Root word: *ghredh-
ingress
The scream pierces the walls, shakes the windows, rattles the roof. You’re folding clothes with your beloved in the bedroom. You stop. When your seven-year-old screams like that you become a conglomerate of clichés. Your blood curdles or freezes. Your heart skips, it’s in your mouth. You drop the shirt you’re holding, drop the socks. This house is new-to-you, you’ve just arrived, so for a full beat, you can’t tell where the sound is coming from. But when at last you know, you push and race your way through the narrow hall and there, in the bathroom, thrashing itself against the door and now, as you open that door, flying out, flying fast, flying far too near your face, is something black, something small, something hairy, something probably as terrified as you are.
Bat. It flies the way you came, to the bedroom where you began, so you follow and shut it in, and while you and the kid cower together in the narrow closet, your beloved removes the window screen and tries, with one of the clean towels, to usher the creature out. But it won’t go, won’t go, and instead it escapes into the hall again and either loses itself or makes itself at home amid the still-unpacked boxes of books and toys and dishes and pots and pans of your unfamiliar house.
congress
Behind the house stands a Norway maple, its trunk bulls-eyed with a massive hollow. This hollow is home to a hundred pigeons. Their droppings speckle the patio stones. Their iridescent feathers shine. All day as you go about your tasks, sorting through your things, putting the books on the shelves, hanging the pictures and curtains and blinds—dreading, all the time, an encounter with a bat—you hear the cooings and murmurings and rustlings of these birds. All day they come and go, come and go. Shuffling, settling, resettling. Nestling in a busy symposium.
aggress
Your daughter holds the kitten in her lap, her face suffused with a joy so true it hurts. Every minute of every hour of all her eight long years she’s been dreaming of an animal companion, and here, at last, he is. You snap a photo. In the glare of the flash, he looks soft, sweet, dazed and possibly dim-witted, but in the months to come, he’ll prove to be a confident cat—vocal and a decent mouser. At night, he’ll chase still-living gifts of voles and shrews from the limestone cellar up into the light of your freshly renovated kitchen. He’ll pounce and bite and toss and terrorize. Years from now, when he’s no longer a kitten but a stately senior feline, when the kitchen has lost its fresh-paint smell and the movers come to take the furniture away, you’ll find a family of toy mice under the big pine cupboard, the kind made of brightly dyed rabbit fur, with black beads for eyes and cardboard lungs, and each and every one of these dusty relics will be decapitated.
progress
When does the house begin to feel like home? The first time your beloved brings you coffee? The first time you bake an apple crisp? Or is it the evening you light the first Hanukkah candle? (Your beloved can’t find his kipa and has to hold his hand over his head as a makeshift hat.) The first time you take out the recycling or rake the maple leaves or shovel snow off the stone steps? The first time the mail brings good news?
Here, your beloved breaks his toe on an afternoon run, cheers his team to innumerable victories, barbeques like a boss, reads a lot of Nordic noir, loses the work that mattered to him, starts to lose his hair and then wears hats so stylish the neighborhood widows have to stifle their sighs. Here, your daughter learns to tie her shoelaces, grinds her teeth through a thousand nightmares, writes a series of novels about an assertive cat, harbors half a dozen crushes, punches out her window screen, graduates from high school with honors, confides with quiet confidence that she is gay. Here, you tear open the boxes of your first book, join a community choir, fret about money you don’t have, leave to visit your father on his deathbed, learn to lift weights, marvel at the fireflies that flicker through the garden on a summer’s evening after rain.
digress
Of course, you come and go. Attend meetings for your job. Visit ailing family. Take occasional holidays. For five long years, you find yourself packing a suitcase several times a month and your beloved teases that you’re away more often than you’re home.
Each time you return, the beauty of the house astonishes you. The lofty ceiling on the main floor seems to free your mind for thought. Tall windows on all sides let in ribbons of light; you can see straight through from the entrance to the garden out back with its peonies and irises and Wintercreeper. The oak floors gleam. The cat winds round your legs. There’s something bubbling on the stove.
The rooms envelop you in their golden glow: “Lioness,” “Sunflower,” “Life is Good.”
transgress
On the counter, Niagara peaches. In a cooler-than-usual summer, you’ve waited and waited for these. They mound now in the blue bowl like a week of glorious sunsets. Ripe, juicy, sweet. You reach for one and recoil. This, and the one next to it, and the one next to that, all bear evidence of some attack. Rips in the velvet skin, chunks of tender flesh torn out.
From outside come the kuks and quaas of a gray squirrel raising alarm. Looking up through the kitchen window, through the wide gash in the screen he’s apparently made, you see him scolding, a peach pit in his paws, his tail twitching and flapping, for all the world as if you’re the one who has breached his nest.
regress
You live there for eleven years. You fix the basement, replace the roof, build new bookshelves, add a skylight, redo the bath. Take down the rotten tree, mourn the pigeons, landscape the garden, rebuild the stairs.
When do you know it’s time to move on? When the mold keeps creeping up the shower walls no matter how hard your beloved scrubs, when the lights mysteriously burn out, when despite your frequent culling, you run out of room for your books, when the euonymus dies, when the squirrels dig up every one of your tulip bulbs, when the mice begin to come back.
egress
Boxes piled on boxes. Boxes sealed and boxes ready for sealing.
Your beloved, your child, the cat must be halfway across the country by now. The keys to the new house lodge in your beloved’s pocket. It’s your job to finish the work on this end. Wipe down the cupboards, sweep the dusty floors, scrub every cranny, collect every cobweb.
On a break, you sit in the back garden and read an old friend’s new book of poetry. Church bells chime the Westminster Quarters. Behind you, the hydrangea bows its pink blossoms, the leaves of the Japanese maple decorously clap.
A squirrel clatters across the sloped roof, stops to look at you, kuk kuks. That screen door below him is the one the bat, long ago, must have slipped through to get into the house.
In China, you’ve heard, bats signify fortune.
When did that bat slip out?
* Proto-Indo-European, meaning “to walk, step, come, go.”