Exercise Four: Childhood House

Hi everyone,

I'm a newbie, so this will be my first post with you guys. I found out about your group, and e-mailed Christa to join. I've spent the past few days lurking and reading everything! Can't wait to get to know you all.

Here's my first GOYAW contribution, penned through my splitting day-after-memorial-day-hangover:

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The real attraction at Grandma’s house was not Grandma. And it certainly wasn’t Grandpa, whose three-martini mornings and rants at talk radio made him pretty much a non-entity in our summertime visits.

No, the reason my brother and I dressed in school clothes and swallowed our Dramamine for the big plane ride each summer was for the little country house. Perched on a slight rise in the undulating Virginia hills, it only looked simple and austere. Plain white clapboard covered its two-story frame, leaving gaps for thick windows, wavy with age. A run-down sagging porch slumped, defeated, against the foundation. Bushes and wild grasses pushed in close to the old home, as if seeking protection from the fields of emptiness around it.

But inside never felt empty. Followed by Granny’s half-blind dog, who tended to lift his leg whenever and wherever the spirit moved him, we would giggle at old photos of our mother as a toddler in the bath. Bunch yellowed lace drapes on our head to play bride. Run a grubby finger over the dusty, gold-edged china, which, like Dickens’ Miss Havisham’s, was always set out precisely on the unused dining room table, enjoyed only by the errant spider. And then, as lunchtime approached and our grandfather would begin ranting at the radio in the kitchen, we would sneak over to his recliner and filch moist green pistachio nuts from his private stash: popping them open and spitting shells at each other, devouring the fresh tangy meat. Once, I read one whole year of old Reader’s Digest magazines in a single lazy afternoon, stretched on my belly in a sunbeam sneaking in through the old bay windows, which bleached the carpet and stained the framed photos yellow.

But on days Grandpa had a five-martini morning, we went upstairs. Up a twisty wooden staircase, lined with mildewed military certificates hung crookedly in three-penny frames, were three small bedrooms, each overstuffed with dark Victorian furniture and Turkish rugs. This was where the ghosts roamed at night, where my cousins and I – piled up in a double bed like a pile of puppies – would wield an old flashlight for protection from the mysteries of the dark corners and branches scratching on the warped glass windows. In the day, the old armoires dropped their threatening nighttime façade, and became, instead, perfect places for hiding or digging through decades of old fashions: hats crusted with little pearls, gossamer-thin scarves, a mangy fur stole. Memories of a time when Grandpa was a mustached military officer and Grandma was a thin dainty arm ornament. A time when the empty fields were promises, and the house a dream come true.