all good ghosts here

margaret redmond whitehead

All houses have ghosts. 

The one we buy is a two-story building, teal and coral pink, with white gingerbread eaves. It has a tall privet hedge that feels like it can shield me. To the left of the front door is a wooden plaque naming its year of birth: 1889. It is a house anchored in history, so stable that when I stand on its wooden floors, my heels root deep into the earth. 

When my wife, Sara, and I first visit the house, we step through the threshold and I know its smell. As we move further inside, I recognize more of it: There is my stovetop espresso maker; there is a wall print of the activist whose autobiography is in my bag; there are books I want to read and books I’ve read; there on the kitchen counter are the cookbooks we used to teach ourselves to cook. When I open the door to the back vestibule and see dozens of dried garlic bulbs hanging from the walls, the recognition changes. From then on, as we tour the house, instead of seeing myself as I am, I start seeing myself in the future. The historic house holds the magic of time travel. 

There are also the things I don’t see. There’s no nursery or children’s rooms. No dresser surface, bathroom shelf, or closet rack holds things I wouldn’t use. It takes me until that evening to guess that no men live there. “Well,” I joke, as the notion solidifies that we are buying a house from a queer couple, “At least we know it doesn’t have any homophobic ghosts.”

I’ve never felt interested before in the people who came before me in places I’ve lived, but it means something this time, that we’re inheriting a queer space. There is no ground to break. Instead of trying to make a place our own, we would be building upon something that was already there. 

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be part of the queer history of a building; to move into a queer space. There are the small things it means: The straight neighbors pre-accustomed to your existence, when your last neighbors called you sisters. The feeling of a building already amenable and welcoming to you, ready for you. The  absence of phantom presences otherwise encountered in the day-to-day textures of the floors and walls, which by their existence alone might threaten to remind you that heteronormativity cloyingly defines ideas of home and family. There’s no space for that bullshit. All good ghosts here. 

In that release and freeing, though, there is something else. There is stepping into a space you already fit into and finding that you do not need to fit it to yourself, but that, in fact, there is room to stretch and grow. 

Queer spaces have frequently been public spaces—clubs, back rooms, bathrooms, parks, and cruising spots—their transience defining them as much as their legacies. And yet private spaces, as well, have long provided safe or relatively safe queer space. The hedge is a shield and the walls are armor. What I had never before fathomed is a space that is both: A space that could come with queer legacy, and which could shelter me as a home. 

I’m not someone who always dreamed of a space of my own. My dream was always a shared space, a house full of people who move easily around one another: Community that behaves like family. As soon as I could name this desire, I started collecting within the trope. I read books about perilously tight-knit housemates and listened to songs about houses and the people who fill them. In my favorite set of house-related lyrics, the narrator returns to a derelict family home covered in trash and graffiti, wind-beaten and sun-faded, and sets about trying to make right only to find in the seven long mysterious years he’s been gone, the lilac bush in the patio has flourished, alone. He doesn’t mind the litter or the vandalism—I use those words too—but the thought of the lilac bush meeting its doom is too much: 

I could not stand to see it die; 

Let the lilac bush live on!

Saving the house, in a way, revolves around the lilac bush, this single living thing that has altered the house beyond what its owners ever meant it to, growing beyond its sanction, so big and so fruitful and strong, changing the composition of the house more profoundly than garbage or spray paint ever could. In returning to the house, the singer isn’t just trying to restore it—he wants to protect some of the new aesthetic it’s taken on. It is better in some way, more suited to him, because of this unlikely squatter. He will scrub the graffiti off the doors, restore the panes and fortify the walls—This poor old house is in decline / I hope we got to it in time—but the wildness of the lilac bush indicates a trajectory other than intact-in disrepair-restored; it suggests something less circular and more linear, a growth of the house from its previous self to something not just restored but improved, built upon, the sweet pungency of the feral porch flora transcending the house to something more than a house, something like a holy artistic sanctuary. Let the lilac bush live on!

A house, and its bidden and unbidden parts, the intentional shingles and unexpected lilac bush, can collaborate with its inhabitants. The structure in which I live provides unmoving beams to hammer into, and walls to paint and floors to scratch or buff. The ground it stands on collaborated with the owners before us—we call them “Elinjay,” a meshing of their initials—as they weeded the garden beds and wove a grape vine into an arbor and laid beneath it stone slabs that came from the floor of the sea. It held their paint. Its walls absorbed layers of their cooking grease. Shelves bear the rings of their essential oil bottles. 

Sara theorizes that at some point, an owner of our house before Elinjay took steps towards modernizing it, and that in the seven years Elinjay lived here, they steadily worked to reclaim its true form—return it to its lilac-wild oldness. On top of restoration they were bold with colors: lavender, coral, dark brown, and peach. The living room wallpaper is bronzy damask, and it is a little bit shiny. But we don’t want to erase the previous owners just yet. Instead we layer ourselves over them, our existence more like a geological era than an imagined present-permanence. We hang my grandfather’s carpentry tools to their wallpaper; I buy a bolt of hemp weave fabric, as clean and simple as muslin but which presses as eagerly as linen, and sew curtains for the house. Elinjay’s geological era was defined by bright paint and patterns; ours is the age of earth-things, rusting metal, woven plant-matter, and recovered wood. 

In seven long mysterious years, things can alter a house that deserve more than a blink of notice. Some living things transform a space in ways that change its composition and meaning, and render their legacies deserving of preservation. Let the lilac bush live on! There are acknowledgements we must make to the unwieldy, unconforming entities that shape the spaces we inhabit. 

At first, Sara and I don’t trust ourselves not to fuck anything up, but as we gain confidence we make small changes: We repaint the porch; Sara takes down the ripped plastic blinds and I sew new curtains; I sand and varnish the bare trim in the tiny house; we strip textured beige wallpaper from the bedroom and paint it a stormy grey. To Elinjay’s outbursts of color and pattern I add simplicity in the soft and the hard: draped fabric and rusting metal. In thinking forward, I try to envision the house without them, but it’s hard to separate the two. It seems more apt to imagine a trajectory of layering artistic sensibilities, the space they forged and the parts of ourselves we brought in through its doors. 

In the heat of summer, I pay a man from the internet to dump a cord and a half of firewood through the back gate. I spend the day out back, hands sweating in my rubber-coated gloves, stacking the wood log by log across four pallets in the pole barn. I blare Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. At lunch I take a work call about an editing job but the whole time I’m on the phone my arms are itching for the weight of a few logs. When I tell my cousin I’m having a blast stacking wood, he cracks a laugh: finicky work with a bunch of tree pieces—of course. I’m as delighted as he is at this revelation. 

In the end, the forsythias show up first, flowering bright tiny specks of yellow along the fence. Then comes the asparagus, and the grasses and the trees and the hedge-walls fill out with green. When the pond thaws, we discover three goldfish paddling around in the murk. The strawberries fatten until we pluck and eat them. The azalea blooms and then the rhododendrons. The sweet fern and hostas uncoil. The champagne currants and gooseberries turn up, then the raspberries between thorns and white mulberries hanging from branches. The sea kale, sorrel, and comfrey spread themselves out across garden beds. The walking onions grow until they are too heavy to hold up their own heads. The arbor vines sink under the weight of the grapes. We make cake from the currants and we sauté the asparagus; we make jelly out of the grapes they planted.

With the yard’s steady unfurling, I keep thinking that I never would have known how to design a garden to suit my sense of beauty exactly, but that this is it. I find it remarkable that I didn’t have to make a place from scratch where I feel at home. Some aesthetic part of me was already here. 

It is an incredible thing to get to know the ghosts of a place and find that, in many ways, they are you. Parts of you that you haven’t yet found and named.  

A year in, Sara arranges for a call with the previous owner to learn about the garden. She walks around the yard with her phone, holding it up so Elinjay can explain to us what we’re seeing. I take notes on a paper garden map I’ve made. “Forgiving,” I write next to the blueberries, hoping I’ll be able to decipher the notes later. “Lingonberries: living mulch.” “Concord grape arbor: planted 2012.” “No man’s land.” “Weed tree.” “Seaberry tree. RIP.”

At the peach tree, a hip-high, scrawny little branch of a plant, Elinjay pauses and gives a little sigh. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “That tree has never been happy there.” It might be all the shade it gets from the neighbor’s cherry tree, or any other of dozens of factors. It has a couple dozen dark green leaves and a bent to it like something’s drawing it nearer to hear a secret, or maybe drawing it down to the ground. 

“We were thinking about moving it to the other side of the tiny house,” I say, anxious about mentioning changing a garden with the person who made it, “So it could get more sun.”

Elinjay clearly doesn’t share our vision of torch-passing. “You can do whatever you want with it,” she says later, of the garden. “It’s yours.”

In the warmth of the second November we gear up, armed with web research and shovels and a tarp. We are prepared to unearth a substantial root ball, but the peach tree comes out of the ground as easily, as untethered to its prior soil as though it had been growing from a slope of ever-shifting scree. As the light of late fall dims across the yard, we transplant the peach tree to a spot in the sun. 

about the artist

Margaret Redmond Whitehead's work has appeared in publications including the Atavist Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Millions, and Transition. She was a 2017 Literary Journalism Fellow at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Fellow in Nonfiction. Read more at www.MargRedWhite.com or find her on Twitter @margredwhite.