I have a memory of running home from Kindergarten and watching my feet as my Kelly green bellbottoms with colorful embroidered flowers kicked out in hypnotic leaps. The sky around me a cloudless gray of a late spring in early afternoon, the air warm and silent.
I followed the rhythmic fall of my steps past the house on the corner where a recluse lived hidden away behind low hanging trees and an unkept garden. I ran past the garage where a race car that looked like an insect sat in the driveway, to the street where I would often say good-bye to my neighborhood friend.
“See you later Alligator.”
“Aftewhile Crocodile.”
On I bound and hurried past the short alleyway where the axe murderer lived, directly across from Mrs. Kellerman’s residence with her Patch the Pony sign in her window.
“Neigh, neigh, Patch the Pony says stay away from strangers.”
Breathing hard and red faced I sped past Mrs. Clatterbuck’s who was 99 years old and lived on her own in a crooked, weathered house that still had an ancient potbellied stove in her living room and the antiquated leather shoes of small children born many decades before on her dining room table.
Finally, in a last gasping leap across the cobblestoned street I would reach our home. Home, resplendent in its restfulness and warmth, protective of its many ghosts and guarded by the sigil of change, a many limbed magnolia that grew in our front yard and declared each year the end of winter and the triumphant return of spring in glorious pink blooms of thick, protective petals.
My parents bought our house in 1973 the year I was born for twelve thousand dollars. They didn’t have a mortgage but paid the owner something like one hundred dollars a month for many years. It was a white two story craftsman style dwelling with a balcony and a closed in front porch located near the downtown area. My mother says she moved our entire house piece by piece, pregnant and in the hot summer sun by walking items from her old apartment a mile away to our new home with my six year old brother at her side.
Around the time our home was built in 1890, there were just 3,094 inhabitants in Marion, Iowa growing to nearly 20,000 by the 1990’s as old farms were bought up and the town spread into singe story ranch style homes with colorful siding. Rising up hills and sloping into curves of sameness. Our side of town became the place where the older and less affluent populations lived, but it was the best side. The houses were more grand and the yards more expressive, radiating with the vivid orange of tiger lilies, ferns that looked like ostrich feathers, tangled grapevines that you could slip under to hide, walnut trees and spirea hedges blooming with white “bridal wreaths.” It was landscaping from another century when yards were more than just a neatly cut lawn drowned in chemicals to keep the weeds out. Eventually the neighbors on both sides of us killed the ferns, chopped down the walnut trees that were ruining the roof of their garage and uprooted the grape vine that was a natural barrier between our yards but happened to fall on their side of the property line. The brutality of mankind mired in the need to control, the fear of standing out and the desire for balance exterminated the florae in the quest for a yard that looked like a golf course.
Our house was in a crumbling state when my parents purchased it and it continued to be that way for many years. I can remember the carpet, so threadbare that you could see the rotting wooden floor beneath it and the kitchen fuse box for the electric that would spark each time you changed the fuse which looked like the base of a lightbulb on one end and a flat glass head like an oversized screw on the other. My mother would place the fuses and then use a wooden broom handle balanced over her head to push it in place to keep from being shocked.
The kitchen still had a door in the floor that you could pull up with a brass handle and descend wooden rickety steps to a dirt lined root cellar which had acted as a place to store food and in case of emergency to take protection from one of Iowa’s many tornadoes. It was frightening full of cobwebs, creeping insects and the soggy smell of mold. We were sure if we ever had the guts to dig we would find skeletons just below the clay and soil surface.
The bathroom was a converted walk in closet with a beautiful porcelain, claw foot bathtub and a toilet that was constantly threatening to fall through the floor. The original toilet had been in the backyard in the form of an outhouse and seemed to had been in general, not just a place to relieve oneself but also a place to throw broken crockery and other trash. We even found a mysterious well that was lined with green and brown antique liquor bottles while tilling the soil for a garden.
The stairs leading to the upstairs bedrooms were steep and narrow with one angular, wide step in the crook of a corner where magazines and old books would collect. I would sit on the bottom steps next to a low window that was always cracked and covered in packing tape to keep the glass pane from falling out and teach myself sign language from a book about Hellen Keller or stare desirous at tattered catalog of decorated cakes.