The Little House

I knew I’d grown up in a small house, but I didn’t realize how small until after my mom passed on when we were going through the layered contents of the old steamer trunk that sat in our basement for years. Mom’s wedding dress was carefully folded at the very bottom, yards and yards of heavy ivory white satin with a long train, bureau scarves, the metal cashbox that held emergency money, and various odd things like some rough sacklike pillowcases that I suspected had belonged to my grandparents. The trunk itself was a remnant of my grandparents’ past; it had been used when they packed up the family in 1924 and moved from tiny Lafferty, Ohio (today a few miles off I-70, and still a tiny town when we detoured there in 1978 on the way back from California) to Providence, Rhode Island, where Grandpa had been offered a job in a foundry, and still has the brownish, faded 1924 baggage tag stuck haphazardly to its side. One of the more interesting things found in the trunk were the original 1951 house plans, complete with a notation that a coal bin could be fitted into the cellar, if necessary, as the boiler was equipped to burn both oil and coal. The first floor footage was only 782 square feet.

There were days we each had our cozy corners, Mom under the three-way lamp in the armchair, knitting or crocheting, Dad in one corner of the sofa usually asleep, and me, either at the other end of the sofa, surrounded by my lap desk and pens and paper or a book (you had to do something during the commercials), all watching the square, sturdy GE television that one day morphed into a Magnavox "portable" that eventually, happily at Christmas of 1972, finally turned into a color TV. There were other days of housecleaning or rushing around that it seemed there was never room enough.

Granted, we did some living in other parts of the house. The attic, as previously mentioned, acted as a kind of storeroom. The basement, anchored in the center by a big cast iron boiler compartment, was unfinished at first except for a small northwest corner which Dad partitioned off in Masonite in hopes of making wine like his father did. I vaguely remember a big oak barrel in the little room, but the experiment didn’t last long. Still,  it remained “the wine cellar” in nomenclature for years afterward, keeping the Christmas tree intact (Dad didn’t like putting lights on the tree anymore than I do now), with handmade wooden shelves in one corner as an overflow pantry where multiple sale items were kept for storage until needed: canned goods, paper towels, toiletries. The oil tank was neatly against the wall in the opposite corner where it was periodically filled by my godfather (our oil man), with the clothes washer (and later gas dryer) next to it along the wall that paralleled the driveway. Dad later fixed three quarters of the basement with a drop ceiling of acoustical tile, wooden floor covered in inexpensive linoleum squares, and the 1970s de rigueur dark-brown paneled walls. It was downstairs I had my first ever-birthday party—I was twelve—in which the guests were all kids my age rather than a few friends mixed up with relatives. Later Dad also installed our old enamel sink and the old Glenwood gas stove down there so in the still humid throes of September we could can tomato sauce in relative coolness. Our old kitchen table, Mom’s sewing machine, the aforementioned steamer trunk, and the old sofa completed the turnout. Near the wine cellar I had a little space where I kept two bookshelves of hardback books (some were my mom’s) and shelves on the wall which held my rows of paperbacks, plus the old red-maple child-sized old roll-top desk and swivel chair I’d gotten from my cousin Johnny. Flanking one of the book cases on either side were closets that held seldom used clothes like Mom’s and my dressy dresses, bathrobes in summer and sunsuits in winter.

The house itself was that most ubiquitous of New England structures, the Cape Cod, with a small apron of lawn out front; however, since the lot was short and narrow (the width of a one-car driveway, the house, and a green stretch of lawn and flower bed to the side that wasn’t more than three feet wide), the home had been turned 90 degrees—instead of the front door being on the long end of the house, it was on the short end, opening directly into the living room (we called it the parlor). To the back of the parlor were the stairs to go upstairs, and you exited the room at left through the arch to a short hallway, tiled, like the kitchen, with pale yellow with black accents. Mom and Dad’s room was to the left of the parlor, followed down the length of the house by the equally ubiquitous pink-tiled and -painted bathroom, and then the yellow kitchen. My bedroom was opposite the kitchen, and between my room and the parlor were the stairs down to the basement. In the house's original incarnation, the rest of the rooms were wallpapered. No gayly-flowered 50s fashion for us; the parlor wallpaper was a pattern of curves and pediments that would not have looked out of place in a Victorian home. My room was striped pink, green, and silver, and my parents' room was similarly attired but in different colors. Once the wallpaper came down, we emerged into Mom's "beige era." Oh, all the rooms were a different shade of beige, but there it was—Dad and I dubbed it "everlasting beige" and fought it tooth and nail. Eventually Mom gave in: my room turned a pretty sky blue, their room a golden, dark yellow, and the parlor another ubiquitous 1970s color, terra cotta (which matched the fabric on the sofa and chair). It didn't last long: after fifteen years and Dad's death, Mom went back to "everlasting beige" once again.

Tacked on to the back of the house was an small enclosed porch just big enough for three in woven tape lawn chairs which had begun life as a simple square platform. In winter the winds came skidding from Cooney Field across the street and anyone standing on the porch attempting to open the back door rattled their teeth in the cold as they groped for their keys, so a roof was soon added and then walls and windows. In the wee hours of dark mornings, even in the cold winter over the low grumble of the boiler, I could hear the porch door open and then clunk close as the Hood's milkman made his delivery; in spring with the windows open the clink of the milk bottles would add music to the percussion.

Behind the house lay a small lawn, small enough to be manageable when mowing, large enough to fit a small shed, a full-size clothesline (which for at least one year flapped nearly daily with diapers), and even a small vegetable garden up against the old fence which went back decades to when the area behind our house was a racetrack. Mom's rosebush grew against the fence each summer, winding the chain link with tangled thorny vines  that ended in riots of small red roses. In winter I dug paths along the snow with my feet through the yard and then rode my stick horse through the paths, pretending to be Trixie Belden on her favorite of the Wheeler mares, Susie, or Annie Oakley rescuing her little brother Tagg yet again. And in the spring, oh, in the spring, for a few delicious weeks in May, Charlie's unkempt lilac bush draped its fragrant branches over the chain link fence, dripping with heavenly scented armfuls of pale purple lilacs. I never failed to bury my nose in them, even if later I was punished with the mother of all allergy attacks.

The house I remember best at Christmas, sparkling with tinsel and candoliers at the window, and in summer when the relentless heat brought every orifice open and the sounds of the street inside; the basement was for hot summer days; the attic for memories—but the yard I always remember for those brief weeks of spring and the draping lilacs. Surely heaven smells of lilacs...