The Family Home

I grew up on a dead end lane in a working class city. My father planted rose bushes and giant sunflowers and built a white picket fence in the front yard. My grandfather and godmother lived in the big white house beside ours, and Jeannie and Janice--two sisters just about my age--lived across the street. They had a nice father and a mean step-mother. She made everyone take their shoes off in the kitchen and was very strict about the volume of laughter anywhere in the house. All their living room furniture was covered with plastic and no one was ever allowed in there. And worse of all, she made them share one hula hoop one Christmas. They never complained about it, but I remember their eyes were sad on that Christmas day.

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My life on the lane was safe and easy. On summer days I'd sit on Jeannie and Janice's front steps and we'd play with our dolls, or we'd chalk up a hopscotch game on my grandfather's driveway. Sometimes we'd walk a block to the local field, where a recreation person taught us to play softball and make potholders. I'd come home for lunch and head out again until dinner. My mother never worried about predators or speeding cars.

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These days the family home is empty. When my father died 12 years ago, it took a few seasons before the yard began its decline. My mother still raved about her roses, and I pruned and planted here and there, but it was never the same.

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Last July my mother broke her hip will not return again to the home my father and grandfather built with their own hands almost seventy years ago. When Spring has settled, I will begin to clean it out and arrange the repairs it will need before it can be rented out. I will sort and sift through memories that will always live within me as surely as I breathe. The lane is no longer the lane of my childhood. At the last of it, my mother no longer knew her neighbors and there were no children playing there as I did. And sometimes the cars speed too fast coming and going.

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Still, a few weeks ago, in the old desk that is now in my Mother's room at the Rest Home, I came across this picture of my family home. It reminded me why my childhood seemed so right.