Memory Album

 

I found a realtor's ad for the house I lived in from kindergarten through eleventh grade, minus two years in the middle. My grandfather bought it and rented it to my parents so I could go to kindergarten when kindergarten was a rather rare commodity in schools at that time. 

Walking through those pictures sparked a lifetime of memories! There was the corner of the yard that used to have bushes with a path through them. I ran through it on the way home from school on days when I had piano lessons and one day I tripped. I fell so hard it knocked the wind out of me. And there was the sidewalk where I would ride my wagon by putting one knee in it and pushing with the other leg to zoom down the side of the house, or ride my bike and see how I low I could go while turning the corner, before I fell one day and took layers off my knee.

Inside was the mail slot into our foyer with the big glass door to keep the chill out of the house. To the left was the living room and I could still see the baby grand piano in the corner that used to hold our giant Christmas tree, wired into the woodwork so four little ones couldn't knock it over. I could see the windows I had peered out of when my mother went out to build a snowman for us since we were too sick to go out ourselves. There was the wall where our aquarium sat, right by the big television set that had converter boxes and rotator boxes on top so we could watch one of three channels.

The sun porch was painted white, but the bookcases were still there from when my father had his office upstairs. The dining room where we ate every dinner and celebrated birthdays and holdidays had different light fixtures, but I could see where the buffet with it's huge mirror had been. My mother hid a brush in one of the drawers so she could do our hair before we left for school.

The kitchen was much different, but there were the windows our neighbor passed in a trouble light through one night when the power was off. I remember sticking my finger in the empty socket as I pulled it in and getting shocked. Under them was the space where our kitchen table sat. We each had our place. My youngest brother sat at the end on a step stool type chair and sometimes the toast would fly out the end of the toaster and slide all the way down to him! I also remembered where the high chair was and the trash can next to it where one of my brothers threw away a match when he got caught playing with fire. My mother was a hero that day, kicking the burning trash can down the steps and out the back door and ripping the curtains off the wall before the firemen came.

The basement still had the room that was once my dad's office when he was a high school teacher grading papers, and the old enamel brick shower we sometimes used in the summer. Even the toilet on its dais was still here, right in the middle of the laundry room!

I could see the second floor bathroom, pretty much the same as it had been, but no longer pink tiled. And I could see into all four upstairs bedrooms, three of which were mine at different times in my life. Each room full of memories from that age when I slept there. The bedspread decorated with dolls from many lands when I was young, the day bed room with the bright green furniture my mother thought a young teen would love, and finally the deep orange painted room of a young girl in high school with her Nasa clock and so many dreams.

I remember sleeping on brush curlers, using Ten O Six on my face, getting ready for dates and standing there looking at myself in my dresser mirror thinking, this is me?

So many memories waiting in those pictures, it felt like a time machine.