Chapter I - Going Home

1966

            Julia Adams is on her way home for the first time in many years. There's a nagging voice in the back of her mind that she tries to hush telling her it's probably for the last time. It's this sense of an ending that makes her want to preserve whatever she can by recording it. She's thinking of her brother and sister and their children. She wonders besides if what she intends to set down might provide material for stories she hasn't written yet. These might, in turn, lead to entertainment, if nothing more, for readers who won't know any of the actors.  The notion occurs to her that such narratives might grow like accretions in a stream, taking shapes that look more random than perhaps they are. Like most writers, she's always afraid she'll let an opportunity escape.  As memories unfurl across her mind's eye like the miles on the odometer, she resolves to do her best to preserve them—even those that are incomplete, even with the imagined details there's no way she could have seen at the time.

She has read that the sense of smell is the most effective one for reviving the past. She thinks that soon she'll be able to test that theory. It isn't as if she'd never come back here over the years, but now there seems every likelihood that if Maiden Run is still here in ten years, it will be all but unrecognizable, at least to the Adams family—her brother Tom and Marian and their children, and to her and Eric and their daughter.  As for her sister Estelle, Julia wonders what to expect when she appears among them again. Her affinity for their home place was always ambivalent, and Julia thinks, sometimes seems to be nonexistent.

            A journey like this is fraught with an amorphous burden, not just of the past, but of the unknown.  She recalls Roberts Frost's wonderfully sad and true poem in which he said, Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ they have to take you in.  Like a Jungian memory, that knowledge has persisted with Julia all her life, at least until now, when she recognizes it.

            Eric will be coming by train tomorrow with their daughter, which is why she's alone. She enjoys this brief solitude without guilt, unusual in their increasingly demanding lives. Julia has found the unconscious activity of driving seems to free her mind so it can rove in a way that sometimes even generates insights than she would not recognize with her feet planted on the ground.

            Supermarkets and car dealerships have sprung up along the highway, where once there were only pastures, corn fields, and woodlots.  In the nearly twenty years since she's seen this village, it has become a suburb.  Even though she was prepared for it, the sight disheartens her.  She fears it might be just a foretaste of what the whole family is going to have to adjust to.  Julia is old enough to know how futile resistance to what the world likes to call "progress" is, and she knows that all change isn't necessarily a personal affront to what she treasures, but even so, the unforeseen banality of the roadside view emphasizes her fear that nothing about this visit is likely to be less than painful.

            Julia is concentrating on that fateful summer when she felt as if the farm were being invaded by strangers—strangers who threatened the Adamses because they threatened their home, and by extension, them.  She muses at how often she is amazed at how little people perceive during times when they're most in need of perceptiveness. That summer was a time when so many changes overtook them, they effectively separated the siblings from each other, as well as from Maiden Run. One of the worst parts about this trip is that Julia is wondering if now, at last, they may find some of those rifts will be permanent.

            The real world forces her out of such musings and displaces these notions when she turns off the highway between stone gateposts, one of which bears the farm name on a bronze plaque. The gloss of sunlight on the letters Maiden Run shows how well Tom and Marian keep it polished.  Now, however, she thinks the mile-long drive lined with alternating maples and catalpas no longer seems as wide as it used to.  She drives very slowly until she rounds the last curve that reveals the house.

            Immediately she sees that the huge sugar maple that used to shade the east side of the rose garden is gone. When they were children, they used to soar on the swing that hung from a horizontal branch till they were high enough to catch a glimpse of water in Brave Brook, which runs in a little gully below the garden.  Even the long, low brick house, shaded by shagbark hickories and blue spruces seems to have shrunk.  Julia thinks, Can it really contain the airy rooms I remember?