The Vanished House

Delta, Colorado

I have just finished eating a fresh apricot, and its sweet, juicy flavor and plum-like texture brought back memories of the apricot tree in back of the house I once owned in Delta, a small ranching town in western Colorado.

The tree was right behind the old white-clapboard carriage-house. It bore a lot of fruit, sometimes massive amounts that we’d dutifully pick and give away, eating only the best. My daughters Isadora and Ursula, who were four months and two years old respectively when we moved into the Delta house, loved to climb that tree, ascending its many branches to nearly the top, where the most tasteful fruit grew. Across the yard there was a crab apple tree. Though we never made use of its fruit, the birds certainly did. The girls also climbed that tree, though the branches were smaller and more tentative. Indeed, it was from the crabapple tree that Ursula fell and broke her arm when she was seven.

The house itself, like the carriage-house, was a white clapboard, two-floor structure about a century old. The dining room was the girls’ bedroom, and they basically had most of the first floor to play their pretend-games, construct elaborate structures of colored yarn and paper cutouts, and send their pet guinea-pigs for rides on the .027 gauge Lionel train set. The kitchen, with its white-painted wood cupboards and Roman numeral clock forever stuck at 10:24, faced west, and I would often sit in the big stuffed armchair we placed in its corner and contemplate the great rise of land that comprises the Uncompahgre Plateau out there beyond the back yard. Upstairs was the attic – a compendium of half-broken furniture, rolled up posters, and dusty boxes. From its back window Ursula, insulated from the frightening noise, used to view the fireworks that roared up from nearby Confluence Park.

From the glassed-in front porch, we could watch the great Southern Pacific trains roll past just on the other side of the street, their mighty diesel engines rumbling like deep-earth tremors. And past the porch stood the tall, heavy-trunked catalpa tree, which the girls also climbed. From its massive fork they could watch the carnival assemble on the Gunnison River flats beyond the grain elevators, the one that came every year on Ursula’s birthday, with its Ferris wheel, rocket-ride, and miniature dragon rollercoaster.

Not all my memories of the Delta house are fond ones. After all, it is where my first marriage fell apart, and it was the scene of many bitter arguments. But for the most part, it was a place of happiness and delight, especially for my daughters, who lived there for seven of their most formative years before moving to Grand Junction, a mid-sized city to the northwest of Delta.

One day about three years ago, when Ursula was 21, she and I were passing through Delta on our way home to Grand Junction, so we thought we would visit the old home. We turned left on 1^st Street, and headed west for Columbia, where the house stood. When we got to the tracks by the grain elevators, I stopped in confusion. Where was the house? Instead of the row of old homes with great trees and sun-filled yards, there was the concrete and stone arc of a highway bridge, taking a bypass route over the train-tracks and around the town. Everything – the apricot tree, crab apple tree, sunflower garden, catalpa tree, glassed-in porch, attic of dusty wonders, mysterious stairway, bedroom, kitchen, dining room, and living room with its echoes of children playing and electric trains running – all of it was gone, vaporized, seized by time and progress and cast into oblivion.

I drove along the Frontage Road and pulled over on Silver Street, which used to be behind our house on the other side of a dirt alley. We both got out and stared at the unreal, almost futuristic structure. I was stunned. Ursula began to softly weep. All of those seven years were now simply and absolutely a memory, for the physical structure was gone, eliminated for an easy way to skirt the town – a vanished house.