I had this really strange experience today. I went to my grandmother’s house, one of the most familiar places ever for me, and yet, because of my time in the US and the stay-at-homer order, I felt completely defamiliarized with it. To be more precise, it felt like I was rediscovering my familiarity with the place where I spent so many summer weeks with my cousins. This feeling was so strong and so strange that I did my best to register it, to breathe it in and to record every little feeling and sensation it brought me.
They say that olfactory memory is the strongest – or at least one of the strongest – sense of memory that we have. And indeed, as I rediscovered each room, each with its peculiar smell, so many memories came flooding back, memories half-forgotten that I hadn’t thought about for more than a decade sometimes. I felt like I was an amnesiac who was suddenly recovering everything at once, like almost every single memory associated with my grandmother’s house came rushing back at the same time, painting me the broadest image possible of the time I spent there.
It’s really strange how that house fits in my memory. On the one hand, I associate it with some of the best moments of my life, wonderful days and evenings of Summer fun and mischief with my two favorite cousins. But it is also a recurrent setting for my nightmares, for some reason. For instance, when I have nightmares about bats (they freaked me out way before covid), they’re often set in a dark corner of that house.
The most magical room in my grandmother’s house is the attic. It’s a place where my dad and his brothers and sisters would play around as children, and us grandchildren picked up the torch and somehow made it this place that was ours within our grandparents’ home. It was and still is, by far, my favorite place in the house. But it also retains an unsettling character in my mind, for some unexplainable reason.
The most fascinating aspect of this place is its furniture, consisting mostly of old, discardable furniture actually. Old TV sets from the 70s and 80s can be found there, as well as old Christmas ornaments, old toys, old chairs, old books, old camping equipment, old suitcases, … There’s also an old bed in which my cousin pledged to sleep a whole night once, but of course he never did because there are way too many spiders and god knows what kinds of other creatures there. There’s a sort of wobbly couch that is actually the whole backseat of an old car of theirs. My brother turned it into what he called a “roller-coaster ride”. There’s a bunch of stuff my cousins and I brought in order to turn it even more into a playroom for us. The walls are covered with the graffities and drawings we made in chalk throughout the years. There are also some planks, old chairs and ski poles that we put together in order to create a “spaceship”, using and old Puy du Fou map for our travels. And there’s that TV that my dad tried – and failed, or at least gave up trying – to turn into a robot.
And, most of all, there are a pinball machine and a foosball table bought by my dad from a café somewhere in France when he was a young adult. The coolest pieces of furniture, the source of our pride. Strangely enough, as much as I have always loved the pinball machine – and I really do – it kind of terrified me as well as a child. There was a mechanism that prevented people from shaking it too much. If you did, often because your ball had gotten stuck somewhere, this “tilt” mechanism was triggered and not only did the machine become completely unresponsive – meaning you inevitably lost – but it also started making this loud, awful, shrill noise that you could only stop by flipping the switch of the machine. And sometimes even that didn’t work. You had to try a few times or wait a few days instead. I used to have nightmares about this noise, and it also made the room a bit dauting, this place that I loved but where not everything was under my control. (Once, I also dreamed that Lady Gaga went hiding from the police into my grandma’s attic so it’s not all bad though.)
It’s hard to articulate how ambivalent my feelings are about this place in general, but today the unheimlich reached a whole new level. Usually the only dust to be found there is in the attic (my grandma has a maid).But today it felt like there was dust everywhere, and especially on my memories, and I was the archeologist going through it, making sense of it, like I was slowly easing back into my old, French life after those months abroad. Is it what it feels like to grow up? Is my childhood becoming increasingly harder to reach? It’s both scary and fascinating…
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