Up On a Hill

I drive by the house, sometimes, especially when I feel something in my life is missing , or, as has been happening in the last few years, when I feel that my extended family is loosing touch since the older generation is passing away and the younger generations are moving away or don't have the same family loyalty as my generation had.

When my parents first bought the house in the '50s, the "subdivision" was in a cornfield. In the early days, since some of the roads were dead ends and some were winding, many people got lost trying to find the house. It also stood on a bus route. We lived here until I was a senior in college. When my grandmother decided to move into a retirement high rise, the house was put up for sale. However, since there were many things that couldn't go with my grandmother to the high rise and there were many things that my mother couldn't part with, my parents decided to buy the house. The two houses, thankfully, are in the same city.

The house, by this decade's standards, was tiny.

The house stood on a corner lot and had a sizable front and side yards, but the backyard was barely wide enough to walk through in the summer with the single row of tomato vines my father planted every year. On the opposite side of the tomatoes a five to six foot tall limestone wall separated our yard from the neighbor's. On the side yard a slab of cement functioned as a patio. When I was a kid, the patio held a screen porch that was screwed to the cement. It shaded the area and surrounded the picnic table. It was a fabulous place for dinner on hot winter evenings. Air conditioning? I don't remember when Mom and Dad finally purchased the single window unit that filled the dining room window and cooled the air only in the evenings and only in August when Mom's allergies got bad. Sometime down the road, they installed central air, but that was when I was in the last couple years of high school.

My bedroom occupied one of the back corners of the squarish home. The door across from my bedroom was the linen closet, and the single bathroom shared the wall where my bed stood. Every morning, I could hear my dad getting ready for work a least an hour before I needed to get up on any given day. The other back corner of the structure housed the kitchen which was only large enough for the table and two chairs and a step stool. Also along the back, a small dining room stood adjacent to the kitchen separated by a fragment of a wall. Only two rooms occupied the front of the house: my parents bedroom and the living room. The front door opened into the living room, but the back door opened from the one car garage onto a landing: steps to the right led to the basement, to the right stood the door way to the kitchen. It was the garage that gave the house an outward appearance of being rectangular. There was a walk-up attic that had the same floor dimensions as the house itself, but Dad had only put board over the rafters so that the space could be used for storage and fans could be put in the windows at either end so the hot summer air could be pulled out of the area. The basement, however, had been the '60 idea of finished.

Two of the homes like the one I grew up in could fit in the house where I live now.

If the walls could talk, the families that have occupied this "starter" home would know all about me, for the walls hold my memories and the things that happened there made me who I am today.