home, they’re often surprised that it seems so small. There’s a logic to that, I guess. When you’re little, everyone and everything around you seems big. But Calpurnia’s house really was as huge as I remembered. It was just a lot more crowded.
We entered on the ground floor, passing under the brick arches and through a warped and sticky wooden door into a large, open space with rough brick walls and a ceiling so low that both Calvin and Trey barely cleared the wooden beams. Flooding isn’t uncommon in Charleston—there’s a reason they call it the Low Country—and some houses were constructed on what amounted to above-ground basements, to provide not only storage but a buffer zone in case of flood. That was how my family had always used it, as an unfurnished, unoccupied space to store stuff. But not this much stuff. There were boxes and bins, cartons and crates, and piles of junk everywhere I looked.
And though I wouldn’t have believed it possible until we climbed the rickety wooden steps, the upper floors were even worse.
My great-grandfather bought a lot in Harleston Village in 1918. He built a haberdashery shop on the corner and lived above the store. After the business moved to more commodious premises on King Street, he built the biggest house on the block, a structure designed to impress.
The first floor was home to a big kitchen and butler’s pantry, cavernous dining room, living room, the enormous entry hall that had been home to Grandma Beebee’s out-of-tune piano, a powder room, and a library. The wide staircase split into two staircases at the landing, leading to an open, wrap around hallway on the second floor, with four bedrooms, two baths, and two dressing rooms. The larger of these had once been my father’s office, the smaller turned into a linen and storage closet. The effect was imposing but somewhat impractical. The open stairwell allowed sound to travel throughout the house, from one floor to the next, and ate up a lot of square footage. The third floor was enclosed and really more of an attic, gabled and tucked into the roofline, with storage, two smaller bedrooms, and a small bath with a tiny pedestal sink and a shower the size of a phone booth.
Though the attic was small in comparison to the rest of the house, you could have fit my studio apartment up there twice, eight times more if you took the whole house into consideration. But there still wasn’t room for all of Aunt Calpurnia’s stuff.
Every room was filled to bursting, so much so that we could barely open some of the doors. The stairs to the third floor were completely impassable. I kept looking for some of the pieces that I remembered from my childhood—the long, inlaid mahogany dining table, Beebee’s piano, the sideboard filled with her china and sterling. If they were there, they were buried under an avalanche of stuff. Every flat surface was covered with boxes, bins, stacks, and piles. In many instances, the piles had grown into towers and created canyons with walls of stuff on two sides from floor nearly to ceiling, leaving only a narrow walkway to allow passage from one room to another. Trey called them “goat trails.”
We followed him through one of the canyons into a relatively open area in the living room, a space about eight feet square. Sitting in the corner was an aunt-size armchair, a television set topped with an old-fashioned rabbit ears antenna, and a TV tray that held rubber-banded stacks of grocery coupons and a flowered teacup with an imprint of pale-pink lipstick still visible on the edge.
I felt so sad and so ashamed. Sad that Calpurnia had ended her days in this room. Shamed that it had come to this. Shame on me.
“Can you believe this?” Calvin said, clearly impressed. “Bet you anything that there’s a dead cat in here somewhere, probably a few.”
“Calvin!”
“What?” He turned out his hands, attempting to look innocent. “I’m not being mean. I’ve seen every single episode of Hoarders and there’s always a dead cat. Always. Oh, don’t look at me like that. And don’t cry. You know I hate that. Please? Oh, cupcake.”
I couldn’t help myself. I was gutted.
Seeing our family history, strange though it was, disappear under a pile of garbage felt like losing them all over again. When Calvin crossed the room and wrapped me in a bear hug, I only cried harder. By the time I got a grip