Dirt was another story. There was indeed a lot of it. I say this with some hesitation, because at the time I did not really have a category for household dirt—although as a late seventies self-identified “clean hippy” I was all about bodily hygiene. It would be two years until my not entirely happy graduate- school revelation that stovetops could get dirty and that I could— and perhaps should—do something about it. There must have been some among the 21 of us who could see dirt and who might have been horrified by the lack of cleanliness in the public areas of 2-D.

I joined 2 Dickinson in what I believe was its second year of existence, the fall of 1978. It had emerged—I don’t know quite how—as an “alternative” living arrangement on the Princeton Campus, which at that time had two residential colleges and a series of traditional dorms. I had lived happily enough in Wilson college for my first two years, joining in a variety of group activities and refusing others, especially those that involved eating with faculty. (I think of this often when encouraged to be a College Associate at Rice; the idea, someone’s idea, is that students are dying to eat with professors.)  Wilson college did not look like what most people think of when they hear the word “Princeton”: it was newish, square, and utilitarian. In my own mind I exaggerated the difference: Mussolini not Fitzgerald, brutalist not gothic.

You love the smell of Thanksgiving that begins the day before when your husband makes turkey stock and the stuffing that contains a world of things—whatever feels right to him at the time: almost always dried cherries, usually chestnuts and shallots, sometimes hazelnuts, and recently roasted golden beets. Over the years, the bread base has become gluten free, but the stuffing is still dotted with jewels of things that you get to see for the first time late at night on Thanksgiving Eve, as they now call it, or early on the day itself.

My own son left his apartment in Syracuse, New York a week before his classes ended and just as all events, including classes, went remote. Because he lived off campus, the university could not require testing, but he took a test and got the negative results the day before his 1400-mile car trip to Houston. The idea of home propelled him through the night; driving too fast and too long. He was in Alabama by dawn of the next day. He did not, as my husband and I begged him to do, stop at a motel along the way, but called at 5:30 a.m. from a rest stop to say he was pulling over for a brief nap. It was a moment of wordlessly coordinated (if stumbling) parenting: Scott and I immediately got out of bed, downed some coffee and eggs, and headed to meet Paul on the road to spare him the last few hours of driving.

 Like Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, who wakes from a long illness in a foreign country to find herself in a room furnished with items from her past, I would open my eyes to ghostly but familiar forms on each continent at various times in my life. Although, unlike Lucy, I had not myself created any of these household ghosts, and although my moments of waking rarely if ever followed moments of physical collapse after an illicit confession in a Catholic church, I was, in my own way, haunted by the scattering of furniture and the reformation of rooms that contained them.

November 3, 2020. It is the longest day of the year. This is a strange summer solstice ripped out of its natural order into an endless fall. The sun has been high in the sky, it seems, since at 6 a.m. I tumbled out of bed into time that refuses to travel and a day without shape. This shapelessness, this lack of temporal markers, is due in part to the fact that I voted three weeks ago on the second day of early voting in Texas.

Part if the “Images of America” series published by Arcadia Press, the book both is and is not directed to tourists and to the celebration of Houston. As the name of the series implies, it relies heavily on photographs, most of them credited to the Harris County Flood Control District. Even to the tourists who might buy and skim the book, disappointed perhaps that the pictures are in black and white and not particularly well reproduced, it would be clear from a quick glance that the history of Houston is in large part a history of its bayous and that the history of the Bayou City is a history of flooding.

I am writing this at the very beginning of a long-planned project on Brays (or, sometimes Braes) Bayou, the not-very-blue body of water that flooded my home during Hurricane Harvey, the Medical Center during tropical Allison, and the old Jewish neighborhood of Meyerland four times in the last few years. In my mind, this has always been a project that required walking the bayou with a map, photographing it from its origin at Barker Reservoir, following it as it meanders east through neighborhoods rich and poor but always urban, until it joins, 31 miles later, with Buffalo Bayou emptying into the Ship Channel at the town of Harrisburg.

This is not my first quarantine. The first one dates back to, I don’t know, four years ago, the year I became a member of Amazon Prime. Although that quarantine, like the one that is a result of COVID, made me spend more time alone at home, I am not alone in having experienced a form of pre-COVID house arrest. For half a decade now, perhaps for longer, people who can afford it have been encouraged to do as many things as possible from what is usually referred to as “the comfort of their home.”

The passage I just wrote is full of anniversaries, and is a product of what I call anniversary thinking. When we measure the distance from one event to another, we do so by invoking anniversaries. Although online calendars of Gulf hurricanes tell me that today is not, in the usual sense, the “anniversary” of any particular Gulf storm—I can’t find a storm that landed in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana or Texas on this date--the combination of repetition and temporal distance makes anniversary thinking applicable here.

Any given classroom is in a strict sense only “mine” for a while; towards the end of class, even before my allotted time is over, it is quite common to see the door knob turn as students from the next class signal that they are waiting. And there is often an attenuated and sometimes awkward moment of exchange, where the teacher from one class logs out of the tech, gathers (and sometimes drops) papers, and talks to lingering students as the teacher from the next class stands by, eager to claim the podium, push buttons, define the parameters of her own space. It is this very turnover and exchange, with all its messy rituals that turns all classrooms into “my” classroom.

But when I am on a campus—a residential campus—I feel not so much that I know where I am as that I know who I am. I know that there will be a library, and dorms, and buildings with offices, that there will be students carving their way through green spaces between those locations, that there will be food (bad, good, or indifferent), and that someone somewhere had an idea that this place would be beautiful, even if in this particular instantiation it does not seem beautiful to me.

None of the landmarks seem familiar. Is Scott reporting on the progress in the backyard of our new house where we are installing a pool with the money from selling our previous home? I look more closely: on the left-hand side of the picture is part of a two-story yellow building, my erstwhile neighbor’s house; shorn of the fence between our houses, the yellow house reveals itself from an angle I have never seen before. This is not the new lot but the old one; Scott is writing to tell me the house, which generated so many unoriginal names from “Hell House” to “Albatross”, is gone.

From the time I was able to notice such things, I knew that my grandmother Rosie, my mother’s mother, did not leave her apartment on the upper west side of New York City where she had lived since my mother was a teenager.  For years I was strangely uncurious about this fact of her life and mine; she was, in her own words, ‘housebound,” and I accepted the term as its own form of explanation. As far as I knew, being or becoming housebound was a natural stage in a woman’s life, perhaps transmitted through the maternal line.  I imagined a time when my mother would no longer go out-and even, somewhere at the chronological horizon of possibility, a time when I too would be housebound.

But once the floods came, each piece of china, each of the hundreds of pieces, assumed a new and frightening form of unintended value. Each piece involved labor to find it, fetch it down, wrap, and pack it.  Most of that burden of work fell on our friends, who wrapped each piece individually and put them into boxes to be stored until some fantasized moment of recovery, when they would be used and valued again. Seeing my friends wrapping, going out to purchase more supplies as the collection sucked them up, I felt a tremendous guilt and desperation.

These are my feelings as I cross my threshold to something like work. But my feelings, as I often have to remind myself, are not everything. Of all the people crossing their thresholds—if they have them—today, I am among the most protected. I have a house, a car, and a tenured job, one that, crucially, allows me to work from home. This fact—these protections—are not an accident, but the sum of a series of acts, policies, prejudices, laws, and expectations that have been built up, as surely as the foundation of a house, over my lifetime and those of my parents.

Her linens are heirlooms in the strict sense of British law. As Victorian author Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds reminds us, heirlooms are not extaordinary, but everyday objects—pots and pans, not the titular diamonds—passed down within a family. But many of my mother’s linens did not follow the lines of blood or marriage, interrupting ideas of maternal inheritance. This was in part because, in her own small way, she stepped to the side of rituals of marriage.

No one, perhaps, would describe you as “effortlessly elegant,” but you have never before today knowingly gone out with a big stain on the front of your dress. Your excuse is that no one will know who you are behind your mask, which clashes with your stained dress because you have not built a “mask wardrobe.” Perhaps, you think to yourself, it is not a stain after all, but just an effect of the light.

Like flies in amber, the members of my nuclear family were caught in our house on March 24, 2020, the day the Harris Country judge, Lina Hidalgo, issued her “Stay Home Work Safe” orders. We had gathered there for our respective spring breaks which, for once, turned out to coincide: my older son, who teaches high school in Austin, my younger son who is a student at Syracuse University, and my husband and myself. We were suddenly, and for an indeterminate time, a household.

Our goal, in the blazing sun of the week post-Harvey, was to sort into three piles: throw away, repair, and pack for some undefined future place where what the Victorians called “household gods” might reign again. The “throw away” pile grew steadily on the curb: here were the couches whose foam cushions could never be made completely dry; the tables whose legs fell of as we lifted them; the electronics that would never turn on again. As our pile grew, so did those of many of our neighbors, many of whom had never seen the inside of our house nor we theirs.