rekkidblogga

St. Francis and Dauphine

On certain days when I have nothing better to do, I make this odd kind of pilgrimage to my old house in East Point - the house where I grew up. I lived there from 1972-81 but the house itself was built in the late 1940s. My mother was the original owner, I think. She raised my sister there with the help of my grandmother, who died before I was born, during the '50s and '60s as a single mother, which was almost unheard of back then.

It's a small house - cramped, even - and back when my mom, dad, Cinnamon and I shared what space there was, you couldn't miss its obvious flaws. Whenever you walked down the central hallway, you had to step over the exposed heating grate in the floor. If you were a grownup, I guess it wasn't difficult. But as a little kid, you couldn't hardly make the giant leap and so you ended up trying to skirt around its edges, burning your bare feet in the winter. Our house sat next to a small drainage ditch that turned into a creek during heavy summer rains and for whatever reason back in the '70s, every summer rain in East Point was heavy. This meant that my mom and dad would spend hours trying to pump flood water out of our already cold, musty, dank, unfinished concrete basement.

Our old hardwood floors were freezing in the wintertime, no matter how high my mom cranked up the heat. Cinnamon's back room, which had been her mom's as a girl and as a teenager, was always drafty because it connected to the basement. The kitchen was so tiny that we never ate meals in there; we ate in the den. Driving by now, I notice that the backyard, which seemed huge and limitless when Cinnamon and I ruled it (OK, when Cinnamon ruled it and I followed her every command), is actually not even half as big as my backyard today.

Whoever owns the house now has let it get in horrible shape. The yard and trees that my parents kept so trim and neat are weedy and overgrown, the trees so unkempt that no sunlight gets in the backyard and the grass there is gone -- dead. Cracking in the corners, the old brick foundation is sagging with age and neglect. No one lives there anymore. It's the same house I remember and yet, it isn't.

There aren't many pipe dreams that I allow myself to hang onto but this is one: I buy back my old house and restore it to its former glory. It wouldn't be fancy -- just comfortable, like it was in the '70s when Cinnamon ran Tracy from up the street all around the backyard, forcing her to play "Obstacle Course" until she finally gave up and went home (which meant Cinnamon won) and I laughed and laughed because Tracy's misfortune meant that I was off the hook for a little while. Or like it was when Cinnamon and I spent entire summer mornings swinging in the backyard, singing "Copacabana" at the top of our lungs, not quitting until we got all the lyrics just right. Or like it was when the older neighborhood girls, Cinnamon and I set up our Kool-Aid stand on the corner where our house stands, St. Francis Avenue and Dauphine Street, selling cherry refreshment to the handsome, uniformed military men who worked at the National Archives building down the street. Or like it was on Halloween night, when we walked all over the tiny, close-knit neighborhood, going from house to house in the first chill of October. I'd love to live there again, to see East Point come back as a thriving little city. I miss my house. It was a friend.

Mainly, these days, I drive by every so often to make sure that my old house is still there. I have this nagging fear that one day I'll find that it's gone and there's no way of getting it back. Cinnamon and I remember the good things about 1457 St. Francis Avenue but once you can't go home again, who else will know? Who else will care?

posted by rekkidbraka @ 12:21 AM