(This series of articles is about “Home,” however you define it. . . It’s where the heart is. . . It’s where our stories begin. It’s where we belong.)
At the beginning of the previous century, Dominican monks kept vigil in this house on Galveston Bay. I imagine them cowled and reverent, padding across the pine floors. At a long table, they broke bread and ate peaches in silence - a sacrament as ordinary as summer.
But holiness does not last long in the South. That restless house eventually shed its piety. A gambler came next, bringing with him a massive mirror he propped against a wall. That mirror bore witness to evenings of roulette wheels and card games below, and whores above. I think of that mirror, bathed in smoke and lamplight, observing the slur of whiskeysoaked songs, the gleam of a pistol laid on velvet, the storms battering the shutters. Even when I Iived in the house I imagined if you stared long enough, perhaps that mirror would reveal its hidden faces. Then a doctor arrived - although a dubious one - who brought the house a new congregation: children sent away by their rich Houston families, their minds untethered, small hearts hammering like trapped birds, their spirits quick to flare. They darted through the halls like fireflies and swayed on splintered porch swings, eyes fixed on the leap of mullet in the bay, dreaming their way out of exile. When I moved into the house, on the second floor near a bay window, I discovered a penciled inscription on the shiplap siding - someone’s fragile claim: “ Arrived at Resthaven, July 24, 1921”.
Ghosts wandered that house. The self-proclaimed “empath” soccer mom, standing in the dining room during an end-of-season soccer party for our 10 year-old son, declared that the house was ‘filled with spirits’. She was quick add that they were ‘kind and protective’ – but I already knew that. I had always felt the presence of benevolent unseen company there.
The house carried on through its strange incarnations: monks, gamblers, children, and cooks. The Rat Bag Cooking Club – whatever that was had its season there. By the time I came to it, the house was over 100 years old. Early visitors would have ventured from Houston to Sylvan Beach on the train and then made the five-mile trip further to the house via horse and buggy. I bought it from a soon-to-be bankrupt developer who had positioned a 60-inch television across the front bay windows, shielding the occupants from the view of the living sea just beyond. I knew better than to advance that sacrilege. The house had been waiting for me.
I made a life there. At one point my best friend’s wedding reception was at the house. As his father a minister - raised his hands in blessing, I sensed the whole lineage gathered together: monks bowing their heads, gamblers raising glasses, children giggling, cooks stirring their pots, prostitutes fanning themselves in the sultry light. That past waltzed by us on the Gulf breeze, rich as gumbo, the house itself swaying in time with the Cajun band.
I lived there twentyeight years. The house became my truest kin, outlasting my relationship with my mother who died when I was twentyseven. When Rebecca and I married, we restored and often repaired it, raised two boys within its sympathetic walls, and watched as the seasons moved across the bay - hurricanes, still waters, magnificent sunrises. We had regular sailing adventures on the bay in our little 12 ft. sloop The Sea Witch. The boys grew up, and now as adults, they still cannot abide fences or neighborhoods any more than that old house could. They know the comfort of solitude, the excitement of storms, and the murmur of centuries folded into weathered walls.
We always referred to the house by its longago name: “Resthaven”. Even now when the wind shifts, or I see an expanse of blue water, I hear the monks’ chant, see the gambler’s leer, catch a child’s laughter. That house still lives in me as surely as I lived in it. I know the light. I know that moment. And however far I travel, I already know what is ‘home’.
