The House That Built Me
I had a wonderful childhood. I went to bed each night feeling safe and loved. I woke up every morning to parents who took excellent care of me and all of my sisters.
I grew up in, what I can see now, was a very small house on the prairie. It was the house where my mother was raised, so it was chock full of history. There were three tiny bedrooms upstairs. Except we didn't know that they were tiny. They felt fine to us.
We had air conditioning in one room in the downstairs. The dining room. The coolness edged nicely into the whole downstairs. The upstairs was a sauna all Summer and freezing cold all Winter. We didn't care. It was just...our house. In the Summer, we slept with the windows open and in the Winter, we slept under mountains of blankets.
I never had a room of my own. I shared a bedroom with my sister, C. I never minded. It was actually very cozy. My mother would read us a chapter from a series of books called The Happy Hollisters nearly every night. When there were thunderstorms, I would reach my arm across to my sister's bed and tentatively say her name. She would reach to take my hand and hold it tightly.
"Time to count," she'd say. There would be a flash of lightning and then our little voices would count.
"One mississippi, two mississippi, three miss...." That meant that the storm was nearly three miles away. Little by little, the time between the lightening flashes and the BOOM! of the thunder would get farther and farther away and I would fall asleep.
To this day, I count whenever there is a storm. And every single time, I remember my sister's gentle voice.
I was the third of four daughters. For a very long time, I was the youngest of three daughters and incredibly spoiled. My eldest sister, P, was eight years older than me and motherly. Our mother worked outside of the home and it was often left to her to make sure that my hair was combed, my dress buttoned properly. She tried over and over, unsuccessfully, to try to teach me to tie my shoes. Finally, I figured it out on my own one morning and went to show my father what I had learned.
"I believe your sister will be very glad," he told me. She was.
C and I shared not only a bedroom, but to this day, she and I share a closeness that I have not achieved with my other sisters. There is not one secret that she doesn't know. She is the one that just gets it. When I had dinner recently with my other two sisters and they both proudly reported to me that the only news watched in their homes was Fox News, I knew that I could relay this information to C and she would be just as disgusted as I was. Does it pain me that she is the only person in my family that gets this? Yes. But, having that ONE person to talk to about it has meant a lot to me.
And it hasn't always been this way. My father was a snowflake way before his time. When I was eight years old, two years before he died, he wrote a letter to our city newspaper's "Public Pulse" column. This was a place where our city's residents could spout opinions. My father decided to write a letter claiming that black people were every bit as equal to white people.
He signed his name. Of course, he did. To not sign his name would have been cowardly. The day after his letter appeared in the paper, the phone rang in our home. I answered it and a rough male voice said,
"Your daddy is a nigger lover. He might not be coming home tonight from work, you little cockroach."
I was stunned. But, for reasons that might surprise you. The word "nigger" was not only not permitted in our home, it was considered filthy. Something that only filthy people said. I was so surprised to hear that word that everything uttered next barely registered with me. I stood with the phone against my ear long after the creep had hung up. Then, I found my mother and relayed what the man had said. I was eight. I had no idea what was meant by "he might not be coming home tonight from work." And I didn't much care to be called a bug's name. But, it was the word nigger that horrified me the most.
I don't know what my mother said to my father, but he and I went for a walk the next day and he attempted to explain to me what the word ignorance meant. It stuck. To this day, it is one of my proudest memories of my father. And it is the arrow that I guide myself with. A lesson learned.
Always speak your truth. Never allow yourself to be bullied by ignorant people. ALL people are created equal and should be treated as such.
My father was an incredible role model who died too soon.
I learned a lot from my father about doing the right thing. Even if you stand alone. From my mother, I learned courage.
I never got along well with my mother. Even as a child, I far preferred my father's company to hers. When I had my tonsils out when I was seven, the nurse reported that I was the first child, in her experience, to come out of anesthesia asking for her father instead of her mother.
It was just me. My mother was not a bad person. In fact, she was, in many ways, a wonderful person. My sisters all remember her with intense love and devotion. It wasn't that I didn't love my mother. I did. I just was never sure that it was reciprocated. Once, at the age of 17, as she and I washed dishes together, I worked up the courage to ask her if she loved me. She didn't answer right away and my heart sank. And then she looked me straight in the eye and told me the truth.
"Of course I love you. You are my child. But, honestly? I don't really like you all that much. I have always thought that you were a very strange child. Very odd. And your Dad loved you enough for both of us. He was crazy about you. "
My mother did not lie. And where my father was a gentle, sentimental soul, my mother was a practical, strong woman. She made sure that all of her children had good shoes and warm coats. She was not anyone's pushover, ever. She was a staunch Catholic and could fight a dragon if she had to.
She did. Cancer took her in her 60's but not before she fought it tooth and nail. There is some of her in me. I'm still far more like my father, but there is a bar of steel in my back that she put there. I consider it one of the most loving gifts she ever gave me. She taught me what strength looks like.
Most of my memories clamor all around the house that I grew up in. That tiny cramped kitchen where my mother baked homemade bread, not because she loved cooking (I believe that she honestly hated cooking...) but because my father loved it so much. The basement that was entered through a trap door in the kitchen floor. I remember so many nights seeing her going up and down those steep steps, a laundry basket on her hip. The basement carried a permanent odor of laundry soap and my father's paints that he used when making his many airplanes.
Where did all those airplanes go?
I grew up in a reading home. My mother took us to the library every Saturday morning after the chores were finished. My chores were a constant: I was in charge of dusting the baseboards and chair legs in the house and helping to change the sheets on my bed. When chores were done, we went to the library right before we went to confession at the church.
I lived for the library. I was lost in the Betsy Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. The Beany Malone series by Lenora Mattingly Weber. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. ALL of the colored fairy books by Andrew Lang. Blue. Red. Green. Yellow. Pink. Grey. Violet. Crimson. Brown. Orange. Olive. Lilac. All of them. The All-of-a-Kind family books by Sydney Taylor. The shoe books by Noel Streatfield. Ballet Shoes. Skating Shoes. Dancing Shoes. Theater Shoes. Circus Shoes. And so many more. I would check out seven books, all that were allowed. The books would be thrown into the back seat of the car until after we went to confession at church. I would run in, try to find the priest with the easiest penance record, blurt my sins, say my hail marys and then get back home to get my hair washed and put in curlers for Sunday mass and then....
READ.
Every Saturday night, my sisters and I watched Gunsmoke with my mother, our hair up in curlers, glasses of Vess soda pop and a bowl of potato chips, sometimes...if we were very, very lucky, with onion dip.
Sundays were special. My father was off on Sundays. After seven o'clock mass, we would all sit in the back seat of the car and cross our fingers. If we were lucky, our father would take us to The Blackstone Cafe for pancakes. If not, it was home where our mother (the one who hated cooking...) would make scrambled eggs and bacon. Cornmeal mush for our father.
Sunday was a quiet day but we were a close family. In the Spring, we planted flowers. Often, my father would sit on the front porch or at the kitchen table if it was cold outside, playing his guitar and singing to us. He sang a song about a chicken that I adored. I can't remember even one line from it now.
He would sing Old Shep for my sister, C. A Glen Yarbrough song for my mother, called Rose. We'd all sing along.
That's okay! Rose would say,
Don't you worry none.
We'll have good times by and by,
Next fall when the work's all done......
I had a happy childhood. There is so much of me that was built in that house on Cass Street. Life would go on and life would bring us to our knees over and over, but the love that shone in that house still lives in me.
I had a happy childhood.
I grew up in, what I can see now, was a very small house on the prairie. It was the house where my mother was raised, so it was chock full of history. There were three tiny bedrooms upstairs. Except we didn't know that they were tiny. They felt fine to us.
We had air conditioning in one room in the downstairs. The dining room. The coolness edged nicely into the whole downstairs. The upstairs was a sauna all Summer and freezing cold all Winter. We didn't care. It was just...our house. In the Summer, we slept with the windows open and in the Winter, we slept under mountains of blankets.
I never had a room of my own. I shared a bedroom with my sister, C. I never minded. It was actually very cozy. My mother would read us a chapter from a series of books called The Happy Hollisters nearly every night. When there were thunderstorms, I would reach my arm across to my sister's bed and tentatively say her name. She would reach to take my hand and hold it tightly.
"Time to count," she'd say. There would be a flash of lightning and then our little voices would count.
"One mississippi, two mississippi, three miss...." That meant that the storm was nearly three miles away. Little by little, the time between the lightening flashes and the BOOM! of the thunder would get farther and farther away and I would fall asleep.
To this day, I count whenever there is a storm. And every single time, I remember my sister's gentle voice.
I was the third of four daughters. For a very long time, I was the youngest of three daughters and incredibly spoiled. My eldest sister, P, was eight years older than me and motherly. Our mother worked outside of the home and it was often left to her to make sure that my hair was combed, my dress buttoned properly. She tried over and over, unsuccessfully, to try to teach me to tie my shoes. Finally, I figured it out on my own one morning and went to show my father what I had learned.
"I believe your sister will be very glad," he told me. She was.
C and I shared not only a bedroom, but to this day, she and I share a closeness that I have not achieved with my other sisters. There is not one secret that she doesn't know. She is the one that just gets it. When I had dinner recently with my other two sisters and they both proudly reported to me that the only news watched in their homes was Fox News, I knew that I could relay this information to C and she would be just as disgusted as I was. Does it pain me that she is the only person in my family that gets this? Yes. But, having that ONE person to talk to about it has meant a lot to me.
And it hasn't always been this way. My father was a snowflake way before his time. When I was eight years old, two years before he died, he wrote a letter to our city newspaper's "Public Pulse" column. This was a place where our city's residents could spout opinions. My father decided to write a letter claiming that black people were every bit as equal to white people.
He signed his name. Of course, he did. To not sign his name would have been cowardly. The day after his letter appeared in the paper, the phone rang in our home. I answered it and a rough male voice said,
"Your daddy is a nigger lover. He might not be coming home tonight from work, you little cockroach."
I was stunned. But, for reasons that might surprise you. The word "nigger" was not only not permitted in our home, it was considered filthy. Something that only filthy people said. I was so surprised to hear that word that everything uttered next barely registered with me. I stood with the phone against my ear long after the creep had hung up. Then, I found my mother and relayed what the man had said. I was eight. I had no idea what was meant by "he might not be coming home tonight from work." And I didn't much care to be called a bug's name. But, it was the word nigger that horrified me the most.
I don't know what my mother said to my father, but he and I went for a walk the next day and he attempted to explain to me what the word ignorance meant. It stuck. To this day, it is one of my proudest memories of my father. And it is the arrow that I guide myself with. A lesson learned.
Always speak your truth. Never allow yourself to be bullied by ignorant people. ALL people are created equal and should be treated as such.
My father was an incredible role model who died too soon.
I learned a lot from my father about doing the right thing. Even if you stand alone. From my mother, I learned courage.
I never got along well with my mother. Even as a child, I far preferred my father's company to hers. When I had my tonsils out when I was seven, the nurse reported that I was the first child, in her experience, to come out of anesthesia asking for her father instead of her mother.
It was just me. My mother was not a bad person. In fact, she was, in many ways, a wonderful person. My sisters all remember her with intense love and devotion. It wasn't that I didn't love my mother. I did. I just was never sure that it was reciprocated. Once, at the age of 17, as she and I washed dishes together, I worked up the courage to ask her if she loved me. She didn't answer right away and my heart sank. And then she looked me straight in the eye and told me the truth.
"Of course I love you. You are my child. But, honestly? I don't really like you all that much. I have always thought that you were a very strange child. Very odd. And your Dad loved you enough for both of us. He was crazy about you. "
My mother did not lie. And where my father was a gentle, sentimental soul, my mother was a practical, strong woman. She made sure that all of her children had good shoes and warm coats. She was not anyone's pushover, ever. She was a staunch Catholic and could fight a dragon if she had to.
She did. Cancer took her in her 60's but not before she fought it tooth and nail. There is some of her in me. I'm still far more like my father, but there is a bar of steel in my back that she put there. I consider it one of the most loving gifts she ever gave me. She taught me what strength looks like.
Most of my memories clamor all around the house that I grew up in. That tiny cramped kitchen where my mother baked homemade bread, not because she loved cooking (I believe that she honestly hated cooking...) but because my father loved it so much. The basement that was entered through a trap door in the kitchen floor. I remember so many nights seeing her going up and down those steep steps, a laundry basket on her hip. The basement carried a permanent odor of laundry soap and my father's paints that he used when making his many airplanes.
Where did all those airplanes go?
I grew up in a reading home. My mother took us to the library every Saturday morning after the chores were finished. My chores were a constant: I was in charge of dusting the baseboards and chair legs in the house and helping to change the sheets on my bed. When chores were done, we went to the library right before we went to confession at the church.
I lived for the library. I was lost in the Betsy Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. The Beany Malone series by Lenora Mattingly Weber. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. ALL of the colored fairy books by Andrew Lang. Blue. Red. Green. Yellow. Pink. Grey. Violet. Crimson. Brown. Orange. Olive. Lilac. All of them. The All-of-a-Kind family books by Sydney Taylor. The shoe books by Noel Streatfield. Ballet Shoes. Skating Shoes. Dancing Shoes. Theater Shoes. Circus Shoes. And so many more. I would check out seven books, all that were allowed. The books would be thrown into the back seat of the car until after we went to confession at church. I would run in, try to find the priest with the easiest penance record, blurt my sins, say my hail marys and then get back home to get my hair washed and put in curlers for Sunday mass and then....
READ.
Every Saturday night, my sisters and I watched Gunsmoke with my mother, our hair up in curlers, glasses of Vess soda pop and a bowl of potato chips, sometimes...if we were very, very lucky, with onion dip.
Sundays were special. My father was off on Sundays. After seven o'clock mass, we would all sit in the back seat of the car and cross our fingers. If we were lucky, our father would take us to The Blackstone Cafe for pancakes. If not, it was home where our mother (the one who hated cooking...) would make scrambled eggs and bacon. Cornmeal mush for our father.
Sunday was a quiet day but we were a close family. In the Spring, we planted flowers. Often, my father would sit on the front porch or at the kitchen table if it was cold outside, playing his guitar and singing to us. He sang a song about a chicken that I adored. I can't remember even one line from it now.
He would sing Old Shep for my sister, C. A Glen Yarbrough song for my mother, called Rose. We'd all sing along.
That's okay! Rose would say,
Don't you worry none.
We'll have good times by and by,
Next fall when the work's all done......
I had a happy childhood. There is so much of me that was built in that house on Cass Street. Life would go on and life would bring us to our knees over and over, but the love that shone in that house still lives in me.
I had a happy childhood.
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