Gone From Google Earth

Grandma Myrtle’s house in southwest Oklahoma is gone from Google Earth. 

The house was there when I showed my mother street-level views on the computer just before mom died at 93. The white clapboard house with a covered porch was where my grandma raised five children after her husband died when the youngest was a baby. Mom’s memories of the house still resonated with her Dustbowl experiences of sleeping with wet handkerchiefs over her mouth and reading books in the outhouse where nobody would bother her.

The house was where, during summer visits, my brother and I slept in the same beds from my mother’s childhood, the mattresses bowed when rain had blown through the window and curled after they dried. The house was where Christmas was celebrated in the living room with energetic unwrapping of presents and loud thank-yous called across the living room while my grandmother rocked in her creaking chair warmed by the gas heater. Cousins played house under the heavy oak table in the dining room. They told ghost stories while the adults talked quietly in the living room about who had what ailments.

The house was where the older cousins gathered in the north bedroom, in which my mother and her siblings were born. There, we escaped from our parents and read poems aloud out of books once owned by a grandfather we never knew. Aunts played the rarely tuned piano, whose discord a raucous choir of cousins could overcome. The house was there for over a century. I haven’t been back to that small town in decades, but I visited it often on Google Earth, and seeing that the house was there gave me a foundation.

Today, it’s gone from Google Earth. I can see where it had been, now a parking lot for the Baptist Church next door. Gone from Google Earth means its absence is permanent. The house had been alive; it was where hearts came together, where memories were created, now warmed by age, but even a house, memories, and people are not impervious to the vagaries of time.