THE COMING OF AGE

4 7 R T H E C O M I N G O F A G E H E N R Y S L O S S West of the handsome house the land descends sharply, levels o√ in a broad flood plain above Antietam Creek, and then becomes its sheared-steep bank. The house and land are mine. For three or four days following the battle the Creek ran red, from thousands wounded, dead. For twenty years I’ve felt uncomfortable about the property, tried to evade the implications of my privilege (and the absurdity of ‘‘owning’’ land) by thinking of myself as its caretaker. And yet it sometimes felt as if I had blood on my hands. Whose I couldn’t say. Perhaps my father’s since I bought the place, a very costly home away from home, with money left me when he died, bequeathed in part as a reward for good behavior: a house of glass and redwood, cedar roofed, surrounded by mown grounds and ornamentals, perched on eleven acres rich in oak and sycamore, black walnut, locust, pine, a purchase he’d have said was ‘‘worth the money.’’ What would he think if he could see it now? Most of the flowering shrubs have withered, died, the lawns become scrub-riddled, waist-high meadow, the bottom land along the Creek impassable. The house itself su√ers from age – warped siding, loose molding, moss-eaten shakes, pest-pocked porch . . . 4 8 Y ‘‘problems’’ proliferating like the stinkbugs. He’d have been disappointed, not surprised. ‘‘You cannot stand success,’’ he told me once. For years I mowed, cleared paths along the Creek, pulled wild grape from the trees, cut back thorn-brake and bramble, poison ivy, stinging nettle; gardened within ten-foot-tall, deer-proof fencing put in post-hole by staple with a neighbor; took on woodchuck, woodpecker, borer bee; cut, hauled, split wood for stove and fireplaces . . . I loved the work, the challenges to strength and stamina, and wit, until I didn’t. Just when that was, if ‘‘when’’ is the right word, I can’t recall, but I began to notice that what I couldn’t do I left undone. For some time say, I tried to keep up with the handsome house’s and the land’s demands, to keep up – and to live up to – the place. In di√erent ways each proved too much for me, as in a third the place was when I bought it. (Now it’s for sale that’s what I tell myself, eliding hours, seasons of happiness at simply being able to be there.) To someone like my father I’m afraid the shape the place is in, unkempt, unruly, a sort of mirror-image of its owner, would argue that I’d ‘‘trashed’’ it, meant to take the glitz if not the guilt from privilege. If true, that might be preferable to feeling the degradation inadvertent, helpless, as bound to be as anyone’s descent from youthful heights to the floodplain of age. It’s not dishonorable to get old, embarrassing at times, but nothing worse, and look at how age leads to self-acceptance – unprepossessing though that self may be – almost as readily as to the Creek. ...