Honestly, this picture looks like it comes out of some book from the 1930s that would go on to talk about how my grandparents lived in their little home with no air conditioning, spending their evenings on the porch over a game of checkers as they swatted flies. The poorer history of the post-Civil-War-South. A page of a history book.
But, actually, that picture was taken in 1985 and I think that’s me waving from the porch. The house belonged to my great-grandfather, affectionately known as “Daddy Bert”, who had passed away a month after I was born. The little four-room, one bath and a hall where doorways converged still belonged to the family and we lived there for about six months after we moved to Tennessee while my parents looked for a house. I don’t know when it was built, but I don’t think my grandmother grew up there, so sometime after she married in the 50s. The bathroom was not original to the house. As my great-grandfather got older, my grandmother and her brother finally convinced him that a bathroom inside would be safer than going to the outhouse. But to me it looked ancient because it had a clawfoot bathtub. My memories of the house are few but colorful: our dog Fred getting badly hit by a car, the neighbor across the street taking me on a horseback ride around the house, the closet that we could walk through to my parents’ bedroom, the bugs that covered the kitchen floor once, the cicadas that plagued us for probably a week or two but I’m pretty sure it was a whole year, casting our fishing rods from the porch, a huge and deadly snake my dad found when removing an old tire from the backyard, and my cat Desi letting herself in and out of the house by climbing the front screen door and maneuvering it far enough that she could drop through to the other side. The things I don’t remember are no air conditioning during a Tennessee summer (we lived there from March and into August) although I do remember a lot of time at the pool, and the rabid fox we were warned about so my dad tried to teach my mom to shoot his gun. She can’t hit the broad side of a barn, though, so he put a hoe by the door in case she needed to protect herself and us girls.
In August, before I started Kindergarten, we moved into what we’ve since called “the rock house”. It's hard to tell in this picture, but the whole facade of the house was grey rocks:
Sadly, this house is no longer there. A couple of years after we moved in, an elementary school was built up the hill behind us (I would start third grade there). Before we moved, the school board wanted a right-of-way from us so they could use part of the property as a bus entrance/exit. Since we were moving, we told them to ask the next set of owners. I’m not sure what the decision was, but the last time I saw the house there was said entrance/exit in place. I think the story is the school eventually wanted all the land, got it, and tore the house down. I still haven’t figured out why.
Anyhow, I lived in this house on Franklin Road for over three years, which held the record until we moved in Londonderry, New Hampshire when I was twenty. I would start Kindergarten, learn to ride a bike, have sleepovers, have two siblings (Daniel and Sally) join our family, and generally just enjoy the ages of five to eight. As you can see, the house was a Cape Cod-ish kind of house. Katey and I had the whole upstairs to ourselves. On one side was our bed, dresser and closet for our clothes. One of eaves under the window was there, which made a good play area. The other side was our playroom, gymnasium, kitchen, library, classroom, art room…whatever game we were in the midst of. We had our toy kitchen and table set up on one end behind some of the supporting beams where we got into trouble mixing perfume, powder, water, and fingernail polish. When we first moved in, there was another eave we could play in but my parents had a second bathroom put in where that was. The rest of the room was where we made huge messes and got into big fights when Mom told us to clean them up.
The stairs from our rooms led were enclosed and led straight into the kitchen. The downstairs went around in a great circle, which was tons of fun as we could chase each other. Facing the house, on the right were the two bedrooms (my parents and our younger siblings) with a bathroom between and all of them led into a hall space where I would stand on my head because the walls were empty of furniture. The front of the house was the living area and the dining room was to the left between it and the kitchen in the back. There was a real fireplace and it always felt like we had plenty of space. Of course, I was a kid, so everything seemed big. Including the yard.
Today I’m not sure that yard was as huge as I remember, although the property itself was at least a few acres. We had a field to the side and behind us we didn’t play in. There had once been some outbuildings in those fields, and where the old barn had been is where we put our garden. The front yard was a good size, the house a distance back from the busy street. The backyard was fenced in with a chain-link fence and seemed huge as we played kickball on one end and had our swingset on the other. It sloped downhill and our favorite game was throwing pretend coconut bombs from the copse of trees on the top down on the “pirates” running up the hill just like in Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson.I think the rule was we had to stay within the fence, although it was okay if I jumped it get a ball we kicked over into the field. And that didn’t always stop Katey from scampering over to Mrs. Mayberry’s next door. She really was a great neighbor.
In a lot of ways, I consider that rock house my “childhood home” even though I was only eight when we moved away. But it was such a fun place to live, and I have a lot of good memories. Besides, Tennessee is where my family has lived since the 1770s. It’s home.
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