House of Wonders

There’s a house in Paris where I spent time as a child. It belongs to a friend of my mother’s, an old(er) woman. Maybe she wasn’t so old then, but she always seemed old to me. We would visit for a week or so, once or twice a year, when we lived in France. Her grand old house is one of the places I remember most vividly from my childhood.

Obviously it wasn’t somewhere I spent as much time as, say, my second grade classroom, or the homes of childhood friends. But I remember it in such great detail. It was a house full of wonders, unlike anywhere I think I had ever been. Maybe unlike anywhere I have been even to this day. I don’t know whether these memories stand out because our time in France was so transformative, although the majority of it was not spent in Paris, or because that house so inspired my imagination.

Just as Madame always seemed old, the house always seemed enormous, although it probably wouldn’t seem so now. It wasn’t in the heart of Paris, it was in a quiet suburban, on a tree-lined street. It was surrounded by a wall, and other than a towering apartment building on one side, I don’t know what was behind those walls. They seemed as tall as the great wall of China, but they can’t have been all that high, because I remember once climbing a garden ladder to see over the side where the apartment building was, and exchanging pleasantries with the children on the other side. But until I poked my head over, those walls might as well have been the edges of the world. They were covered with Ivy; the whole house was covered with Ivy.

What I remember most was the garden. High hedges, so dense you couldn’t see through them, but there were small spaces that children could fit through. Behind the hedges for clearings, where we found garden tools and spare lawn furniture, but to us it was a hidden world. A secret garden, as if the secrets in the house weren’t enough.

It was an old house and every single room and object in it was full of wonder to a small child from another country. The floors creaked, the light switches were different than at home, and there were doors everywhere. So many doors. In traditional French fashion, each floor had a main hallway, with many doors leading off it. There were doors between the kitchen and the dining room, the dining room in the living room, the living room in the sitting room. So many doors. So many rooms. Every room was different. They had so many surprises, and year after year, the house continued to surprise us as we discovered secrets previously unknown, rooms previously unplayed in.

There was a room full of collections, seashells, antique lace. There was a room full of antique Chinese furniture. There was a whole room dedicated to sewing, half-finished and half-forgotten projects, upholstery and scraps of material littered throughout, waiting for Madame’s soft, wrinkled hands to pick back up where she left off.

There was a room where the grandchildren stayed when they came to visit, full of toys. I vividly remember a chest full of dress-up clothes, costumes and props. One of the granddaughters was my age, and we dressed up and played in that room for hours.

Different people inhabited some of these rooms over the course of the years we visited. The old women’s niece lived in the back bedroom on the top floor for a while, and later the old woman’s son and his family moved in, taking over the second floor. They installed a sort of gate on the landing, to close off their floor from the rest of the house. My imagination ran wild with what could have been behind that gate.

Even after years and years, that house still feels very real. I’ve tried to find it on Google earth, but I’m afraid it has probably been torn down, turned into a housing development or an apartment building. As if it never existed at all.

The memories still feel just out of reach. I can’t picture the specifics. I remember what the light was like in each room, but I can’t picture the wallpaper. I think I can picture of the outside of the house, but if I were to sit down and draw it, I couldn’t do it. Because I can’t really see it in my mind’s eye, rather, I remember what it was like to stand in the garden and look at it. What that felt like, seeing it for the first time, and how it felt to come back each time. Like coming home. Like greeting an old friend. Even if I could find it, even if I could visit that old house again, I don’t think I would, for fear of overriding those memories, erasing the old and creating memories anew. It would be like erasing a part of myself, a part of my own history.