As I turned back onto the freeway after a quick stop at a gas station, I decided to turn on the radio to listen to some country music. A habit that has increasingly become worse within the past year, I am sorry to say. I don’t know what happened to me. I used to hate country music except maybe some Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, and Taylor Swift when that used to be her thing. The radio began to play a song I’d heard before but not a lot. I later googled it and discovered it was called “The House That Built Me” by Miranda Lambert. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you can listen to it below this paragraph or click here.
It really hit home for me (pun intended). It felt like the perfect song to listen to as I drove seven hours to the little small town where I grew up.
It’s the kind of small town without any stop lights. The kind when you’ve been gone for years and years, come back, poke around every part of town while walking around for a few hours, you still run into people you knew years and years ago—because it’s like nobody ever leaves. I didn’t talk to people for the most part. I sorta hoped they wouldn’t recognize me, and sorta hoped they would. Like when I wasn’t thinking and gave the Safeway cashier my family’s old phone number while buying a pizza Lunchable since my mom still hasn’t changed the phone number to her Safeway account; and the cashier decided to start talking about how she knew my parents years ago. She used to go to my dad who was a doctor at the local hospital and my mom from church. As my dad put it later, “This place is a lot smaller and more hokey than I remember it.”
Truth.
But I kinda take some sort of weird pride in growing up in a town like that.
While snooping around, I decided to send a message on Facebook to my old neighbour. She’s my age. We grew up at a time where kids still ran next door daily and knocked rather than texted each other. We didn’t have cell phones and we played outside a lot. Anyway, she said she wasn’t home, but that it was alright if I walked down the edge of their property to the land behind my family's old property.
So I did.
I drove about a minute or so out of town to the long lonely, “cul-de-sac” in the middle of a bunch of wheat fields. (Speaking of wheat, did I mention that before hitting town, I couldn’t resist the urge to stop on the side of the road and pick a tiny bit of wheat to chew and make into gritty gum just like old times? It’s a totally gross thing to do, but something you kinda do again and again just because. Definitely not gluten-free or trendy or anything like that.) As I turned onto the road, I felt this weird, subtle surge of nervousness, or excitement or something from somewhere in the depths of my unconscious, surface like a tingle up my spine. In all honesty, things were the same almost everywhere I looked, and that’s maybe what made it weird.
I parked my car on the road in front of my old house, next to the largest pine tree at the far corner of the front of our old property. It had gotten so huge—all the trees had—but especially that one. That’s where I buried all the fish carcasses from the fish the boys and I caught with our sticks and fishing line off of the boat docks down at the river. That’s also where we buried our cat Lucky who clearly really wasn’t all that lucky, poor thing.
Sitting in my car, I took off my new walking shoes, and replaced them with my hiking boots while wondering if I was being watched. Who knows, I probably was. Boots tied, I strolled down the property line to the edge of the four acres of property my family used to own. I noticed the short to the ground, long wall of piled up porous lava rock along the back edge of the property. The wall of blood, sweat, and tears. As my dad also later put it, “The perfect home for those dang gofers.” It was child labor practically, you could say. Pretty sure our parents only paid my brothers and I a penny a wheel barrow to help my dad pick rocks so my dad could plant grass. Four acres...But hey, at least I learned not to be afraid to get my hands dirty and work.
You don’t see as much of that kind of rock where I live now. I remember how I used to be captivated by imagining that lava used to run through our backyard while dinosaurs roamed around. I always hoped I might find a dinosaur bone or something. I never found anything but dead gofers, mice and whatever else—still fascinating.
I headed toward the really old, large apple tree that must have been planted by some farmer heaven knows how long ago, before my family ever got there. I always loved that tree. Probably because I always wished we had trees, something I’m glad to have now where I live. Any other trees we had were what my dad planted, so they were small at the time. As I neared the tree, I saw an owl swoop out of it and fly away across the green wetland grass. I remembered the natural “pond” that used to exist there and had since dried up. In the early years we lived there, it used to be so deep we could have gone swimming if it weren’t so boggy. Now, if anything, the ground was just a bit damp.
I lifted my legs high as I walked through the grass to the sage brush area. I could already smell the strong scent of the sage. I used to hate the smell. Now, I loved it. What I still didn’t love was the dead cheatgrass from hell. That day, my socks were destroyed as well as some of the fabric on the insides of my boots. How the heck did I ever willingly endure that on a daily basis as a kid?
In case you’re someone who has never experienced these types of “vegetation” (can you call sage brush vegetation?), any of the bushes you see in the photos in this post are sage bushes. That’s right, I really did take pictures of sage brush and cheatgrass. That’s how nostalgic I was. But you know what’s cooler? I found all the particular spots we used to play as kids. The first obvious landmark was the following “tractors” or “plows”. I actually sent a picture of it to a friend in the area who grew up on a farm and he said they looked to him like “old discs". As he described their use, it sounded an awful lot like a plow. I'll just call them plows. They look like this:
I explored past the boundaries my parents let us explore as a child. Upon turning back, I kept searching in hopes of finding the old spots we used to play. That’s when I saw a pile of dead sage bushes that looked like this:
I immediately recognized this as one of our old "dumps" (cause you know, when you play house you gotta have a dump), surprised that over 10 years later, it was still there.
I began to get really excited and began looking all around for remnants of any forts that we had built from the old wood we found back there. I always wondered what the wood had made up years and years ago. I wondered who had lived there. We would find random things sometimes like an old rusty spoon and an old oil lantern piece. We didn’t find things much after my mom told us that we weren’t allowed to dig there because it wasn’t our land. I never understood why the government (I’m pretty sure it was government land) just abandoned it like that. How were they not interested in it? I found it fascinating. Eventually I found it—pieces of old wood and an old tire—remnants of what used to be one of our forts. I don’t know if the kids who move into our old house moved it and made their own or not, but that was the wood we used.
I also found the old rusty jug that I used to put flowers in:
But I knew this wasn’t the spot. There was a special spot that our main forts were built at. I headed closer to the old “plows” again because I knew they were in that direction. And then I saw something. I knew it was something so I approached it to investigate. About five feet away, I stopped in my tracks and a wave of sentiment came over me. Tears came to my eyes. There it was—the wheelbarrow. The little plastic wheelbarrow we used to play with all the time. Clearly old and broken and destroyed. But there it was. Still there after all this time in the place we had left it.
Yep. It was the spot. I didn’t ball, but I had tears. I think it made me feel like I could still claim the place. I was still a part of it. Though people might not know it, my old playmates and I could still be found in that place. Just like those unknown farmers could still be found in that old spoon, that old lamp, those old discs, that old wood...we had that old wheelbarrow. For once I didn’t care that plastic left in the environment did not decompose. I wasn’t about to pick up that wheelbarrow. I left it there. I didn’t move anything. It belonged there.
There was a ditch we had once built a fort in. I knew the general area it existed and I found it with little effort. We had built a fort in it once and the dog had accidentally walked on top of it and it hadn’t fallen over or broken. We were proud of the sturdiness of that fort. Pro builders we were. Thinking of all of this as I headed back through the wetland grass, I thanked my lucky stars for this piece of my childhood to cherish. For my parents who let us explore and the space to do so.
Heading back up the neighbors property, I looked to my left to see the woman who now lived in my family’s old home watering her bushes—our bushes. “Hello,” she called.
I stopped. “Hi...I used to live here.”
“OH! Hi there! Did you want to come inside?”
Oh man...tears...only a couple, but I was capable of hiding them. “Really? For real?” I said.
To be honest, the inside was not as interesting to me as the outside. She talked and talked about the awful purple tile my mom had had in the master bathroom and the blue carpet that used to be throughout the house. She seemed so fascinated by it that she even kept a few samples of the tile in the storage room. She gave me a piece to keep.
She kept a couple of our old curtains interestingly enough despite her distaste for the other stuff. They still had our old pool table where we used to play Cuban style with my Abuelo when he and my Abuela came to visit from California. They still had our old baseboards. In retrospect, I wish I had asked her if they had found a bunch of dead stinkbugs underneath the baseboards when they ripped up the carpet. I used to kill the stinkbugs and stuff them under the baseboards with a flat-head screwdriver. I didn’t want to have to pick them up after killing them. I don’t think my parents ever knew about that. It’s a shame it didn’t cross my mind when talking to the “new” owner.
In fact, while talking to her, it occurred to me she had lived in that house longer by a couple of years than my family had. Crazy. All in all, I felt the “new” owners had respected the land and the house. She was very understanding of my nostalgia. She seemed to enjoy the history in it.
I saw my brothers’ and my hand-prints and footprints in the cement stairs outside. By that point, my phone had died after all of the sagebrush pictures I had taken, so I didn’t get a picture. But we talked about the neighbor on the other side of the property (not the ones whose property I had walked down) and found that we shared the same hatred toward them. She said she was sure they had poisoned her dog. I said I was sure their dogs had killed my pregnant cat that was now buried somewhere in the back of the property. I told her about our other cat buried under the tree in the front with all of the fish carcasses. That seemed to make her a little uncomfortable. And I told her about how the evil lady neighbor had substituted in my class when I was in second grade and mentioned that the kid who lived across the street and my other friend next door, who were both in my class at school, were her neighbors. She had totally ignored me in class in front of everyone. I never forgot that. I also never forgot how our old dog Dusty had hated her and only her. It felt like justice. I think sometimes smart dogs just know.
She kept asking me if I could tell her something special about that house. I didn’t know what to say. I guess...everything? It’s what I knew when I thought I knew everything—when I thought I knew me. Whatever happened there, the good and the bad, it shaped me. I lived in that town for the first half of my life. And despite some of the changed friends there that I now have to forget (the stuff that I don’t want to talk about) I’m glad for the ones who don’t and for the places that love me the way I love them. I feel like places do that better than anyone.
And I drove away with a hot fudge milkshake from Edna’s, the really old and I’m pretty sure only fast food restaurant in town with insanely overpriced menu items. It had the same old wallpaper inside, the same old everything. Who was Edna originally anyway? I think I just like the fact that people are okay with it all. They aren’t so focused on the “next best thing”. It is what it is and people are fine with it. Maybe they just use their imagination a lot like when they label their town outdoor pool (literally just a pool) with a big sign saying “Waterpark”.
People are funny. And people are complicated no matter how simple they are. And nobody knows it best like the places they inhabit.
Also...wildflowers:
You should blog more.
ReplyDelete:)
Delete