Alright, we sold the house.
This is a post about that house.
Last time I was in that house was on the day of my grandma’s funeral and I remember my mum kept having to go back to pack her stuff and pack out and bring stuff home and she kept having to sleep there because taking the bus there and back on several consecutive days was just a waste of money and I still don’t know how she did it, I couldn’t have.
I said this back when we talked about what would become of that house and I said the house wasn’t the house because of the house, it was the house because of my grandma. And it’s true, it just didn’t feel the same without her but I guess that’s the same with most things that belong together.
I have very old memories of that house. I remember playing there as a really small, tiny kid, with my cousin, my uncle’s son, who for some reason said he’s going to marry me (I don’t think either of us knew what marrying meant, we were like four). I remember the dog, Pepi, the chicken in the back of the yard. I remember these two (then three) neighbour girls I became friends with through the fence, how I kept hanging out with them despite being much older and going over to their place to hang out and they would literally cling onto my waist and I’d carry them around and they were my “holsters”.
For a really long time I had no real idea of just how big the backyard was. It was basically a vineyard and there was this big tree and some junk in the back. I never really played there much, there was this weird bush with some weird fruit on it my mum loves, I think my mum called it gooseberry but I remember small black fruit. Anyway. I stole something when I was in elementary school and I buried it there then I dug it up and broke it with a stone so there would be no evidence left #genius
My grandma was a hairdresser all her life, and she had a salon behind the house. I just picture the door opening and hearing the chatter inside, of old ladies, of the hairdryer, the water flowing in the sink. The smell of hair products, my grandma standing with her hand pressed against her aching back, holding her tools in her other, her hair up in a bun. There were all these old ladies there…
On the mirror was a piece of paper of her prices and I remember I wrote it on our computer in our old house and I remember our ő (or one of the accented letters) was broken at the time (I think I spilled juice on the keyboard) so I left a space where it was supposed to be that letter and she handwrote those. Now I got mad that I don’t remember which letter it was. Maybe á? There was a lot of that latter on there. Now I’m… really angry… I don’t remember. I spent so much time looking at it and I can’t remember.
I loved it when she washed my hair though she was kind of harsh, and it wasn’t very comfortable under my neck but I liked the warmth of the water. I had my hair dyed blonde there in 2012 for the first time, the bleach stung so much. It also took me a long time to find out the salon had a bigger back area with the boiler and so much old crap she horded over the years.
I remember wanting my hair done all the time but not wanting to sit in those chairs for ages. I loved playing with the curlers, put them on my fingers, pretend I had curlers as fingers. There was so much stuff there…
There was a mosquito net door on everything because my grandma was allergic to bees. There was one on the entrance of the house too but there was a square cut in it so we could reach in and unlock this lock… thing… that was on it. The inside door, the real door was barely closed during summers which is when we were there most of the time. I don’t think we ever met my grandma inside the kitchen when we visited her, she always came outside to greet us, that’s where we hugged and kissed, and she would already be cooking something inside, listening to the radio, always the same channel, some old Hungarian thing with classical music and weird religious programmes. I always thought she smelled like a dentist, I don’t know where I got that from, it’s not true.
I was barely in the pantry but there was always so much food there. That’s where I found out you can keep the bread in the fridge. I never liked any of the fruit juices she brought or made. Sorry.
One of the bathrooms opened from the kitchen as well with this huge ass boiler but I remember bathing in that room only once or twice. It was exciting, I don’t know why. The toilet had this flusher that was weird, you had to kind of hold it and wait for a specific noise to let go otherwise it didn’t flush properly.
The kitchen table was close to the door to the living room and a chair always stood in the way, that was usually my place during meals. One time my grandma had this cat, Mici(?), and she kept playing with our feet under the table. My mum hates cats so she didn’t like it but I loved it. When she died my grandma kept luring cats to the yard. She would cuss them out for being so needy but I think she liked having cats to talk to.
The two rooms were otherwise separated by an ENORMOUS ceiling-high tiled stove. My grandma was always very skinny so she got very cold all the time, the air was BOILING HOT during winters.
In the living room where my grandma slept was where the Christmas tree would be set up. The door to the real living room that was this really cold, tiled ~middle room always covered the TV if it was open but when the stove was on she always wanted that door open so the warmth would spread to the whole house. That was the only TV in the house and I remember always wanting to wake up early on the weekends so I could watch the morning cartoons. So often I fell asleep again while watching them. For some reason I remember watching Hungarian talent shows there. And the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. There weren’t too manny channels on it so we only gathered together there if there was a good movie going otherwise it would just be her and my mum watching telly.
That middle room thing wasn’t exciting. There was a huge dining table there but I remember eating there only once or twice when something fancy happened or when my grandma had guests over? Very rarely. She kept her plants there because it was a cold room but it had a huge window wall so the plants would get a lot of sunlight.
My keyboard was set up there sometimes. God we used to haul my keyboard over there holy shit…
One door from there led to the second toilet that was just a small cubicle with one toilet. For a huge chunk of time it didn’t work properly so if we wanted to go in the middle of the night we had to go through the living room, where my grandma was sleeping, and sneak past her without waking her up, then go potty in the kitchen bathroom. She would close the door then so she could see the TV and that door was NOISY. For the longest time this ashtray stand kept the door slightly ajar but it was made of metal and the ashtray was removable so when you had to move it it required a special set of skills to not make any noise with it, holy shit, I felt like a ninja every time.
When the second toilet got fixed I went there to write my diary in the middle of the night for some reason. There were a LOT of spiders there.
There was a second bathroom there. The stupidest thing but I can’t remember if I liked that bathroom or not. The sink and the mirror were behind the door and the boiler was above the bathtub and I was always so scared it would fall on me. I don’t remember taking baths there I usually showered. There was a colour-changing toothbrush there. And a small space next to the bathroom, I was once playing hide-and-seek with the neighbour girls and I remember crouching there and putting a towel on myself and I pretended to be a pile of clothes, they didn’t actually find me, I shit you not 😀
There was this bedroom opening from the ~middle room that we never used. It was a guest room but my grandma usually kept composts there and aspic cause since nobody used that room it didn’t require heating. Fucking aspic addicts both her and my mum. That’s so weird, why would anybody like aspic, it’s jelly soup, ew.
There was another bedroom opening from there, a smaller one with just one bed. That also had a TV now that I think about it. My mum slept there once my sister became too sensitive to her snoring but I also remember sleeping there sometimes. The neighbour girls were always trying to wake me up in the mornings by calling through the window so I would come play with them. It was endearing until I grew up.
The last bedroom was the one where we slept in, quite a big one with one bed and another couch-thing-bed where my sister and I slept. There used to be no divide between them and I could just sprawl across my sister but then my grandma rearranged them (I still don’t know how that worked) and there was this wooden divide between them to my sister’s biggest joy and to my biggest disappointment x) I still found a way though. I think there used to be a telly in there but it either never worked or she took it out of there quickly. I’m positive there used to be a telly there.
A perfect place for the floor is lava ngl.
Then once we had laptops I remember spending so much time there… just hanging out and stuff. I remember getting to know so much music there, and just this feeling of freedom and not having to School and Life. My bag used to go right next to the bed in the corner and it was like my little kingdom, nobody could go there, I did whatever I wanted with my little corner, especially hide chocolate and candy there. We all had our own armchairs and everything had its place, whenever we arrived we’d just automatically settle in, like home. I remember when I once slept in the proper bed, I took my stuffed lion lazy, who has a hand-hole in it for puppet reasons, and I put a bunch of clementines inside her and snuck them inside the bedroom and ate them while pretending to be asleep. I don’t know why but it felt like an important mission.
There was some embroidery of a naked woman in that room, I still don’t know why. Also a very pretty drawing my grandma made of a classy woman and her classy hairdo. She was a really good drawer. Once I had my “better phone” that still wasn’t a smart phone there was this drawing app on it and she could draw well even on that.
Anyway, even though the house is on some small street in the butt outskirts of the town whenever the garbage truck came it was loud as fuck. I loved it, for some reason.
I used to have this habit of praying before falling asleep there. No idea why, I just remember praying there.
Outside the house but still in the yard was a pavement, and in the cement is a handprint that belongs to my uncle when he was a little boy. My grandma made this artificial pond out of a huge basin in her front garden. I was always scared of the frogs that would be there but the lilies were very pretty. Her garden was always very pretty, she slaved away in that garden, it was always beautiful. I remember a peach tree but not much else. I don’t think there was a cherry tree.
Outside on the street, I remember this one winter the road was really slippery and we just kept sliding up and down. I love that street. Whenever we would arrive from a night out we’d look at the sky and my sister would like, take note of all the stars and constellations and we would see the huge floodlights from downtown clubs reaching up to the clouds. They stopped one year, maybe they closed that one specific place that did this, I don’t know.
The walk back home from downtown was Long. Especially with a full belly, sometimes I would get so nauseated. I remember in 2008 when the Olympics happened my sister and my mum narrated my rush back home before I threw up like I was one of the Hungarian swimming champions, it was really cool.
Because everything in town was so far, leaving the house was serious business. Even when we just went to the store (and I usually didn’t, it was my mum and my grandma’s morning routine, the daily pilgrimage to the store) if you left something at home it stayed there. And because it was so far we didn’t leave for anything that was shorter than the walk there and back.
I hated the walk but counting the perpendicular streets was fun. Jánoskert, Petőfi (with the ice cream place, we always stopped for an ice cream on the way there), Gárdonyi (apparently there was a playground there and I remember going there once but maybe I imagined it), Báthori, Dobó, and a long walk to the main street there. There was a bookstore close to the main street and I always imagined I would once buy it and make my own store… I don’t remember what I was going to sell but it was going to be nice.
Then the another smaller street with the cabs… then crossing the train tracks, past the train station… good god…
Luckily there was always a lot of things to do in town. Once we got there this main square with the fountain was full of people and stores and vendors, it was so much fun even though we never bought too much stuff because we weren’t exactly tourists. I would always daydream about having infinite money and buying everything though.
There was this arcade we used to go to when I was little, playing fighting games and riding a jetski, it was really cool. I think we stopped being able to afford it when I got bigger. There was this small cinema too that I was always really excited to go to though it never really had that many movies. It was just the one room, the one building with one movie at a time. It was open air too and right beside the train tracks so from time to time the movie would be drowned out by trains passing by. We watched Mamma Mia there.
I discovered a birthmark behind my ear during that movie and I thought it was cancer.
Don’t ask why I remember that.
There was this place there called Nádas, very popular though slightly out of sight, you had to go behind another store to get there, we Loved going there. I think not one summer passed when we didn’t go there. I always got the same thing, most of the time. When we were smaller there used to be these like, these things you could sit on, put in some coins and you could ride like a unicorn or something. That was the shit. I loved that place… god we spent so much time there.
Going further down the road was where the Wine Week would be organised every year. It was cool when it happened when we were there, it meant MORE VENDORS AND MORE SHIT WE COULDN’T BUY. Also sometimes there would be performers on this huge area to the right of the road.
I don’t remember the last time we got to go to the beach. The weather wasn’t always right, my grandma wasn’t always in the best shape and we didn’t spend that much time there anymore especially after she got difficult. But I loved the beach. There was this huge tree in the middle that most people were aiming for so back in the days we used to set out really early to get a spot there. I don’t quite remember the shore right now… but I remember the slides that I went down on once. We even went to the not-free beach once, I went down the slide there. There was this spinny changing room there. It didn’t have a door it was just a spiral so if you went around enough you were inside and nobody could see in or out. That was fun.
I listened to a lot of music there. Ironically, Nobody’s Listening by Linkin Park comes to mind but… there was a Lot of music there. We ate a LOT of corn too. And ice creams… we tried not to go potty there but sometimes we had to and I hated going cause the floor of the bathrooms were muddy from the wet sand…
We used to watch the August 20th fireworks there. We used to be so close I’d have to duck for fear they would fall on my head. Then we never went that far anymore for fireworks alone and we no longer stayed for one or two weeks.
We used to walk back home then both my grandma and my mum got older so we usually took the cab but most of the cabbies knew my grandma so we got cheaper fares. Once when we walked home my mum and I had to pee so much we actually went in a park. It was dark, don’t worry… I also almost threw up next to the kindergarten. Then my stomach hurt so much my mum thought my appendix burst but it didn’t.
I used to be so sad when we had to leave. It’s a little bitter feeling but once it got difficult to spend more time with my grandma it got easier to leave so maybe it’s lucky that happened so the change isn’t that huge. But it still hurts.
Because we no longer belong there.
I’m going to miss that house.
Pass Through Fire 