Irreparable
The duty to repair in a fragile world, and other links and thoughts for your Sunday
This is the Sunday links post, where I share some thoughts or a personal essay. And then my assistant editor and I share links to stories that we have been reading this week. This post is always paywalled. Paying subscribers allow me to compensate assistant editor Isabella Rosario for her time. Putting together these newsletters requires precision, fun, marketing, editing, and a lot of writing. She helps keep this newsletter running and is worth far more than I can pay her. Thank you always for your support.
The first time I believed in ghosts was when I walked into my family’s home in Vermillion, South Dakota.
My parents moved all seven of us children (my youngest brother wasn’t born yet) from Texas to South Dakota for my dad’s job in 1995. After living in a cramped duplex in Sioux City for months as they looked for homes, they decided to purchase a crumbling old Victorian near the University of South Dakota.
The house had lived many lives: first as a single-family home, then a fraternity house, and then apartments. The interior was cut up into an indecipherable maze of halls and rooms, filled with abandoned junk and erratic drywall. All the wood in the home had been painted brown and the walls were a jaundiced yellow.
The first year we lived there, my siblings and I spent hours sifting glass shards from broken beer bottles out of the yard. My mom paid us one cent per piece of glass.
The first time I walked into the home, I was in eighth grade — the same age my daughter is now. As I entered through the front door and began to walk up the zig-zag of creaking stairs, I felt like I knew each room by instinct, some ancient reflex that carried through my DNA. I was a child who did not operate fully in reality. Even at that age, I was still creating fairy gardens and petitioning to rename myself Lavender Rainbow. So maybe it was just my imagination. But I do think, once we left, everyone in my family felt haunted by that house.
We left it in 2000. My parents moved us again, this time to Minnesota during the middle of my junior year of high school.
We lived in the house while it was being renovated. My brother Zach and I tore lathes off the wall. I remember my mom, once furious at another no-show by our contractor, climbing onto the roof and taking a sawzall to the remains of an old fire escape and knocking herself out in the process. After my youngest brother was born, I was carrying him through the kitchen, which was still being assembled, and my leg broke through a floorboard. I dangled there, cradling him and crying for help.
It was our Money Pit. A movie, that after we lived in that house made my parents laugh a little too hard — the laughed of hysterical knowing rather than pure enjoyment.
We’d finished most of the renovations right before we moved again. The house was painted pink, blue, and yellow. It looked like a doll house — with a beautiful wrap-around porch and swing where I’d sit and read. My older sister used the roof of the porch to crawl out the third-floor window and sneak out to forbidden parties. We all have stories of sneaking out of that house. It wasn’t a home designed to hold people in but to let them go free.
This house was the first time we’d ever felt free. We’d been homeschooled and kept inside. In Texas, the circumference of our lives was only as big as a church and our home. But when we moved to South Dakota, our world opened up. The town was so small that my parents felt safe letting us roam. We had bikes, and we could go to the gas station, movie theater, library, high school, babysitting jobs, or our friends’ homes. Suddenly, everything was so much larger and wider. I’d often make a butter and chicken sandwich and head out on my bike, spending hours alone exploring the woods and the country roads right outside of town.
Last week, I visited the house again.
I hadn’t seen it since 2018 when I was researching my book God Land. It wasn’t in good shape then. The paint was flaking and the porch roof sagged. But it didn’t seem unfixable. After all, my family had brought it back from much worse.
But when I drove by it last week, I gasped and pulled over.
The house was beyond repair.