I'm in my home town this week.
I have a home in another place. I've lived there for nearly 40 years.
Somehow, "going home" means going to the place where my life started,
even though I was there only 18 years.
I took a walk to the grocery store the other morning. I wanted potatoes for supper and I needed some exercise. It's only about 6 blocks to the store.
As I walked I remembered:
This house had a big tree in front and it's gone. Woodland phlox bloomed bluely under that tree in the spring.
We had friends in this house. The cellar under the house was small and dark. I remember when they jacked up their house to put a half basement under it.
These two houses I'm going by weren't here when I was. I don't remember what was here before.
This next house was on my paper route. The lady of the house asked me what grade I was in and I told her "Junior", and she said, "How nice to be in junior high." I was the tallest I ever was then,
and I'm no taller now.
On my way home I took another street, the one I walked up and back down to school first to the elementary school and then to the bus parked there to go the the Jr./Sr. High School.
There was the house that everyone said a witch lived in, so we never walked on that side of the street.
In later years when I was delivering papers, I discovered that she was no witch, but an ordinary, nice lady.
I walked past the house where a friend and I heard banging and a cry for help. We went in and I stayed with the lady while my friend ran for help. I think she broke her leg. I don't remember anymore of the incident.
In the alley behind that house lived a Shetland pony for a few years and we would stop after school to feed it grass.
This next house, resplendent with Victorian trimmings had a dog. I was afraid of dogs.
Here lived a family with a girl my age. Once bicycling madly home from there I fell off my bike onto my face and had lovely scabs and bruises for school picture day. It was there I saw that the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound.
The next house is a big stucco one with an enclosed porch. My parents were friends with them since they both belonged to the school, one a teacher, one a principal. I never got to see in that house, and oh, I wanted to. It was there, after putting a washer on my finger (in my defense about was about 6), the man of the house put the washer with my finger in it in his vise and filed carefully through it. I haven't put anything more on my fingers except my wedding ring.
.And THIS house -- the band teacher lived there and my friend and I had a crush on him. He built an airplane in his shed and we would go and watch.
Some relatives of the stucco house people lived behind the airplane builder's house and I would go there to visit. Those two old ladies would give me a cookie.
Another house to go by and I don't remember the names of the people that lived there. They would sit in their driveway on nice summer days and chat with the kids that came around.
This last house before mine, my friends house. She was my best friend. We walked to school together, played together, biked together. We played at each others houses. There were a lot of kids in our neighbors so we could play lots of different games the required more people.
Across from my friend's house lived an old couple. I would take them violets in the spring and chat a little. I did the same to the old lady in the house beyond ours. I think there were others my friend and I would take violets to, but I don't remember. I wonder really, how old these old people really were.
Farther on was the house where the owners of the trailer court where I lived my very first years. It was there I learned what "running around like a chicken with it's head cut off" means.
Heading back home, another block over, there was a pig, a great big sow I think. There's no place for a pig there now and on beyond and closer to the river are more houses that weren't there before.
I've written this story before, in other place. Somehow, those early days leave an impression that isn't forgotten and it moves me when I walk around the town again.
There's more I know. The park so near us where we would play in the "back of the park", the wooded area where we would have forts and picnics. the "canal" we would jump over than was just the storm drainage ditch from town. Farther away, the apartment house where we lived after the trailer and rents out later. I could walk there. The trailer court equally not far away. I had friends houses scattered all over the town and the biggest of all where I had piano lessons and longed to "go over the whole house".
I like to remember the good times.
