You Can Go Home Again — If You Pack Lightly

The little girl who grew up in the city is still a part of me, even though the grown-up woman fled for the country long ago.

My house is in Delaware. My home is on Martha’s Vineyard.

I live in my husband’s house. My dad lives in my house.

If you think that riddle is confusing, I should also tell you that my father’s mother married my mother’s father, making my parents stepsister and stepbrother to each other and my sister and I stepcousins.

Fun, eh? It’s a true story, but my grandparents got together after each had lost their original spouse and after my parents were married. (Just so you know it’s nothing creepy or anything!)

And it really doesn’t have much to do with the subject of home.

Except.

Except in a way, those two grandparents – the only ones I knew – represented the two worlds I inhabited as a child. The first world was northwest Washington, D.C., where my grandfather, Dr. Paul S. Putzki, was a well-known surgeon and where my mother had been brought up in an acutely defined social environment – one specific to the culture of Washington society, with standards and expectations that she carried with her into her marriage and passed along to her daughters.

On the other hand, my grandmother Honey (Elsie Evans) had raised six boys with a Navy engineer who moved the family around a lot and died halfway through the child-rearing, leaving Honey to fend for herself in her husband’s hometown of Lewes, Delaware. She promptly became a realtor, hung a shingle out, and carried on. Life for Honey wasn’t easy before or after he died. But she always had a twinkle in her eye and a tune she was humming. She was a fabulous seat-of-the-pants cook who tossed a glug of 42-percent-butterfat Lewes Dairy cream or a shot of sherry into everything from Sussex County succotash to crab bisque. And my time with her and all my uncles and cousins in the magical backwater that was mid-century Lewes was a balm to the formality of life in D.C.

When Honey married my grandfather (who we called Bum-Bum), she brought joy and levity to his life and he brought her security and companionship. They were an unlikely couple, but it worked and they were very happy.

Bum-Bum and Honey: my mother’s father and my father’s mother, married.

But I can’t say that I ever really reconciled my two worlds like Honey and Bum-Bum did. I chose one, metaphorically, over the other. It was the Lewes of my childhood, catching blue crabs, picking beach plums for jelly, driving with Dad out to Knapp’s farm stand to pick up Silver Queen corn just coming in from the fields. It was banging screen doors and sand on the floors. Phosphorous jellyfish bobbing in the moonlight. Bicycle freedom, comic books, Nancy Drew mysteries picked up second-hand at the antique store on Second Street with my weekly allowance. Supper at Honey’s with all the cousins.

Taken for Honey’s birthday, early ‘70s: The Evans crew, minus a few cousins and Dad’s oldest brother Jack who died in 1942 while serving in the Merchant Marine.

It took me a long time (and a move to Martha’s Vineyard from the Connecticut suburbs of New York City) to honor that choice, to understand that what I wanted was a simpler life with less pretense and more time spent outside.

Of course, I hadn’t even understood that I had a choice – one I could have made all along by clicking my ruby slippers together. When the lightbulb went off (yes, you guessed it, in early sobriety), I began to resent the path I’d been on – and the people who I felt had strapped me to that path. (Couldn’t have been my fault, right?!)

The early-sobriety Susie all but rejected the tremendous gifts – the opportunities, the education, the art, the culture, the life skills – she’d been given, growing up in Washington. Gifts from a father who worked hard to provide for his family in a way he could be proud of, and gifts from a mother who felt strongly about traditions (and, okay, appearances). I nearly threw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is what happens when gratitude is in short supply – resentments reign. But as time (and sobriety) tick along, and you have those moments when you are flooded with gratitude, resentments recede.

This week my gratitude synapses have been firing away. First, because we are visiting my father in Delaware, and I am hyper-aware of my good fortune in still having him in my life. He is 92, turning 93 in July. He is a dear, kind, smart person. He’s an excellent cook, a loving caretaker of Shortie the poodle, and the man who’s completely redone the landscaping around this house. (Yes, he does, in fact, live in the little house I bought in 2017 when I discovered I was priced out of the market on the Vineyard.) He’s outlived all his brothers and is the sole keeper of family history. He’s a treasure.

I am doubly grateful because my sister retired from her job in Washington and bought a house right down the street from Dad. I love that I get to see her more often – and that she and Dad have each other. (My mother died in 2018.)

My second burst of gratitude came from a quick jaunt my husband and I took this week over to Washington, D.C.  I wanted to show my husband my “hometown” through my eyes. We decided to stay downtown and visit museums for one day and then head up Massachusetts Avenue to the Northwest neighborhood I grew up in the next day.

I am not sure what I expected. We planned the getaway so spontaneously that I didn’t have time to wonder what it would feel like to be back in the thick of it.

As it happened, it wasn’t the nostalgia that got me, though I felt it everywhere and more intensely than I’d have predicted. Standing in the National Air and Space Museum under aircraft hung from the ceiling, I remembered singing in a Christmas concert with my school glee club in that very spot. Walking across the mall, I thought of the countless times my sister (seven years older and often stuck with me) entertained me by taking me to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. And the time she took me to the top of the Washington Monument and the wind was so strong that we could feel the structure sway.  

And I thought of my mother, who had a keen interest in modern art (Frank Stella, Josef Albers, David Hockney) and decided to pass it along to me by taking me to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden nearly every school vacation. There were plays and concerts at the Kennedy Center, too.

“How is it that I’m not thankful for this every day?” I began to think. No, it wasn’t the nostalgia that got me – for that would have meant a longing for something that was no more. Instead it was the realization that I carry a part of this city with me always. And how incredible is that?

And it’s a beautiful, beautiful city.

As we drove up Massachusetts Avenue the next day, along Embassy Row, past the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Vice President’s residence, past the soaring Washington National Cathedral and around Tenley Circle past American University, my husband kept commenting on the architecture, the parks, the hills, the trees. The lack of skyscrapers. The magnolias in bloom. The cherry blossoms just beginning to pop.

On our tour, we stopped at my mother’s childhood home on Garfield Street in Wesley Heights, a big stone house my grandfather moved his family to from Q street in 1932, the year my mother was born. In those days, it was a move to “the country,” though still within the District of Columbia. We peered over the ivy-drenched walls to see what the gardens looked like – overgrown, and de-imagined, I’d say, with a pool and a pool house where dogwoods and azaleas and bee hives once were.

My mother (right) with her sister Anne in the garden at Garfield Street.

I looked up at the row of dormers across the third story – my mother’s hideout. Even when her sisters left, she didn’t want to move down to a second-floor bedroom. I picture her up there, goofing around with friends after a basketball game (she was the star of her team), talking about boys and movies and school.

The night Mom delivered me at the Columbia Hospital for Women.

The thing about Washington for me is that my mother is everywhere. It was her town, and she loved it fiercely.

On this visit, I realized, with a mix of relief and acceptance, that I’ve always conflated the city of Washington with the pressures I felt in high school, with the social stimulation that I just wasn’t built for, and most especially with the friction I had with my mother as a teenager. I left Washington because that friction was too painful for me. It wasn’t the city’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. And it was okay to go. And coming back this week felt like a way to celebrate my mother, to remember how her love of the city radiated from her. And yes, to feel a little closer to her. In a strange way, the gratitude that snuck up on me helped put the eraser to some of the smudges of resentment - and regret - I apparently still harbor.

I did not feel like a stranger in Washington on this trip. It hasn’t been my home for a long time, but it will always be the place I sprang from. I’ve found my “Lewes” life on Martha’s Vineyard – a life most conducive to serenity for me. But I’m learning that defining home as a single place is a slippery concept. These days, home is where my husband and my dog and my Dad and my sister are, wherever that is and whenever we can all be together. 

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Top photo by Shelley Langston.