Posts from ‘Childhood’
The Box in the Closet
When Diana discovered she was an orphan, she immediately realized she had to make some changes in her lifestyle.
She studied the white piece of paper, it’s black ink faded to gray due to time and bad photocopying. Mother, she read, of medium height and weight, quiet, pleasant, brown hair, brown eyes. Her eyes moved down the page. Father also of medium height and weight, serious with a pensive demeanor, black hair, brown eyes. Then, slowly, as if fearing the words had suddenly changed in the last five minutes, she read the next line.
Legal Status: Orphan. Continue Reading
Christmas morning, southeastern New Mexico, 1968. Vicki knocked on our door at 8 o’clock sharp. Our mother let her in, just like she had done the previous year. Alice, Jean and I watched in irritation as Vicki crawled through our holiday bootie, nice things like Barbie dolls and pogo sticks and new sets of water paints. Vickie “ooh’d” and “aah’d” over the gifting wisdom of our parents as she sat down to play with our wonders.
My sisters and I didn’t like Vicki touching our stuff because she was a grubby 9-year-old waif who ran around our neighborhood looking so poor that it embarrassed us. She stank of sweaty feet and bean-farts and we were sure that she was the one who’d spread lice through Monterrey Elementary last spring. Above her sooty face sat tangled strands of thin red hair and her blue jeans were shiny from weeks of compressed dirt.
Throughout the year, Vicki would wander up to our end of the long street, but she had no friends there except for our mother, who, upon catching a glimpse of her standing alone on the curb, would insist that one of us play with her. As I was the youngest in my family and Vicki’s age, I was made to do the unfortunate deed. Continue Reading
There were a lot of things I liked about my grandma’s house. I liked that it was the biggest house I’d ever been in. It had a kitchen, a dining room, a front room, a parlor, a sick room, and a bathroom. It had two stairways to get to the upstairs where there was a maze of four bedrooms, no bathroom or hall. You walked through one bedroom to get to the next. It had great hiding places where I could stay huddled until a cousin called, “Ollie ollie oxen free!”
I liked how Grandma’s house smelled. The kitchen smelled like spices and the basement smelled like burlap bags, walnuts, and 3-in-One oil. Any one of those aromas today takes me immediately back to Granddad’s side, hammering walnuts in that basement.
I also liked the location. Grandma’s house was two straight blocks down the sidewalk from my house. My school was two blocks from my house and two blocks from Grandma’s. The sidewalks made a triangle that I mostly lived within. The thing I liked best about the location was that my aunts, uncles, and dozens of cousins inhabited many of the houses within that triangle. The two safe blocks down the sidewalk meant I could walk, run, skip, ride my scooter, peddle my bike, skip rope, or roller skate all the way, back and forth, at will, since about age five. Continue Reading
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