Houses with the Shine Worn Off

Earlier this week I got an email from a friend, telling me about a website.  You could type in childhood addresses and see a current, live photo of the house.

Termites have probably won the battle with a few of the houses I grew up in; some we didn't live in long enough for them to hold more than a shadow of a memory with me, but there are two. I suppose a psychologist could give good reasons why they stand out from all the rest. I just know I loved them - and the years spent there - more than any others. We moved into the first one when I was about 8 or 9, and stayed until I had just joined the ranks of teenager.

Memories that flooded, when the photo showed on the screen, seem as fresh as yesterday. Roller skating on the driveway, with the key looped through a ribbon tied around my neck; catching crawdads in the ditch and building forts from the trees left over after Christmas; learning the sad truth about Santa, dancing all over the couches to Baby Elephant Walk and piano lessons from Mrs. Wiggins who lived down the street and whose little boy died. The ice cream truck that drew us kids to the streets every day, playing music that sounded like what I imagined a circus would. I saw the tree in our front yard - home base for nighttime games of Hide 'n Seek that included the entire neighborhood. As I traveled up and down the street with the cursor I saw the culdesac where Pepi lived. Pepi the big, scary dog that tore my brother's leg open when he tried to ride by with his newspapers strapped to his bike. I still remember that the tear was in the shape of an L. I went from child to young girl in that house, so leaving behind my Barbies and Thumbelina when we moved was probably appropriate, but given the choice I would have kept them.

The website showed the Erwin's house, right across the street.. They were the only family in the neighborhood that had more kids than we did. How did they all fit in that tiny house I didn't know was tiny? Was the neighborhood that shabby when we lived there, or have forty years just worn the shine off everything that's visible to the naked eye? That's a question for adults, not little girls 8 years old.

Pulling up the picture of the house on Emile, my home when I was too young to tie my own shoes, I was surprised to see people. A black man sat on the steps with a little boy, also black. The steps my siblings went up and down to walk to school. The pecan tree I've revered in my memories is gone, replaced by a sad little sapling. As I scrolled up and down the street I saw houses with windows boarded up, yards overgrown with brambles, abandoned cars and other signs that most people who live there have a lot of month left after the paycheck runs out, if there is a paycheck at all.

Our neighborhoods might have been segregated but the schools were not. I still remember several girls in my class, trying to teach me to do double dutch jump rope at recess. I remember their knobby hair, sticking straight out at each side of their heads in fat braids that had many baubles on them. It was a sharp contrast to my yellow curly hair and fair complexion. Not that we cared about the color of our skin - we left such things to adults. I don't know if they never came home with me because we already had so many kids of our own, or that you just didn't do such a thing. If a black family lived on Click Drive I don't remember them. It seems to me when I lived on Emile there were no black families anywhere near us, but then I was little and so was my world.

I looked at the black man sitting on the porch with his little boy, in that worn-out house, in that worn-out neighborhood and I wondered. If I stopped by, walked up those wooden steps and introduced myself, if I told him I'd lived there as a little girl, would that endear me to him, or separate us more? No answers, just deep questions.