mariboulet, 2: childhood homes

[maribou]

The first place I remember living was in Riverton, a very small house in the woods near a river, blueberries all around. I remember playing in the snow outside, and I remember sitting on the neighbours' staircase, playing with a cobbler toy (shoe-shaped piece of wood, bang the pegs into the wood). I also remember rolling my sister off the couch. She was about three months old.
It was a low couch, about 6 inches off the floor, and it was my favorite napping place. So one afternoon I went to nap, and she was in the way. Naturally, I rolled her off. She didn't even wake up, and I was completely confused by the resultant hub-bub.
I hear I learned to read while we lived there too. But I don't remember not being able to read. I remember the first book I read, but not the not-being-able-to before that. I also remember sitting on my Poppy's lap, while he taught me to speed-read - I figure it was about six months later than the actual reading started - but I don't remember the process, only the lap and the pages and the smell of his cigars, and looking out the window at the bird tree.
I suppose his house ought to count as a pre-chronology childhood home, too, since we were there every week.
My Poppy's house was in Tea Hill. It had been a hotel, once, and it was three stories high, full of rooms no one visited regularly, benignly haunted by the ghosts of snakes and bats and hawks that had been stuffed or pickled in earlier biology-professor days. It rose up out of the side of a rolling hill that, when I was so small as what I'm remembering, was covered in piney woods and lupine fields and gardens and ramshackle graying sheds, and blissfully devoid of neighboring property ... all the way down to the red clay seashore. A mile of half-skipping, half-tumbling down the hill, and you could walk out about a mile along the sandbars, when the tide was at its lowest (not that my mother ever let me, but I knew it was possible). You could go all day without seeing another human. It was a kingdom.

We didn't live in the Riverton house very long after my sister was born. Certainly by the time my brother was born 13 months later, we lived in the city. Charlottetown. No city by the standards of Denver, or even Ottawa, but urban in the way the small neighborhoods of classic children's books are. The house was L-shaped, painted red with yellow trim. It was about a hundred years old, a fixer upper my parents never could quite afford to fix up. The lead paint flaked, and I admit to having tasted it once or twice, enticed by a stern parental warning. The second floor verandah was strictly forbidden to us, likely to fall off any time, so we tested it every month or two, one at a time, hearts pounding.
I half-fell through the bathroom floor, when I was about seven. The floor boards were old, and one could see through the cracks between them, and the plastic ceiling beneath, to the kitchen below. It was rather soothing, watching people in the kitchen whilst one used the bathroom. I stood up one day and suddenly found myself immersed to the thigh in old splintered wood. I'm still afraid of plank staircases, if they're new to me.

Despite or possibly because of its dangers, I loved that house. Loved the odd angles and the layers and the wainscoting and the heavy (walnut?) dining room doors that required a running start to open. Loved the back yard and the stand of jerusalem artichokes that stood in for many an imaginary forest, and the vegetable garden. Loved slipping through the loose board in the fence and traveling about the neighborhood between everyone's fences. Loved the 60 year old sidewalks and the 100 year old trees. Loved talking to the crows in the park a block away, and talking to the nuns in the convent across from it - a similar sense of awe pertained to both sorts of conversations. I could still draw a map of that neighborhood, house by house, and give you a fair accounting of who lived where, what they were like, and what important events took place when to whom at what place. Maybe the next time I'm too full of happy to sleep, I shall do so.

Comments

[corivax.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is really cool! You've always been somewhat cardboard to me - an online voice that dind't really come from anywhere, so I'm really enjoying filling in the pieces.

[entelein.livejournal.com]

Yay, I've missed your writing.

Do more.
Hugs for you.

[maribou]

Thank you both. I have a feeling there may be a great deal more where that came from, so it's good to know it wasn't solely self-indulgent.

[eeyorerin]

I am enjoying this muchly, yes.