Dreams

I frequently dream that I am back in my childhood home. When I was a kid and after my parents divorced, my mother moved around a lot. Part of the reason was wanderlust, and part of it was that she always thought a new location meant things would be different. They rarely were for very long. I have no doubt that being a single parent is the hardest thing in the world, and when things got overwhelming for my mother she'd pack one or both of us off to live with my father in his small house in a small town in Iowa. As a kid I lived many places, but I only had one home.

The house had originally been my grandmother's. It had been her little love cottage when she remarried late in life. The marriage didn't last long as Grandpa Emil was insane. She ditched the husband, but kept the house. Then when my father divorced, he moved in with Grandma. They shared the house until she died and he bought out his brother and sister.

It was a small, two-bedroom house that sat on a corner lot. It was pink when my Grandmother bought it, but she had it painted white, because that was the only respectable color for a house. I remember when she and my aunts hung new wallpaper in the dining room and living room. It was a green, almost Asian-grass print on three of the walls. On the fourth wall was a bold, gold floral print that took days to hang because the walls weren't square, which made matching the pattern difficult. I remember the day the new pull-out sofa and rocking chair were delivered. Both were immediately covered with coordinating beach towels, to keep them from becoming covered with cat hair.

After my Grandmother died, my father did what he could to maintain the interior of the house, but that really wasn't his interest. He liked to build things. He built fences that marked the division between our yard and the two neighboring yards. He put decorative green shutters on the house. There were at least two old tractor tires that he'd painted white and filled with dirt for flowers. And there was the gazebo.

While it was a corner lot, the official back yard was actually pretty small and Dad filled most of it up with the gazebo. It had originally been intended for picnics and for us to play in when the weather was bad, but it quickly became just a storage shed which Dad filled with bits of scavenged supplies for all of his home-improvement projects.

When we lived with Dad, my sister took over my grandmother's room, and I set up shop in the unfinished basement. If I remember correctly, my father did put down linoleum tile and there was a carpet remnant. It wasn't much, but I have to say that I loved that room. I could move things around, and in the winter the windows would be buried in snow, so the room was always dark. I remember the winter holidays and barricading myself in the basement with my stereo, the old TV, and my round, red transistor AM radio.

When my father died, we sold the house. It was nearly fifteen years before I ever went back. I don't know how many owners there had been since we'd lived there, but most of my father's improvements were gone, as was the enormous oak tree, the roots of which had broken up the sidewalk creating a mini bump that was just right to launch a speeding bike into the air. The house had a new roof, and the sun porch had been enclosed to expand the kitchen. Someone had painted the house brown.

Still, somewhere deep inside me I feel like we will all go back to that house to live. And I visit in my dreams. In my dreams, it's exactly as it always was on Christmas Eve. The tree lit, the floor strewn with torn wrapping paper, and a big pot of chicken and noodles on the stove. There are pounds of fudge in the refrigerator and fresh coffee in Grandma's new electric percolator. My mother, father, and grandmother are sitting at the kitchen table, visiting. And my sister and I would be in our rooms admiring our gifts.