Writing of Home(s) 1989 or 90

August 21, 2012 at 6:27pm

     We are far from wealthy, but here lately we seem to be collecting houses. We lived comfortably for 32 years in a cramped little suburban home with one bathroom, and raised our family there, and none of us seemed to mind stepping over each other. We can't let go of it we say. Too many memories. A few years ago we inherited my husband's boyhood home, which is a farm house sitting on a hill in Ohio. We mused about making it into an antique shop someday.When our retirement years arrived, along came the thought of getting a summer home up north. So we bought a place in the northern part of our state. The children began to tease us, because it seemed we were involved in an expensive hobby. Then we surprised them even more by taking off for Florida and traisping around down there looking at villas.

     My friends started giving me cast iron houses to use as door stops and little David Winter cottages. Those houses line my mantle along with the pictures of our grandchildren. 
     .Many of the stories I write, are about my early childhood, so I decided to put a picture of my birthplace on the mantle with all of the other houses. I found a pretty little frame and proudly placed it there. Looking at it keeps me humble.   It is an unpainted shack in Tennessee, and my seventeen year old mother gave birth to me there and scrubbed it, and shined it, and watched her baby take her first steps on those floorboards.   When I was two, we moved away from that place, but the little house has never moved very far from my heart.  What you can't see in the framed picture, is my grandfather's house. It was big and painted white and had a swing on the front porch. Many pictures were taken of the family on that porch. Very few were taken of the unpainted shack.

     We always thought of that big house as Pappy's house, and the unpainted shanty as the sharecropper's home he provided for his workers.   But our grandfather was a tenant farmer who rented his house and his land from Mr. R.J. Brock.   Mr. Brock, was a rich man who lived in town with his wife, Ethel.   She wore high heels every day, and intimidated the farm women who wore bonnets and chopped cotton in the fields with the coloreds.

     The sharecroppers who lived in the house where I was born, were always colored in the early years. A joke my grandmother told on my mother was that she was so anxious to move into her own house, that when her father told her she could have the sharecroppers place, she didn't even wait to have the tiny house fumigated.
     The last time I saw that little cabin was about twenty years ago and it was flat to the ground.   Mammy and Pappy's house wasn't much better.   It needed paint and new screens and it made all of us cry when we saw it.    By contrast, the next farm house to my grandfather's still looked wonderful.    It belonged to a family by the name of Coats, and I reckon that is the reason why it had held up so well.   You see they owned their own place.   Mr. and Mrs. Coats didn't have to "ask nobody for nothin'," as Daddy would say.  
     They were independant and in our view, wealthy.   Their children went to high school and they were never sweaty in their clothes.   Mrs. Coats smelled like powder and she spoke in a low voice, with a sweet and pleasant tone like the grandfather clock in her hallway.    Her house was cool even on the hottest days.

     When we left Tennessee we lived in the projects near the shipyards in Charleston, South Carolina.   Daddy covered pipe in the big ships with a new and wonderful product called asbestos.    Mama thought she was living in a castle.    She had running water right in the house and cement floors just like the front porch of Mr.and Mrs. Coat's place.

     The rest of my life was spent moving from house to house, state to state.   We lived in the upstairs apartments of old couples in Savannah Georgia, and with a crippled up midget and his sister in a small town in Tennessee.   We lived in a third floor apartment building on Lafayette Street in downtown Detroit and in an unfinished shell of a house in the suburbs.   
     In Kentucky we lived in a converted chicken coop that Daddy covered with tar paper.    Mama had to walk a mile to the well for her water that year, and Daddy had to try and make a living at Buck's body shop because farming just didn't pay as well as being an asbestos worker.    
     All of this moving around, living in different houses and attending a different shool each year, taught me that I could nest anywhere.   I often think I am like the snail.     I simply strap on my back pack, which is shaped like a shark's eye shell, and plod along.    I hope the words I leave as a trail are like the glistening trail she lays.    A snail's trail is so protective of her underbelly, that she can travel along on something as sharp as a razor blade and never cause harm to come to herself.

     I have occasion to visit some of the houses I lived in, and a couple of them are still standing, but most have been used for kindling, or used for fill to make a parking lot.    One thing I learned from growing up the way I did, is not to put too much store in tangible things, and never hesitate to head on out on the highway in search of a new place to lay your head. Our Father's house has  many mansions......And I don't think I've lived in my last one yet.