If These Walls Could Speak

Kulp Family at 544 Melody Lane

**Disclaimer: These are the nostalgic musings of a sentimental Kulp about a home soon to be sold, which may bore and baffle non-Kulp readers.

The unpretentious split level home on Melody Lane is deserving of an epitaph. Ordinarily such eulogizing is reserved for the dead, specifically, dead people. However unorthodox, after almost six decades of faithful structural service to three generations of Kulp descendents, a farewell tribute is (somehow) in order. If the walls could speak they would testify to the loves and losses and lives nurtured and shared and beget within their shelter. History breathes through both its unchanging and organic architecture.

Though ordinary and somewhat provincial in the utilitarian way most post WWII homes were constructed, the lawn –by contrast- was not. My grandfather was incomparably and indefatigably meticulous with his lawn: After carefully mowing it on one exceptional (and privileged) occasion, he arrived to assess my efforts and began to snip at several insubordinate blades… with scissors. His attention to landscaping detail is probably why a former boyfriend’s fateful fall into a celebrated shrub was the kiss of death for our relationship. Moreover, my grandfather mastered the art of enlivening the mundane for the benefit of productivity. Preparing the bird bath stained with avarian poop for spring, gathering fallen, smashed and rotting crab apples and arduously edging sidewalks have never been more thrilling than under his tutelage.

Similarly, my grandmother executed her domestic role with excellence and distinctive dignity- her elegant home, always a sanctuary of saccharine tea, gum drops, porcelain curios, Tasty cakes and the perfume of clean cotton. Her piano proficiency inspired my own, as she patiently indulged my painful practicing on her beautiful baby grand. In the omniscient wisdom of my adolescence, I boldly eschewed her apparent subservience to my grandfather, as she prepared and served him each meal without complaint as an affront to the liberation of women and the 19th amendment. And yet, her daily domestic enterprise and marital devotion, demonstrated more polish and principle and passion than Gloria Steinham could hope to exude in several lifetimes.

I will cherish the indelible memories of raucous holiday dinners followed by a reading from the Psalms, Fourth of July BBQs on a too-small patio, waking up in the stifling attic to my granddad singing hymns while combing over his hair, eating a sacred Pepperidge Farm cookie while collecting my caramel candies “goody bag,” amassing provisions from the cupboard for two weeks at the shore, watching the original Herbie movies in the basement, sharing spaghetti with “spatini” dinners finished by coffee ice-cream topped with fruit, using an antiquated bathroom –practically an outhouse- that I loathed to see updated and sitting around the living room year after year after year sharing laughter with those who loved me back.

Houses like people possess secrets kept and disclosed. The basement bomb shelter and attic-stored albums spoke wordlessly of stories both shared and untold. The front lawn has framed photos capturing memories both forgotten and remembered- faces loved and lost, babies feet now grown old. A home imparts a bit of immortality- Often existing before we arrive and remaining after we have gone. If these walls could speak, they would echo that laughter and love and sorrow and faith of the lives led while they sheltered and that is why to never traverse its threshold again seems a great tragedy to behold.

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