When guest judge Anna Quinn selected Sindee Ernst’s essay as our Winter No-Contest Contest winner, she wrote, “A wonderful piece. Writer uses specific sensory detail beautifully to evoke feelings of leaving one’s childhood home and discovering another. Strong ending.”

Sindee wrote back:
Thank you so much for this great news. I enjoyed working on that essay. I experienced what a difference it makes to be committed to the practice of writing. I have written about that house so many times, and somehow the bits and pieces came together in this one.

In response to the invitation to do a freewrite on a phrase you hear on the radio, tv, or in conversation, or one you read somewhere I began with words from an NPR interview, “There was nothing I could do to save Alden.” This phrase brought me to memories of the house I couldn’t “save,” and wondering about the deeper meaning of that time in my life. I found I could bring together pieces from my earlier writing practice. As the essay evolved, the idea of saving something fell away. It was hard to let go of this idea, as it had inspired the whole piece. One of the last sentences I chose to delete was a reference to wanting to save that time in my life. Writing the essay from a freewrite required me to use the original concept to allow the most meaningful theme to emerge.

Here is the first draft Sindee sent in:

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There Was Nothing I Could Do to Save Alden.

There was nothing I could do to save the house. It was sold. We were moving. A girl named Amanda who had thick long brown hair and was a year younger than me was moving in. To my house. I hated her. She was going to have my teachers and my neighbors – the girls I had played with every day after school for five years – and my space trolley. The one my dad put up for my sister and me. He even built a little wooden platform with a three-step ladder for us to climb on so the two thin trolley wires could be higher off the ground and our flying-across-the-lawn ride would really depend on our strength. Sometimes I sat on one of the two wooden bars that hung from the wires, not willing to risk the sharp jolt of landing on the grass from a few feet in the air.

Now it would all belong to Amanda.

I didn’t want her to get my pink-carpeted room. I didn’t want her to have any of the rooms. Not the big friendly kitchen that my mother had designed, or the slate floors in the dining room. I didn’t want her to have views into the trees from every room in the house, through large plate glass windows that my mother complained made the house drafty. I didn’t want to have to imagine some other family living in my house in the woods. I didn’t want to have to leave my life behind, all of the years held in those walls.

There was nothing I could do to save the house. I “adjusted” and started Junior High school. Life went on. New school, new friends, new town. New life.

I didn’t forget that house. I dream about that house. I have always dreamed about it. At age ten, as a teenager, in college, as a fifty-something-year-old. That is the house that comes to me in my dreams, the only dream that arrives with any consistency, always permeated with a sense that I have been there before. Not just in real life, but in my dream world.

In my dreams I walk its halls and it is as if I am underwater and the air in the house is what touches my skin. I am immersed in familiarity and belonging – no matter what it looks like. Usually the new owners have changed it. No more white walls but bright blues and yellows. More bedrooms. Additions. Everything in the wrong place. That is what happens in my dreams and still I know it is my house. The one we left. The one I couldn’t take with me. The one I couldn’t save. Only now I wonder if the thing I was trying to save was myself.

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I sent back with my responses inserted into the text:

There was nothing I could do to save the house. It was sold. We were moving. A girl named Amanda who had thick long brown hair and was a year younger than me was moving in. To my house. I hated her. She was going to have my teachers and my neighbors — the girls I had played with every day after school for five years — and my space trolley. The one my dad put up for my sister and me. He even built a little wooden platform with a three-step ladder for us to climb on so the two thin trolley wires could be higher off the ground and our flying-across-the-lawn ride would really depend on our strength. Sometimes I sat on one of the two wooden bars that hung from the wires, not willing to risk the sharp jolt of landing on the grass from a few feet in the air. THIS IS A WONDERFUL OPENING PARAGRAPH. THE FIRST SENTENCE PROVIDES A GREAT HOOK FOR THE READER AND THEN THE LIST OF THINGS AMANDA WILL HAVE NOW MAKES US FEEL THE YOUNG SPEAKER’S ANGER AT HAVING TO LEAVE A HOME AND NEIGHBORHOOD SHE ENJOYED. IT LETS US KNOW THERE WAS FAMILY INTERACTION, GOOD FRIENDS, AND MORE.

HERE I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT BEING IN THAT SPACETROLLEY AND ABOUT THE LITTLE GIRL’S RELATIONSHIP TO HER FATHER AND SISTER.

Now it would all belong to Amanda. I THINK I KNOW THIS ALREADY. SO NO NEED TO REPEAT HERE.

I didn’t want her AMANDA to get my pink-carpeted room. HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO KNOW IF THE SPEAKER HAD EVER MET OR SEEN THE LITTLE GIRL WHO WOULD HAVE ALL THAT SHE LOVED ABOUT THE HOUSE. I’D LIKE A DESCRIPTION OR AT LEAST ONE OF HOW THE SPEAKER IMAGINED THE LITTLE GIRL CALLED AMANDA. DID HER PARENTS TELL HER ABOUT HER? WHAT DID THEY SAY? I didn’t want her to have any of the rooms. Not the big friendly kitchen that my mother had designed, or the slate floors in the dining room. I didn’t want her to have views into the trees from every room in the house, through large plate glass windows that my mother complained made the house drafty. I didn’t want to have to imagine some other family living in my house in the woods. I didn’t want to have to leave my life behind, all of the years held in those walls.

There was nothing I could do to save the house. I’D SKIP THE REPEATING SENTENCE AND JUMP TO “WE MOVED” BECAUSE IT MAKES US JUMP FORWARD AND CAPTURE THE VERY FEELING THE SPEAKER MUST HAVE FELT. We moved. I THINK HERE WOULD BE A GOOD PLACE TO TELL THE READER WHY THE PARENTS WANTED/NEEDED T MOVE. I “adjusted” and started Junior High school. I’D LOVE SOME DETAIL HERE. Life went on. AND A LITTLE MORE DETAIL HERE. New school, new friends, new town. New life. BUT WAS IT? WAS THERE SOMETHING UNSETTLING THE SPEAKER BROUGHT FROM THE OLD LIFE–I ASK BECAUSE OF THE ENDING ABOUT WANTING TO SAVE HERSELF.

I didn’t forget that house. I dream about that house. I have always dreamed about it. At age ten, as a teenager, in college, as a fifty-something-year-old. That is the house that comes to me in my dreams, the only dream that arrives with any consistency, always permeated with a sense that I have been there before. Not just in real life, but in my dream world. I’D LOVE TO READ THE DETAILS OF THAT FEELING OF BEING THERE BEFORE YOU REALLY LIVED THERE.

In my dreams I walk its halls and it is as if I am underwater and the air in the house is what touches my skin. I am immersed in familiarity and belonging — no matter what it looks like. I AM NOT SURE HOW FAMILIARITY AND BELONGING LOOK LIKE BEING UNDER WATER. Usually the new owners have changed it. No more white walls but bright blues and yellows. More bedrooms. Additions. Everything in the wrong place. That is what happens in my dreams and still I know it is my house. The one we left. The one I couldn’t take with me. The one I couldn’t save. Only now I wonder if the thing I was trying to save was myself. THIS LAST LINE COMES AS A SURPRISE. THAT’S WHY I ASKED ABOVE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE BROUGHT FROM THE OTHER LIFE INTO THE NEW LIFE, SOMETHING MAYBE YOU DIDN’T WANT. OR, MAYBE IT IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAT CAUSES YOU TO SAY YOU MIGHT BE TRYING TO SAVE YOURSELF WITH THAT DREAM. IF SO, WRITE ABOUT IT, BUT I THINK LAYING SOME FOOTPRINTS ABOUT THIS PART OF YOURSELF SOMEWHERE EARLIER (DID THE ADJUSTMENT TO THE NEW SCHOOL GO ALL THAT WELL? DID ANYTHING IN YOUR FAMILY LIFE CHANGE ONCE YOU WERE ALL IN THAT NEW HOUSE? WHATEVER OF THIS IS IMPORTANT TO THE ESSAY WILL HELP MAKE THE ESSAY SATISFYING AS IT REACHES AN ANSWER. YOU HAVE CREATED A RICH MATRIX AND AN ENGAGING DRAFT. KEEP WORKING ON IT AND RE-ENTER BY JANUARY 15TH!

Sindee rewrote her essay, and said, “I had fun working on this and considering your comments. It has changed a lot, even the first prompt-inspired sentence, yet I think it retains the experience that touched me in responding to the prompt”.

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In the Fragments
by Sindee Ernst

There was nothing I could do. The house was being sold. We were leaving. An eleven-year-old girl named Amanda was moving in. To my house. I hated her. She was a year younger than I was and she was going to go to the Brooks School and have history with Mr. Rigelhaupt and play with my next door neighbor Joanie — the girl I had played with every day after school for seven years. Most of all she was going to get my space trolley; the one my dad put up for Andrea and me. He even built a little wooden platform with a three-step ladder for us to climb so the two thin trolley wires could be higher off the ground for our flying-across-the-lawn ride. We hung from a wooden bar, jumped off the platform, and rode all the way to a tree at the other end of the wires. Kicking the tree energized the return trip — the challenge was to make it all the way back to the platform. Sometimes I sat on the wooden bar, not willing to risk the sharp jolt of landing on the grass from a few feet in the air if my arms gave out.

My sister and I didn’t get along very well, but the space trolley helped. The ride was so much better when you had someone to push you off the platform. I never tired of the rushing sensation — the air on my face, my hair whipped into my mouth, the elongated look of the grass blades below. And the sound. It was a metallic song of metal wheels against metal wires in the contraption above my head.

Even though nobody said it out loud, I knew there would be no space trolley at our new house. Amanda would get it all.

I only met Amanda once, the day her parents brought her to see “her” house. At first sight she seemed like someone I might want as a friend. She had brown eyes and long hair pulled back with a black plastic headband. My mother wouldn’t let me grow my hair long and I had to wear bright colored stretchy headbands. Amanda was nice enough until I watched her fall in love. I saw it in those brown eyes. They really did get bigger and brighter as she walked through the house. Then our parents sent us outside to play in the yard. She looked right at me and said, “I didn’t want to move until I saw this house, but now it’s okay.”

I didn’t want Amanda and her long thick brown hair to have my house. I didn’t want her to have my pink-carpeted room. I didn’t want her to have any of the rooms. Not the big friendly kitchen my mother had designed, or the slate floors in the dining room. I didn’t want her to look into the trees through our large plate glass windows with the views that brought the outside in. I didn’t want to imagine her family living in my house.

But my mother was tired of the drafty plate glass windows. She wanted her children away from the isolated woods of our neighborhood. She wanted us to be able to go places on our own as we entered junior high and high school and to have other Jewish children in our classrooms. Even though we weren’t religious and would never join it, our new town had a temple, and we would be able to walk to school.

If there were discussions about this decision I never heard them. But I knew my mother had won something. Because I understood that my father loved the house, too. It was there in the way he paced through the rooms, the way his fingers sometimes traced the walls as he walked. And it was in all the things he had made for the house — lamps, built-in cabinets, his desk. I knew, because sometimes I sat on the floor in his garage workshop and played with the sawdust while he worked.

I would be leaving that sawdust behind, and the Saturdays in the summer when my father cut the lawn with the electric mower. Some days he let me mow a few long swaths of grass. He stood at the edge of the lawn with a slight grin as I leaned against the mower, using all of my weight to push it along. I was petrified of the bright orange cord that ran from the mower to the garage; haunted by images of running over the cord, fireworks of sparks, my body lying immobile on the moist green grass.

Now that lawn would belong to Amanda, and Joanie and Amanda would play together after school. They would search for four leaf clovers, their fingers slipping through the grass as if it was the coat of some magical animal. And they would crunch leaves on purpose as they walked in the woods, or try to take steps without making a sound, like Indians. They would find pink Lady Slippers and sit next to them, tracing the delicate lobes with their eyes. They might even scrape moss off of stones, hoping to keep it alive in their rooms.

Even Joanie didn’t know I searched for robin eggs when we were in the woods. I only ever found pieces of their smooth pale blue shells. I saved them in a small white gift box and sometimes when I was alone in my room I tried to fit them back together. I longed to find a whole egg, to hold it solidly in my hand.

It was not only the house I would be leaving, but my school too, and my just-finished sixth grade year. In sixth grade, I had stopped wearing glasses. I began wearing contact lenses instead, and Alexa Williams had told me that white ankle socks and tie shoes weren’t cool so I got loafers and found a whole big group of friends. I felt like I had just been born, and now I was being dragged away.

In late August, the large silver moving van made loud grinding sounds as it struggled to get up our steep, winding driveway. Tables and beds and couches and chairs and piles of cardboard boxes labeled with thick black magic marker were loaded into the van. These things traveled to our new house in the next town over; just twenty minutes away.

In September I started the seventh grade. I dreaded it. I had never started a year of school without already knowing everyone in my class.

But the kids at my new school didn’t realize I had once been that kid with the pointy glasses and white ankle socks — they liked me right away. I made a best friend on the first day. She sat next to me in homeroom and her name was Cathy. I didn’t have woods around me, but I could walk to school and downtown by myself. There were kids my age in the houses all around me; I didn’t have to play with Joanie every day. There was no space trolley but there were trees to climb — a weeping willow right in the center of our circular driveway, and the large beech tree at Roger’s house across the street. Tree climbing gave me a different sensation of being in the air and floating above the world.

In my new life the world got bigger. In the hallways kids whispered about older brothers and neighbors who were being sent to Vietnam. At my last school we had only studied old science, like the life story of Sir Isaac Newton or how electricity was discovered. But in my new science class we learned how pollution was destroying streams and killing animals. I started listening to the radio and buying my own record albums. No more silly songs about courting frogs. I found real love songs and protest songs and I discovered Simon and Garfunkel’s harmonies and Phil Ochs’ messages of peace. And I began to understand that there were secrets all around me. When Joey Lenox showed up at school with a black eye, I knew he had not fallen down by accident. When Fred Chu shaved his head bald, I understood that it wasn’t his choice, and every time I saw his father I wondered what had really happened.

This new world was my space trolley ride, and I grabbed on with both hands. After school I walked with my friends to Brigham’s at the center of town. We sat at the Formica counter and I ordered french fries and raspberry lime-rickies. I no longer needed rides from my mother because I rode my bicycle wherever I wanted to go. I discovered the bus that would take me to Harvard Square on the weekends so I could go shopping at the Harvard Coop and attend folk music concerts at Club Passim. Passim’s had bright colored tables for two all the way up to the small elevated platform that separated the musicians from the audience. Michael Cooney was my favorite and my best and friend and I always tried to sit right up front so we could watch his fingers dance on his banjo and concertina.

When I graduated from high school the bicycle rides and buses to Harvard Square became airplane flights and road trips. I went to college in Ohio, worked in Washington DC, traveled in Europe and Nepal, always returning to New England in between. Until I got married. Then I moved to Baltimore where I settled, had children, and lived in one house for two decades.

During a visit back to Massachusetts, 25 years after I left, I found myself driving along the streets of my childhood town. I steered the car along the narrow two-lane roads that curved through woods, passing ponds and crumbling stone walls. I wanted to see and feel the place that had once seemed so lost to me. I drove past the driveway to my middle school. Rounding the corner, I went up a small incline that had seemed like a massive hill to me as a child. I saw my elementary school and felt as if I could almost taste the place.

At the center of this small New England town I came to the star where 5 roads meet. I automatically turned to the right towards my old house. The road carried me, the way memory does, when things appear before your eyes and suddenly you are there and living it again. I still knew every house and who had lived there. I still remembered where I went to get homemade Halloween candy, whose family was descended from the Mayflower, which kids called me names at the bus stop, how fast they could run, and who was the class clown.

I arrived at my old driveway. The black iron gates that had always stood open when we lived there were still attached to two stone columns. I was grateful there wasn’t a sign shouting “no trespassing” at me because I might have chickened out. I drove slowly around the familiar curves, feeling them with my car as I had once felt them riding next to Joanie on my single speed fat-wheeled bicycle. When the house came into view, I stopped the car. I left it in gear. I was not going to get out. But I stared at the house for a long while and was surprised by the strength of the words inside of me. You took my life.

Although my body was shaking, I knew it wasn’t true. Amanda hadn’t taken my life. She might have gone to my school, had my same teachers, and even played with my friends, but after 25 years I finally realized that I took my life with me. It was something I had done time after time since first leaving that beloved house. With each transition, whether I was parting from a place that I loved or a painful time in my life, I walked straight toward the person I was becoming. I knew now that the robin egg I had once sought with such longing was really just an unborn chick. The greatest riches in my life had always been found in the fragments, in all of the leavings and breakings and moving on. The pale blue shell pieces I had once gathered and treasured — those were a truer reflection of what defines me.

As I drove away from the house it was my old bus stop that startled me; that reminded me of all I had carried with me when I left. I still had a single vivid memory of waiting for the bus, standing by myself next to the lilac bush in late April with my whole face immersed in the pale purple petals, breathing in the fragrance as if the scent alone was life. Everything I loved — the house, Joanie, the way I knew and understood the world, my fingertips that still needed to touch things, the outside in and inside out; these things still ran like rivers inside of me. Nothing had been lost.

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What a satisfying read!