Visit to parents’ home rekindles memories that sparked a lifelong love of books

As I write this, I’m sitting in the sun room of my dad’s house in Tidewater, Virginia, looking out over my dad’s lake, alternately known as Forest Lake or Kings Grant Lake #3, depending upon who you ask, about as far from Inlandia as one can be without leaving the continental U.S.

It’s taken me a moment to get situated in this easy chair. On the end table to my left is a graduation picture of my youngest son, and to my right is another easy chair — my stepmom’s, facing the window in direct view of the bird feeders and the lake.

I’ve adjusted the pillows, one behind my back, the one beneath my feet a needlepoint of Cricket the dog, beloved pet now gone. I’ve scavenged for a lap desk, because I knew there would be one, because I have been coming to this house for the perennial dual-household summer-and-alternating-holidays visits since the summer of 1983, but this visit is different.

As a child, I spent most of my time here engrossed in the pages of a book taken off one of the massive living room bookshelves: vintage Nancy Drew, Black Beauty, Lassie, or poring over Wil Huygen’s tome on forest gnomes — so I’d know how to find them, should I go looking. It’s where I discovered Rod McKuen’s, “Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows,” a small blue-jacketed hardbound book of poems intended for mass consumption but which as a young teen struck a melancholic chord in me that’s still reverberating. It is this early and repeated exposure to books, to words, that, like breadcrumbs, led me to who I am today.

As an adult, I am often on the other side of books, looking inside out — writing or editing as I am now. Today, I’m writing so that you may see how I got here; so that you may be the one to lead others, as others, like my stepmom, have done for me.

Out the side window is a hand-crafted storage shed built by my uncle to resemble a barn, complete with a tromp l’oeil horse looking over the top of the stable door. In my field of vision forward-left is a sea serpent rising up from the earth, a gargoyle seated in a throne of ivy, a gazing ball and a meditating frog seated on a stone tree stump. A veritable zoo of imaginary creatures co-existing with the living squirrels, ducks, foxes, egrets, and other wildlife that traverse the backyard. Not all of this was here when I was a kid — it has been added to, bit by bit, inside and out, the way letters add up to words that add up to an outline, a chapter, a poem.

On the slope, just out of sight, is the blue canoe, a housewarming gift. Like this house, that lake, the blue canoe has been a fixture in my life. It was where I went to float and look up at clouds skate across the sky. Visiting after my youngest son was born, I was excited to take my then-preschooler out to experience the canoe himself while his infant brother was asleep in my old bedroom, my stepmom keeping watch. That moment would later become a poem, “Room For Two in the Blue Canoe.”

Stories and poems, like fossils or photographs, can preserve a moment in time. I read that poem now, at 50 with two grown sons, and remember what it was like to be a young mother.

This time we’re here to spend some time with my dad. My stepmom died last year, not from COVID but complications from long-term cancer treatment. Like countless others, we were unable to visit when her health took its final turn.

Beside my stepmom’s easy chair still sits a reading lamp, a mail rack, nail clippers, a small trash can, a safety pin strung with a dozen pewter charms. Various and sundry items that she used on the daily, and which, together, tell her story, along with all of the other carefully curated objects in this house: the “farm bathroom” with its shelf of tiny books, including “Stanyan Street;” the living room with its massive bookcases, whose books are slowly being re-homed; every wall, every curio cabinet, every table, every ledge: a sentence, a phrase, a vignette.

Time is not static. It’s layered. Sitting here, in this room, I am a mother, a teenager, a child. My stepmom’s easy chair is vacant, but not empty.

Cati Porter is a poet, essayist and executive director of Inlandia Institute. Her most recent books are “The Body at a Loss” and, with Johnny Bender, “Slow Unravelling of Living Ghosts.”