Our First House

"How hard it is to escape places! However carefully one goes, they hold you--you leave bits of yourself fluttering on the fences, little rags and shreds of your very life."
  --Katherine Mansfield


(My daughter called the other day and said she had found her old Kentucky friends on Facebook and she was going to pay them a visit. We lived there for six years and left in 1975. She was in the sixth grade and is now in her forties. After that wonderful weekend she sent me pictures of our old house. It looked just as it did when we lived there. Looking at the picture—I couldn’t help but take a trip down memory lane.)


I remembered so much about that little house. You opened the front door and there was a small entrance where we hung our first wallpaper. Looking ahead you entered the living room. I thought about that Christmas when we decorated the tree. When it was finally done it came crashing to the floor. In another corner there was our magnificent grand piano we stretched our budget to buy. We borrowed six hundred dollars from our insurance to help pay for the used-rebuilt seven-foot grand. My, my how proud we were.


Leaving the living room I thought about the den and remembered the wooden shutters I worked hard all day long to hang right. We spent a lot of time in that room. TV brought in The Munsters and I Dream of Jeannie and Sonny and Cher and even Ernest Angley, our son’s favorite. Turning left you entered the kitchen with its golden yellow trim, which was quite the rage that year. Funny what you remember. Things like the old portable dishwasher someone sold us for $50.00. Or the time we found our aging Persian Jennifer asleep in the frying pan in the middle of the stove.


Down the hall to the right was the bathroom. One day our boy, playing disappear, flushed my wife’s glasses magically down the drain. Next to the bathroom was our L-shaped bedroom. There must have been yellow-gold paint left because all the woodwork in that room too was painted that color. It was in that room that we closed the door and shut out the world.


Leaving the bedroom you turned toward the stairs and walked up the blue-green shag carpet that led to our daughter’s bedroom. Night after night she would call and say she was scared. And one of us would trudge up the steps and sit by her bed. Her instructions were clear: “Look at me. Look at me.” And if we thought she was asleep we would try to leave and she would rouse up and say: “Look at me.”Leaving your daughter’s bedroom you came to a large room that was where our son slept. And I remembered the rocks, the gerbils, the goldfish and jars filled with insects. It was always a mess—but that was his space.

Downstairs I recalled if you walked through the kitchen door there was a tiny porch outside. There was its trellis where the roses never did grow very well but beside the house was where my daisies bloomed each summer. But the centerpiece of the yard was a tall, tall Norwegian pine where the kids played and the dog slept.

Our home was a little white house with dark green shutters and two little doghouses on the roof. There was a tall oak tree in the front…and to the right, attached to the house was the one-car garage. Next-door Kim lived, one of my daughter’s friends. Their family had a huge German shepherd that they kept chained up in the back. My son was scared to death of that dog and would come running into the house yelling, “The Ben Sippit’s out” which translated meant the German shepherd has escaped again.

Holding those photographs my daughter sent brought so much back. That last day we all piled into the car and began to drive away. I remember looking back at the house that was no longer ours. Our first house—how proud we were—how hard we worked—how much we loved that place. The memories still swirl as I remember that little white house on the corner lot on Montgomery Avenue in a small Kentucky town.