BY LAUREN REITZEL

There’s a place I know- or knew, I suppose- caught between the frigid Upper Peninsula and an occasionally melting Northern Minnesota. It takes exactly five hours and 47 minutes to get there from Naperville, IL,  but only if we aren’t making any stops. But with my mother’s overdramatically long gas station trips and frequent Culver’s visits demanded by my sister and me, it’ll really take about seven hours. Eventually, though, after winding through centuries of carved-out boulders and bluffs that emulate what I learned in a sixth-grade geology unit, I’ll take a right — or my dad will take a right— onto Rainbow Road and see it immediately on my left. We’ll take that sharp left that caught my eye and glide past the heaving willows weeping down the narrow and lengthy driveway. We’re first greeted by a faded wooden barn that used to house my grandfather’s horses, accompanied by the football field-size space just to the left, fenced in by decades-old rotting wood. Even with all the years, all the miles in between me and the deceivingly large cabin in Northern Wisconsin, images of it swirl in my head and, to my dismay, fade slowly, almost unnoticeably, like the old photographs that were taken there. 

Once inside, someone who’s not me will see things differently than I do. Really, anybody but me will see it the way it once looked to me as well: a sub-par house. Maybe without the value of my memories, that’s all it really is. They might walk into the foyer that I once thought was so grand and be disappointed by how objectively ungrand it is. But to me, I enter a time capsule into a larger-than-life front room, glimmering in a warm glow of familiar hardwood floors, the echo of scattered Barbie dolls and stuffed toys still stained wherever it is I left them a decade ago. 

And the kitchen might be smaller than I’ve given it credit for, too. It’s tight and functions almost as a narrow hallway. The oven and fridge are within a single arm's reach of each other, and if you’re really looking at it with a critical lens, there’s little to no counter space. But when I walk into the kitchen, I can still see my grandmother standing at the stove, with no space to move behind her, cooking a bounty of pancakes for the entire family to eat for breakfast, all twelve of us that pack into the four-bedroom house twice a year. My head would poke through the square-shaped hole in the wall that divided the living room from the kitchen, a feature that used to be a window before they added the extension. If you didn’t know about the extension added onto the house in 1967, and of course, why would you? The polished hole in the wall would be confusing and probably out of place. 

My favorite part of my grandparent’s old house, though, is the view from the hole in the wall when looking out of it from the kitchen. Just across the living room, you can see the sunroom. And while I’m keenly aware that everything that’s mine will never be able to be anyone else’s in the way it’s mine, I like to think that the sunroom would shimmer to any who saw it. Or, maybe they’d just find it overcrowded and confusing. You might ask yourself, why are there so many wind chimes in a room where the wind can’t chime them? Why is there a hanging ceiling chair and outdoor patio furniture inside? These things, like a collection of odd wind chimes and a worn down ceiling bench that feels like it’s going to fall out of the sky when you sit on it, that make the sunroom bizarre to others are what make it memorable to me. 

But this next thing, I swear, it’s really the best part of the house, and there’s no way someone who isn’t me wouldn’t agree. I promise. So, you’ll walk out of the sunroom, pad gently to the right, making sure you don’t step too hard and upset the nests of various animals that live beneath it, and you’ll see it. The lake. It’s not natural but man-made; I learned this when I was probably eleven years old by observing the feeling of a pulsing pipe just off the front of the white dock, cooling my small body with uncharacteristically cold water that stuck out against the rest of the lake. Everything about the lake I found magical. The water was always clean enough for us to swim in from when the sun rose until it set in the evenings. It was filled with enough sunfish to drop bread crusts in the water so that they’d swim right into our nets. Even the slow boat rides on the lake were mesmerizing; all eight of my cousins buckled into ill-fitting lifejackets, pleading with Grandpa to speed up even though the entire body of water was a no-wake zone. Though, I guess there was that one summer where we all got disgustingly sick from whatever bacteria was growing in the water, but on the other hand, I’m convinced it was only because it was unseasonably hot that summer. And we never did catch fish, but instead, we swam amongst the soggy bread that wasn’t eaten because they were too smart to swim into our nets. Sometimes the boat rides got boring, and a small piece of me would wish to go tubing or water skiing like I could at my friends’ lake houses. Even with all the flaws I try to hide beneath each water lap and shoreline bend, the house and the lake were irrefutably and undetachably mine. But now, it’s undeniably and regrettably yours. 

***

A few years ago, in 2021, my grandparents sold the castle in Northern Wisconsin in a way that felt like disregarding all the growing up I’d done there. They took pictures to post on homes.com of the bunk room where I’d performed Hannah Montana-style concerts for my younger cousins. Realtors assigned a value to the lake where I learned to swim, deducting dollars because of the shitty no-wake feature and adding some again because the man-made water made it cleaner to swim in. The barn was torn down, and I recently heard a family rumor that the abundance of open space next to it where we would blow off Walmart fireworks on the Fourth of July is now being utilized to build a guest house because the actual house itself, apparently, doesn’t have enough room to host extended family for the current owners. 

I want to scream across these miles and years between the house and me that there is enough room for as many people as you need to host and that in the downstairs bedroom, the value-reducing wallpaper shouldn’t be torn down because my great-great-great granddad put it up himself when they’d first moved there from Denmark, and its hideousness has lasted longer than almost all beautiful things do. I want to fall to my knees and beg them to keep just one bit of my childhood preserved in that house, and I don’t care if it’s the door frames that have my growing height tallied at every summer I visited or if it’s the hole in the wall between the kitchen and the living room. I don’t care what part of it works best for you, but I’m screaming, please, just let the ghost of my younger self continue to live on in the walls of the house. But you probably won’t. In all honesty, I don’t think I would, either. I bet you’ll be sleeping deeply at night, a melatonin-like effect from the combination of fresh air and the knowingness that you’ve made the changes you deemed necessary to make the house into a home. While at the same time, I’ll be stuck up at night staring at the ceiling and counting my breaths, wishing on memories of shooting stars reflected off the lake that maybe, just maybe, a single piece of what lives in my mind will live on be romanticized by you as well. In my nightmares, you’re shivering on the deck, warm breath painting your exhales white, bundled in winter coats and familial love, starting up at the northern lights through trees that won’t grow their leaves again until the next June, and I’m running towards you, but my screams come out as silent tears, my feet trapped in two feet of snow that feel like quicksand. 

All this, or at least what I want to tell myself, is a fear of change. A loss of control as it slips out of my hands, time speeding towards me just as we once sped down Wisconsin freeways.   It’s what I’m telling myself, a poor-piss attempt at soothing insomnia that lurches towards me every Christmas Eve spent in a hotel room down the street from my cousin’s house and every Fourth of July in my hometown. Fear of change and losing control is something I’ve suffered from my whole life, from each inkling of surpassing childhood, and each bridge crossed beat at me as I watched it all go by until now, I’m here. Stuck in a kaleidoscope of memories, I can’t get back and never relive. The wind chimes that never chimed and bats chirp in the chimney echo in my mind, telling me I’ve grown up. They’re telling me they’re meaningless.  The realization settles in my stomach, nausea threatening me even as I sit here contemplating why I care so much about a house with spiders in the basement and a too-small living room. Yet, I can’t help but want to shout across the miles between the house and me, burning my voice out just to reach you, just to try and move backward in time to when I was learning to swim in the lake and decorating Christmas cookies shaped like church bells in the kitchen. 

But even if my cries could reach you as you move your boxes and plans into Rainbow Road now, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter because, to you, the walls don’t have writing of years-long inside jokes that remind me of the fleetingness of youth; they’re just walls to be painted over. Everything that ever lived in that house– the hands held in a circle around the Christmas tree, the bats that used to live in the chimney, the Danish ebelskivers dipped in sugar and jam on winter mornings, the haunting grandfather clock, the out-of-tune piano, the violin we aren’t allowed to touch– it was all left within rooms that are now just rooms, no longer a reminder of every step taken towards becoming who I am.  

I don’t own these things anymore. In fact, no one does, and no one can ever again. The vintage vinyl player and its record collection from the fifties, the abundance of Chicago Bears memorabilia collected in the basement, and the miniature fairy houses scattered across the rolling front lawn, only exist in my memories, never to exist in a living and breathing world again. But, to you, maybe it can. You won’t get to experience it in the same way, but I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, that you’ll be here someday, too. Maybe it’ll be in twenty years, maybe in fifteen, maybe in ten, but you’ll be here. It’s cyclical, this feeling. You’ll learn to swim in the lake, and you’ll race your siblings down the hill, only to lose when you step on a twig, tears streaming out your eyes because of the splinter wedged into the heel of your foot. If you’re unlucky, because we were the summer of 2015, you’ll walk up to the house after swimming in the lake only to realize as you dry off in the sunroom that you have itty-bitty-mini leeches stuck to your toes. You’ll swim in your clothes, accidentally bringing a frog into the house as it made itself at home in the flaps of your shirt. It’ll fall into the toilet an hour later, and that’s when you’ll find it. Someday, or maybe not, I guess, your grandparents will sell the castle on Rainbow Road, and you’ll be kept up at night by the fact that you’ll never go back. You’ll pick raspberries and blackberries in mid-August. You’ll look back and wonder how it all went by so quickly, how you could’ve grown up so terrifyingly fast. But, you’ll look around and walk out of the house and thank it for everything it’s given you, even if it might all be worthless to someone else. Everything, every object, every hole in the wall, every fireplace ash, will be seen differently by someone else. And then after me, and after you, it will repeat again, the house on Rainbow Road will be the childhood chapel for another.  It will be beautiful, it will be painful, that much I can guarantee. 

***

It will become a place you know, and eventually knew, I suppose, caught between the frigid upper peninsula of Michigan and a melting Minnesota. It used to take me about seven hours to get there from Naperville, Illinois, but I’m not sure how long it’ll take from where you’ll be driving. Probably somewhere closer by than where I was. Maybe you’ll wind through centuries of carved-out boulders and bluffs that emulate what you learned in a sixth-grade geology unit, and you’ll take a right onto Rainbow Road and see it immediately on your left. That sharp left will catch your eye, and you’ll glide past the heaving willows weeping down the narrow and lengthy driveway. You’ll first be greeted by half of a faded wooden barn as it gets torn down. But I want you to remember that it used to house my grandfather’s horses and was the background of an endless series of Reitzel family photos. To the left of the dying barn, I’m assuming you’ll see a guest house, a new addition in place of where I used to run around for hours, chasing fireflies and childhood dreams. Images of it will swirl in your head between you and the deceivingly large cabin in Northern Wisconsin, fresh like a new photograph, not yet taken by the toll of time.  

But to you, the new residents of the house, the grandfather clock that chimed at the top of the hour means nothing but the time, and the wallpaper in the downstairs bedroom is nothing more than a checklist point on the “move-in to-do list,” removing it from the walls likely sandwiched between “throw away oversized dock bench with children’s hand prints painted on it” and “fill the hole in the wall between the kitchen and living room.” Everything I’ve ever known in that Wisconsin castle is merely trash to another. It doesn’t matter that it was once a treasure to me. These objects, these objectively priceless things that were assigned meaning over a collection of years left behind, I guess, aren’t priceless. 

But instead, they’re just objects. Nothing more, nothing less.