… and you’re walking through it with hundreds of Baltimore ladies, and nothing looks anything like what you remember from your visits to your Aunt Delores all those years ago, you get a floating feeling. As though your past in this house didn’t happen.

And then you turn toward a little hallway, a hallway across from the secret whiskey passage the architect built (the house went up during Prohibition), and suddenly there’s a painting of her, done in the ‘fifties, showing her glorious beauty. She was blond, with Asian eyes, very elegant.

(Watch this to the end to see the painting of Delores.)

This brings her back for a moment – her sweetness, her bright, open joy in life.

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Toward the end of her life she hoarded things, and the rooms were full of dusty boxes. Her children packed these away. Then the designers came in and installed an art deco bureau, a thickly fabricked wall, a three-curtain window, a nautical bathroom with stencilling.

There was no way, under these several chic layers, I was going to be able, all by myself, to reanimate the woman who lived for forty years in this house on a seven-acre hill overlooking a highway.

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But here was Wally, her son, who had met our ‘thesdan delegation at the shuttle and accompanied us on our tour. Once I’d seen the house, I stood in the bright sun at its entryway and talked to him about her.

Landscape designers had hauled masses of potted plants up the house’s steep driveway. Ferns and hostas and black eyed susans surrounded us as we spoke.

“Yes, she had sheep.”

“To keep the grass down?”

“Not really. Just to add atmosphere.”

“Tell me about the shepherd.”

“When my parents bought the place, a mildly mentally disturbed man, John Baldwin, was just … here. He’d been the groundskeeper for previous owners. Lived in his car. He came from Baldwin Maryland, named for his family, an old and prominent family. He’d worked out this place to be, this odd life to live… And my parents of course took him on, gave him things to do. When they got the sheep he became the shepherd…”

“Tell me the story of the fire.”

“It was Christmas Eve and we were all downstairs. We huddled at the fireplace, and my mother read The Night Before Christmas to us…

We had tons of cats, and we were sort of gradually aware that they were going nuts upstairs for some reason, making lots of noise, jumping around. When we finally went up the steps, we were met by a wall of flame.

We raced out of the house.

Someone who saw the flames from the highway had already called the fire department, so as we ran down the driveway we were met by a big red fire engine.

One of the firemen had been playing Santa in a neighborhood gathering that night, and he’d gone directly to the station when he heard the alarm. I was so excited to go from listening to my mother read about Santa to seeing him in the flesh!”

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Misfortune – divorce, the death of a child, other things – harried her in her later years, and I said to Wally, “I’ve always thought of her as having had a sharper fall than other people. Because her starting point was so high. Everything seemed perfect to me. I remember feeling that way, looking at her life then. I was too young to feel envy, but, you know. Enviable. Beauty, money, a sweet and loving disposition, lovely children… In the background, a placid flock of sheep.”

“Yes. She had it all for awhile.”