Chapter One: Moving on Up

It all started innocently enough somewhere near the summer of 1969.

What a terrible opening line but it fits. It was all innocent. We were all innocent.

I think it is safe to speak for all of us and say what we were about to experience was never even the slightest flicker of a thought in any of our minds.

I had lived in the house on Justin Street for my entire life; all eight plus years. With my older brother and two older sisters I had heard the stories often about them growing up while it was being built. My industrious father built the house himself for his new wife, and as you can imagine an endeavor like that took time. I particularly recall one story about a rainstorm when the roof wasn’t quite yet finished which led to hijinks with the suddenly indoor slip and slide that appeared in the kitchen. All of their memories were there and so were all of mine.

I learned to walk there, cross a street there, ride a bike there. I started school while living there. All of my friends were there. It was my safe place and my refuge. So imagine the surprise when my father announced that we were moving.

The fear and uncertainty of the move was mitigated somewhat for me by the fascinating place we would be moving to. It was literally just down the road so it wasn’t all that foreign. It was also a brand-new tract house in a development of what were, for all intents and purposes, the 1970’s equivalent of today’s McMansions.

The large spilt level had been the model home for the development and as such was decked out to the max with all of the lavish touches of the day: a huge yard, built in gas barbecue on the spacious entertainment ready patio, an above ground redwood decked swimming pool, green, red and gold flocked wallpaper throughout the house and a Minute Man statue in the middle of the front lawn complete with musket. I was thrilled about the pool, of course, but I was equally thrilled and fascinated with the wallpaper. Oh that wallpaper! Velvet for Pete’s sake. Surely we were moving on up in the world.

Looking back, it’s easy to see the signs were there all along. But to us, the innocents, there was nothing untoward just the mayhem that moving house brings. Boxes gone missing that suddenly were there again, talking to the person you swear is there that really isn’t. The crazy door knobs that had no locks but sometimes would lock. Nothing strange that being in a new house and the stress that goes with it couldn’t explain.

If you counted the basement as a level we now had a four-level house. That’s a lot of space and a lot of stairs. Strange stairs. That goes for the hallways too. Normal looking hallways but strange nonetheless.

And then there were the shadows.

There’s No Place Like It

A friend of mine was telling me about her excitement going back to the “old neighborhood” to relive the good old days. As is usual in these situations, “home” was nothing like she remembered.

One of the few times I have been back “home”, the house that my father built shortly after my parents were married came on the market. Being the youngest I only lived there until the summer between 3rd & 4^th  grade. Of the many houses we lived in since, it is still the one in my memories as “home”. Anyway the house came on the market and with my sister’s Real Estate license we got the keys and went for a visit. Besides being 10 times smaller than I remember it, it brought back so many memories…ones that are so vivid even as I type.

The house was vacant when we saw it which just ramped up the eerie tone of the visit. It was like walking into the house the afternoon of the day we moved out. Other than cleaning up I sincerely doubt the subsequent owners did anything to change the interiors. All the fixtures, colors, wallpapers were the same. A testament to my Dad’s good work.

All of the windows in the dining room and “play room” had hardwood window sills and I could not believe my eyes when I saw the teeth marks in them. Those were mine! An unfortunate relic of the past when I was tall enough to peer out of the windows but my mouth was just the same height of the sills. Based on the enjoyable sensation I got from chewing on the wood of a pencil, the sills didn’t stand a chance. Why they hadn’t been sanded out or something I do not know. Heck I think the dent I made in the hall closet door with my tricycle (!) was still there!

But the rooms were smaller then I remembered. The towering staircase to the 2^nd floor was ¼ the size of the one in my memory. Even the vast yard which to me was my own Central Park was a run of the mill suburban yard. The evergreens that my mother planted and spent summers caring for were gone. As were her pampered Rhododendrans.

The tree I crashed my sled into was gone and the sand pile where many hours were spent digging to China, was now green lawn. None of that dimmed my affection for the place.

This is the street where I learned to ride a bike; my sisters old pink “girl’s bike” Schwinn with training wheels. It is also where I fell over onto and squished the neighbor kid one of the first times the training wheels came off.

At the end of this same street, grew wild blackberries. On hot July days if my grandmother was visiting, she would take me down there to do some picking. I’d usually have an old washed out ricotta cheese container to hold the bounty. They didn’t have Tupperware back then. Most would make it into the container, but I had my fair share of the hot from the sun, sweet berries right there. When we’d get home they’d be chilled til later when they were served up with a spoonful or two of sugar sprinkled all over them.

Even though the saying is really true that you “can’t go home again”, I often muse about acquiring that place and maybe even retiring there. My sleepy, somewhat rural hometown of my youth is that way no longer. It is a thriving, BUSY, happening place. But that house will always be a bastion of my memories, a museum of my youth. I wouldn’t mind being curator for a while.