Owls in the Attic

“Do you see that?” Jules says over her shoulder. She is pointing to a spot on the shore line where an old, tattered Boston whaler is tied up to an equally weathered dock. I dip my paddle into the cloudy water; pulling the canoe another length forward. Jules had stopped paddling a few moments before to squint curiously at the array of houses, cottages, and shacks that were scattered along this particular stretch of coastline. I rest my paddle across my lap; taking a long swig of the tepid beer I had poured into my water bottle before we had set sail. With a sigh, I direct my attention to where Jules is looking. The glare on the water causes me to squint too.

“Is it real?!” She asks excitedly. I stare at the docked boat and realize with a snort of laughter that she is referring to the gaudy, decorative, and obviously plastic great horned owl mounted on the back of the forlorn vessel as a mascot or waterfowl deterrent. I remember that her eyesight has never been 20/20 and take another sip of my beer as the hot July sun beats down on my neck.

It is our semi-irregular annual girl’s trip weekend. Canoeing in the sound had been on the ambitious docket for this afternoon despite a mimosa heavy brunch where we had gorged ourselves with crab cake eggs benedict, oysters, and a smattering of more New England delights. Jules has already started complaining about the effort of canoeing in the somewhat choppy water and I brace myself to be the one to paddle us back to the dock of our overpriced Airbnb cottage. I am getting tired, yearning to return to air-conditioning and refrigerated beverages.

“Maybe!” I say, humoring her with a whiff of sarcasm in my delivery.

Owls have always creeped me out to a certain degree. They were unavoidable in my grandmother’s house, figurines lurking in her dining room hutch and omnisciently peering at me from various perches throughout the rest of the house.

Without warning, I spin into a whirl of recollection and reverie. Smells and sensations flood into my body. I am transported into my grandmother’s attic, exactly five years prior; where I find myself kneeling amongst the staggering stacks of boxes that had gathered as a result of 50 years of human inhabitation. My knees and back are screaming at me, yet I remain planted on the musty tan carpet where I had been sorting through the ruins for nearly two hours. I examine the yellowed face of what I believe to a barn owl, hand painted with oils in a gold frame that I had found in between a box of unfinished latch hook rugs and a stack of long forgotten board games. The thick layer of dust sits heavily on the canvas and a swipe from an already caked cleaning rag reveals the deep blues of a night sky in the background.

No one talks much about the shared human experience of cleaning out the house of a loved one. The aching and homesickness that comes with each picture taken off the wall, and every knick knack that ends up in a donation box because it goes unwanted. The smells are the hardest part, wafting incessantly and evoking recollection of every holiday and sleepover spent in their house. They remind you that yes, you should have come home to visit more. Yes, that regret will haunt you like clockwork every time you smell fresh brewed Maxwell house coffee and birdseed from this moment forward.

I stare at the owl.

It isn’t an extraordinarily fine painting, but I acknowledge in the moment that it is a much better effort than any I could make. I barely make out the name of the artist- “Anne Scheink”. Certainly not my grandmother’s name and certainly not anyone she ever mentioned to me. I wonder how the painting ended up in my grandmother’s possession. It could have been any number of circumstances. Perhaps a gift from someone who knew she collected owl kitsch; or a spontaneous purchase at a craft fair… knowing my grandmother, it wasn’t a circumstance - she was more adventurous or complicated than either of these options.

I find myself starting to cry; a vicarious desire bubbling up inside of me to write a more fantastic and fearless storyline for a woman who I now knew feared most things outside of the one thousand six hundred and forty eight square feet of this house. She had so tightly kept the secret of every unhappy thing that had ever happened to her - so tightly, that her demons didn’t see the light of day until she was dying. They unraveled slowly as the dementia took hold, like the stitches of an ill-knit sweater with a pull. The decline was agonizing. Every shred of strength and self-reliance had faded until she was unrecognizable as the woman I once knew as my grandmother.

Wiping my face with grimy hands I toss the painting towards my “keep” pile, full of random pieces of trash and treasure. Some of these connected me to my childhood, but most would assume to eternally and inadequately encapsulate the memory of who this woman was. I roll off of my knees with a grunt and compel my body to stand, deciding that I need to be done with sorting for the day. I pick up shitty pizza and a six-pack on my way back to the home I grew up in where I am temporarily staying while my grandmother’s house is emptied. Avoiding contact with my parents, I head up to my recently repainted childhood bedroom and eat half the pizza and drink half of the six-pack alone.

“It’s definitely fake.”

Jules’s disappointed remark snaps me out of the tailspin of reminiscence and I become conscious of the fact that I have been holding my beer to my lips for about 2 minutes. The boat with the owl bobs lazily and I am suddenly envigored to continue paddling. As I plunge the paddle back into the water beside me I resolve myself to soak everything about this moment in; the light, the sounds, and the smells. I commit every vivid detail to memory so that one day soon I might catch a breath of this salty air and be swept back to the moment I decided to embrace the story of tenacity I am writing for myself.