I grew up in a small home. It was even smaller than I thought, a common mirage, but by any standards, it is close quarters. My earliest memories of my parents, my sisters, are from this house. In all the years since those were created, sewn together with all of the memories since, I have held the picture of this little house in my mind.
The front porch is cast concrete. The steps have rows of small raised squares on the treads, perhaps a safety feature but really designed for young boys to drive Matchbox cars on.
I leapt from this porch and ran down our street to play with friends or to go to the store for my Mom. Rolled snowmen in this yard. Piled leaves here. My Dad strung Christmas lights on this frame.
Tiny living room, a couple bedrooms and a cramped dormer upstairs. My parents started their family here, in modest circumstances, and filled the rooms with children. For some of the time my Dad’s family lived with us, which pushed the limits of the architecture.
It was a small house which expanded to take us all in. It became a living thing, a part of the family, groaning as we stomped up and down its stairs, banged its doors, creaking good naturedly as we rattled the windows with music and crying and laughing.
There are pictures that do the house justice, showing rooms overflowing with smiling people, parties, babies, food, glowing light. A giant house, stretching beyond its potential to take in all these people, all this life, growing as we grew.
Now it is shrunken to its real size, the one drawn on an architect’s plans, fallen back to shingles and lumber and nails, whatever life there was in it, left now with the people who lived there. I don’t dwell on what it has become, but from time to time I go by to see it, and as sad as it is to watch the decay, I recognize that the house is not what it was to us.
It is a city neighborhood, with sidewalks, a luxury that stingy developers ignore nowadays. The sidewalk that carried me to the ends of my boundaries, and sometimes a little beyond. Now they are cracked and heaved, mangled by roots and frost, but still a trademark of their time, an era where people who lived on the street were given a place to walk, to meet their neighbors, to wait for their children to rush for Halloween treats.
Trees line the streets, relatives of those in the nearby parks, bits of nature in the concrete and blacktop. In summer they stretch across Barth Street, reaching to the branches of their peers, forming a leafy arch over the little neighborhood.
Some of the houses are still well kept but none are unscarred. There are signs that people care about where they live, but it is a battle. Scavengers roam the streets, stripping the siding off houses as high as they can reach. When a home goes empty they attack like cancer.
The neighbors I knew have been gone for decades. The witch next door who might have turned me to a frog if I had run across her grass again. The family with the wagonwheel in their yard so I could remember their last name. My friend Larry the Wiggler. The people down the street who had a TV, who invited us in to watch the Wizard of Oz.
The house is not always on my mind, it rests in the periphery, close enough if I want to see it, but not in a place where I am constantly reminded of it. I know I can turn off Mackin and go one block to see it. And some days I do. But it has become time to say goodbye.
The driveway is overgrown with grass, shrubs almost closing the gap between the houses, so you can barely see the garage, listing behind the house. It is tired. There is no old Buick to give it courage. No toys or bikes to give it purpose.
Looking at the house makes me sad because it is abandoned, because its reason for existing has been lost. It is not the home we lived in. We took that with us when we moved. It is still with me today. I have images, strangely tangible and fresh, of this house and our family there that made it the home, and that is bolder in mind than the tattered shell on Barth Street.
This house is sewn in the quilt of memories, the people and places in my life, patched together so that I can hold them up and look at them, as they were. For me now the memory is more important than the sagging husk of a house. I have grieved, and paid my respects, and left with the gifts the place held for me.
Hope this finds you moving on,
David