*This giveaway is now closed. Thanks so much for reading and commenting!
Shortly before Michael and I married, his grandmother began to show signs of advanced alzheimer’s disease. Neighbors found her wandering in town wearing her pajamas and slippers with no recollection of how to get home, while simple facts like her children’s names and how to run the dishwasher disappeared from her memory overnight.
She moved into a long-term care facility for her own safety, and her red brick home on Sunny Hill Lane sat empty until someone put two and two together. Michael and I needed a home, and Grandmom’s home needed a family.
We unpacked our honeymoon bags in Grandmom’s bedroom the day we returned. We cooked in her kitchen, ate at her cherry Queen Anne-style dining room table, and lounged across her dull blue, smoke-stained sofas. At twenty-one years old, I stepped out of my childhood bedroom in my parent’s home, and stepped into the life of an eighty-year old woman in a town thirty minutes away.
We were broke of course, and so we lived like an octogenarian for a few years, slowly making improvements to the house without the benefit of a Target or Ikea and their cheap and cheerful sense of style. For the first few years of my marriage, I felt as if I was playing dress up in an unflattering set of elderly clothes. It was bizarre, and I didn’t know how to feel like myself in a home that still held the memories (and the furniture) of the family that came before us.
From every corner of Grandmom’s home, I sensed her deep unhappiness. Her memory loss had been a gift to her in a way, erasing the memories of addiction and strife and infidelity in her marriage. But, the walls in our home still remembered. They held secrets we would never discover.
Our first summer at Sunny Hill, we discovered Grandmom had planted large, heavy-headed hydrangeas in the garden. The following spring a forsythia took us by surprise when it bloomed in the backyard, a bright spot of sunshine just beyond the kitchen windows. As we celebrated our first anniversary, the pink peonies we never knew existed burst from their buds into a flush of soft color. I cut flowers and arranged them into the cut-glass vases given to me at my bridal shower–my one ephemeral contribution to a home that never felt quite like my own.
While the inside of Sunny Hill had aged into a stale, cigarette-stained, dated house, the tiny garden had been tended with some care. At some point in her life, Grandmom discovered beauty and planted it there. Something precious took root. And it grew.
Michael and I eventually renovated every room of the home, and planted our own beauty in the garden to compliment what already existed. We walked through the door one September afternoon with our little girl swaddled in a bundle of blankets printed with tiny pink rosebuds. We stayed, we planted, we rooted. We grew.
Those years still feel like a dream lived inside someone else life. I remember them as if through a film of gossamer. Our next home, in London, belonged to someone else too, but we moved in and made it ours without hesitation. We discovered, as most people do, that our homes shaped us as much as we shaped them.
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My friend Christie Purifoy has written a gorgeous book about place and home, comfort and beauty, and I’d like to share it with you. I haven’t read writing this lovely in a contemporary book in years. Her book, Placemaker, is a work of art, and I’m so pleased to offer readers a copy. To enter this giveaway for one copy of Placemaker, leave a comment below telling me about a place that’s special to you. In a completely un-scientific process, I’ll draw one name to win a copy of Christie’s book on Saturday, March 23rd. (Continental US only, I’m afraid)
If you simply can’t wait, (and you can’t, trust me) order yourself a copy today.
