Home, to Me

Page 24. Home. Where is home for you?

There's a post I wrote on Scribbles and Scripts...Home, Still Home, that tells about a home of mine. It describes my first real home and the one that remains a "home" to me to this day, my grandparent's home.

My other home sits in a busy neighborhood on a hill, on a mound of earth surrounded by a 5 foot wall. Everyone always said, "You're house is so big!" It really wasn't, it was just high. A two story clapboard house with a large attic, it somehow gave the impression of grandeur from the outside.

Inside it was rather humble. Downstairs was a kitchen, dining room, living room arranged in such a way that two girls could run freely over the burnt orange wool carpet and deep red tiled floors and round again endlessly. Often chased by a dark figure. This figure, sometimes known as the father, would dramatically clench a bent arm against his chest, his hand in a claw, while swinging the other arm which was awkwardly straight as if it had no elbow at all. His tongue was shoved up under his upper lip while his lower lip was drawn down exposing his teeth and he'd groan like you'd expect a person with arms, hands and a mouth like that to groan. This monster dragged one leg, which made the escape to the kitchen, living room or dining room possible for two screaming little girls.

The kitchen memories begin with squeezing around the round table, eating broiled chicken seasoned with copious squirts of lemon and lots of salt and pepper and watching the original episodes of Star Trek on the smallest Sony tv perched next to my dad atop a high stool. My favorite living room memories were the nights that my sister and I would drag our mattresses down the stairs, pile them on the long living room floor and invent gymnastic moves, flinging ourselves around while our parents sat long around the kitchen table, ignoring our shenanigans.

There was also a sun porch with 6 long windows stretching nearly floor to ceiling. These windows were and still are made of old glass which could kill any young child playing blissfully unaware under them. At least this is number 3 on my mother's greatest fears list. Outranked only by the hair-raising china closet glass door that she often blocks with a dining room chair in an attempt to save the necks of people who may go and carelessly stride by it and the bloodcurdling front wall from which children could plummet (and do in her nightmares) into mangled brokenness onto the sidewalk below. She can barely stomach the fourth of July race when all the neighbors and their grandchildren come down to cheer on the runners who go by her corner for fear that one might boost a child up there to sit and let the bloodbath begin. I fell off it once and needed a butterfly bandage on my chin for weeks. By all signs, my mother still hasn't recovered.

Finally, there was a laundry room/backdoor entrance way that also housed our refrigerator, a washer and dryer, a tiny corner utility closet and a tiny bathroom. It also holds the one cabinet in which my mother has her pantry items. One 2ft by 3ft two door cabinet. I have never actually realized the profundity of that till right now. My mother had to keep all of our dry food items in one very small cabinet with three small shelves hanging above her washing machine. We were all fairly thin growing up...

Upstairs there were three bedrooms. My parents' stretched the length of the house and was separated from the hallway by two slatted accordion doors rather like the doors that might span a wide closet. Our two rooms were small with small closets that had secret cubby doors cut out of the wall above them, papered contiguously with the walls. I believed that there was a ghost named George living in the one above my closet. He came out and yelled at me every time I'd get a fever, so that I'd pull my covers and pillow into my parents' room and sleep on the floor next to my mother. When the voices started I'd call from the pond water green carpet below her, "Mom! Hear it now?" She'd mumble that she hadn't and turn over. I believe she thought of me as a strong, able person who didn't need patronization. Years later she and my father would find out that a man named George had died in the house twenty years before we moved in.

Our bathroom upstairs was the skinniest one ever in existence. Still, we found good use. When the floor got wet it made a great slip 'n slide running naked straight from my bedroom, one hop across the narrow hallway and onto the linoleum floor straight down to the toilet. The attic has steep wooden steps that lead directly up to a window. One has to turn clear around when he reaches the summit to step back into the room. We used to play banker up there with some old papers found in boxes from the previous owner. I used to rifle through my parents' college textbooks, yearbooks and various clothes items. Peering out the small windows in the peak of the attic, I could be a secret onlooker into the passing cars below.

The garage. When I was young it was an old shack with walls of corrugated metal and two swinging wooden doors and a workshop area on back. It looked like something you'd come across in a dark wood from another time and place and enter slowly with a considerable mixture of curiosity and trepidation. We did just that often. It was a mysterious, dangerous, interesting place to explore. Filled with junk, old wood and bikes, it was just the place to hang on a hot summer's day, concocting plans to overtake the neighborhood boys. Once we had a yard sale and my father attached a giant sign to it: GARAGE SALE - TAKE IT AWAY He built a new one when I was away at college.

A lot of playing happened in my home. We worked on puzzles and played big family & friend games of cards around the dining room table. I learned how to shuffle and do the "bridge" on the floor in front of the fire while my parents and the other grown ups played above me. Every corner of the house was a place for my imagination. The big bookcase with its square cubby holes was the ideal penthouse apartment for my Malibu Barbie. My big front porch was a great place to lay out all my sister little wooden people and their town buildings. I even planted gardens for them with lines of colored buttons. Sometimes when my parents would have guests, they'd buy Gouda cheese with the red wax coating and I'd grab wedges and hide under the dining room furniture pretending I was a nibbling mouse. In the dank basement I found a large, tall block of wood and drove nails and screws into it. I was creating a robot, my Frankenstein, which I fervently believed would someday come alive, just a few more nails in strategic places.

I guess that's what a home is. I place where you can play and dream.