Last week you read an article by Susan Bono on the personal essay–writing them, teaching them, and starting a magazine for publishing them.  This week’s article is a personal essay by Susan Bono, which appears in the anthology Saltwater, Sweetwater–Women Write from California‘s North Coast, Floreant Press, 1997.  You will see why this essay, rich in details and history of place, fits in such an anthology.

In Passing
by Susan Bono

I live in a house where ghosts wander. At night they slip light-footed down the narrow hall, pause silhouetted for a heartbeat in my bedroom doorway. I have given up being frightened by the weight of an unseen companion settling into bed beside me, or the jolt of an invisible cat springing onto the covers by my feet. I now regale listeners with the tale of three shy ladies in long skirts peering from a corner, or the spirit so enamored of the guy who refinished the hardwood floors it rode around in his truck for a few days. My stories never fail to elicit shudders from my audience and variations on the question, “How do you stand it?”

The truth is, I don’t really know, except that I love my house in spite of the occasional disruptions. Besides, these phantoms do not occupy space needed by my family. They exist along the edges of vision, tangled among the shadows near the ceiling, rovers in that unsettled realm between wakefulness and sleep. Over the last fifteen years, guests who have reported drafts, the sensation of being watched, even apparitions, have rarely been upset by their experiences. This otherworldly element seems as much a part of our house as the breeze ringing the wind chimes in the camellia bush, or the fog that chills so many summer mornings. Only the continually shifting identities of these visitors have ever really bothered me. Because everyone’s impressions remain so varied, I am led to believe no one group of spirits occupies this household. It feels more like a crowd passing through.

But we are only the third family to live in this house since its construction in 1939. No sordid tragedies have taken place under this roof. While it’s true that in the 1970s one of the original owners expired in the bathtub, that hardly seems to account for the wide assortment of characters who have been inclined to put in appearances: the young woman in a neat jacket climbing the front steps, the elderly couple hovering at the foot of our bed, a huge snake twitching its way across the kitchen floor.

 It is not the proper house for long-term ghosts, anyway. It is neither grand, gloomy, nor darkly isolated. All day long, the sun turns its slow clock beyond our yellow walls, delivering light at timely intervals through our many windows. The wind, funneled off the whitecaps of Bodega Bay twenty-five miles away, swirls in under the open sashes and dances in buoyant circles. Nothing can lurk here with a real cat prowling and phones ringing and boys dumping ever-bigger shoes and dirty socks in corners. For a time, an unaccountable mustiness persisted in the back bedroom, but it disappeared a few months after the arrival of our youngest son. I had the feeling my baby’s colicky tantrums simply wore out whatever it was. The others only seem to be stopping by for a moment on their way to somewhere else.

These encounters have prompted me to investigate the history of the land itself. The town of Petaluma took its name from a tribe of the Coast Miwoks, who occupied this area for at least ten thousand years. The current population pays little attention to the Miwoks, focusing instead on history that begins with the Spanish ranchers and mission-builders. But my neighbor’s children have reported seeing silent, dark-haired men dressed in skins on the bluffs behind their house. Before roofs and trees obscured the view from what is now Wallace Court, who might have roamed the hill on which our house is situated?

I think of other places those first people walked. A few miles west is the settlement of Two Rock, named for the stone gateway the tribes passed through on their migrations between the Petaluma River and Bodega Bay. Our nearest cross street, Bodega Avenue, often takes me past this landmark, which looks like the broken-off feet of a petrified giant. I try to imagine the land before ranches and asphalt every time I drive by. Certain curves of the blacktop were determined by those who erected the barns and fences, cleared brush, and established eucalyptus, but our main road to the coast must have been built over a much older highway.

Oak Hill Park, which butts up against the houses on our cul-de-sac, was Petaluma’s first burying ground. The city never officially annexed it, but before 1866, more than one hundred pioneers were interred there. Settlers often disposed of their dead in ground already sanctified by Native Americans, which may explain why the early townsfolk planted their loved ones among the trees at the top of our steep street. Later, the unprotesting residents of Oak Hill were relocated, but traces of the old graveyard remain. Friends who lived in a turn-of-the-century house bordering the park found bones in their basement. The entire northern slope retains the hushed feel of a necropolis, and seems to resist anyone’s efforts to turn it into something different. Some things may want to stay buried.

It seems possible that my family is living near real estate originally intended as a portal between this world and the next, a place that still carries some echo of that purpose, no matter what has been layered over it. While the boundary separating us from the dead may be a membrane that can be permeated at any point, we have heard so often of gateways, tunnels, bridges, fords. Just as roads often evolve from footpaths worn into the land, so, perhaps, are the pathways to heaven made. If the patterned carpets in our house have begun to show wear after only a few years of our family’s wanderings, surely the feet of the dead have smoothed their own trails over time. In charts not accessible to the living, Oak Hill might still be considered a point of departure, with our house right on the established route. When the time for this particular journey comes, who would not choose a well-marked way? Residents of any area learn which back roads and side streets make the best short cuts. The sky seems closer here than in the newer cemetery on the north end of town. For those locals impatient to get on to the next piece of business, our hill might continue to provide the best connection.

I ponder such connections whenever I visit the Bloomfield Cemetery, out past the twin boulders at Two Rock. The hill on which it perches may well have provided another vantage point for the long-vanished Miwoks, and is brushed by those same winds which toss the treetops on Oak Hill. From the western edge of the graveyard, the earth falls away under a vaulted dome that seems to hold an entrance to heaven. “There’s a land that’s fairer than day,” say some of the tombstones poking from clumps of wild grasses. It was a common enough sentiment among the Victorians, but here it is as if they had been gazing through a doorway into that dreamed-of landscape. The seabreeze creates updrafts that could lift souls like kites, and set free those not tethered by a loved one’s grief. Even the secretive little town tucked at the foot of the burying ground holds the stillness of the next world. There have been no recent burials here, as far as I can tell, which seems a waste of such a lovely jumping-off place. Nevertheless, what remains under the chiseled monuments maintains a link between this world and the next. And perhaps, as in the case of Oak Hill, there are some who still take advantage of its function.

At the nearby Tomales Catholic Cemetery, behind a modern cinderblock chapel, the old graveyard opens like a book whose covers have been forced apart by the wind. While the graves themselves remain anchored to the tilting hillside, old sorrows have been blown from between the fluttering pages, like so many pressed flowers and tokens. I have stretched out on the cement over a plot to let the sun warm my living bones and to remember that no sadness lasts forever. I have run my fingers over the inscription, “All flesh is as grass,” while sheep cropped the green of the adjacent pasture.

I come to places like these with my camera, peering through the viewfinder at the smooth, bare arms of statues, the folds of stone draperies, those naked marble feet. Stalking these figures for their most expressive angles, I often feel a gathering stir just beyond my range of vision, hear rustling that might not be the wind or a lizard in the weeds. “Show me,” I whisper, as the shutter clicks. Nothing untoward ever slides from the shade of trees or gravestones, no extra radiance is translated onto my negatives. The barrier between worlds remains fixed, but I like to imagine those on the other side stepping a little closer, curious as to my doings. I arrive with picnics, much as people of the last century did, to keep company with my own mortality. When my eyes follow the direction of carved hands pointing skyward, I am studying a map I may one day follow home.

Perhaps that journey will require me to pass through a house not unlike the one I live in now, a place unwittingly built in the middle of an unseen thoroughfare. I may become the musty draft that rattles a cupboard in a closed room, or the dark shape darting through a doorway. And if I am not quite ready to cross the threshold into the next world, I might linger there awhile, breathing in the milky perfume of a baby’s blankets, trying to mold the form I’ve become to fit the shape of a bed or chair. I would never think to do any harm. I might even be surprised to see terror in a resident’s face if I tried to whisper some last message, forgetting, as I shed the burdens of my former life, how such visits once frightened me. I might try to tell that person not to be afraid; I am only passing through.