished. Deceased. The emotions filling me diminished that hollowness I felt at the top of the hill. The devastation and desolation overshadowed everything.

Dad returned from the field, said the firemen let Sissy and Skippy out of their pen because of the heat. After the fire subsided, they came out of the woods on their own. I smiled for him and the dogs, but I felt nothing in that moment. The rush of relief for the dogs only came later. Who was going to protect me from Anxiety and the monsters under my bed now?

My Aunt C traveled to the naval base to get Mom. All the way back my sweet mom kept thinking about smoke damage. The kitchen made the most sense. There would be black walls, probably, bubbled linoleum, maybe water damage from the fire hoses. My heart broke for the realization she got slapped with topping the pinnacle of that last hill; the realization that the home she had helped build was no longer standing.

We lived on the county line, so far out that fire departments disagreed about who would respond. By the time a department did show up, the heat burned so hot, the flames climbed so high, controlling the spread became the only option. At least someone showed up, though. If not, who would have let the dogs out?

But who got Teddy and Blankie out? Over the years, I never forgot my protectors. It took years to figure out how to combat Anxiety without them. Losing them haunted me for decades. Even today I tell my husband Teddy and Blankie would have a place in my bed if I had them. He believes me. What I discovered on this journey, though, is that the house that burned wasn’t my home. Teddy and Blankie were my home. Mom was my home. Mammaw was my home. Family is my home. In the house built by my Grandpa Buck, where my mom was raised, where I raised my children, I often thought about the meaning of “home.” When Anxiety approaches me, I still have protectors. I can no longer run to Teddy and Blankie, but I have my people. Even living in a different structure, in a different town, it doesn’t matter. The building is not my home. It is not my sword wielding knight or my shield. My people are. With them, I am always home.