1984 finally.
The magical year.
The year I’d been waiting for since I was a teenager.
The year I thought might never come.
But there it was and…there we went.
The house was empty, the van was gone with practically everything we owned and the cars and drivers were ready to go.
I took the ceremonial last walk alone through the house.
I looked at the field stones covering the family room wall with the huge arched fireplace opening.
We’d picked out and placed each big, beautiful stone on that wall ourselves. The huge distressed piece of timber we found and used as a mantle was anchored above the middle of the fireplace. It held four large frames with photos of the four little ladies who lived in that house, but it it held nothing now. It was empty.
The hearth a thick, wide piece of cement; oh so many times I sat there on a pillow reading, listening to music and feeling the warm.
Many nights when everyone was sleeping, I stood in that room and stared out the window at the beautiful snow falling.
The house would be dark, lit only by the huge crackling fire.
Sometimes I’d listen to soft music and sometimes I’d just stand quiet in the still and think.
Sometimes I cried.
The cute little room that was actually good for nothing but a small aquarium and a bar for my husband divided the family room and downstairs bathroom.
The downstairs bathroom had two cabinets that my husband made, they were open and looked so naked with nothing to hold.
Then up the 4 stairs to the living room; the living room that stayed empty for two years.
My girls did cartwheels in that room, we danced in that room.
Our first Christmas Tree was in the middle of that room and went way high to the top of the tall ceiling.
That was the year I slipped a Valium into my husband’s beer as he was high up on a ladder and the squealing little girls below were unnerving him.
Later, we all danced around that beautiful, tall tree, including their VERY MELLOW dad!
Down one step to the dining room and the big long shiny dark pine picnic-table kind of dinner table and long benches.
Oh how their dad complained when they sat up on their shoes, the buckles made scratched imprints on the soft wood. How awesome was that? Their little shoe buckle scruffs on the benches forever. I loved it.
The funniest moment for 5 out of 6 sitting at the dinner table was the time their dad grabbed the Good Seasons Dressing bottle, didn’t hold the top secure, took one big shake and Homemade Italian Dressing shot out all over the entire wall behind him……all over!
There was a little wall half way up dividing the dining room from the kitchen. We’d used Z-brick to make it look like a brick wall, (and it looked real good.)
We had shutters at the opening so we could close them while we ate and I wouldn’t be reminded of the mess in the kitchen that I’d be cleaning after dinner.
I placed my hand on the snack bar their dad had made out of wood for flooring, so beautiful, so unique.
I smiled BIG when I looked at the spot at the snack bar…the spot where one of my girls was often banished to after making one of her sisters, usually the youngest and easiest to make laugh spit out her food from sitting across from her at dinner and laughing at her unseen by all craziness.
Oh what a funny girl turned to woman, wish everyone could know her.
I stood at the sink a moment. That’s where I did dishes by hand for quite a few years. But I didn’t mind, it was a special time for me; a time of quiet and beauty.
Quiet because no one would dare come near the kitchen for fear of being nabbed to help with the dishes and beauty because right out that window was a nightly beautiful sunset.
I dreamed out that window, maybe even meditated.
The dishes always got done and I never remember really doing them.
Up about 13 steps from the living room were three bedrooms.
At first it was the two oldest sharing and the two youngest sharing.
The master bedroom was roomy and I smiled when I looked around and remembered the many times during Michigan storms, one by one my little girls with their sleeping bags tucked sloppily under their arms would quietly kinda open the door and slide into our room.
They camped out at the foot of our bed.
I liked it when they felt safe. I remember being scared as a little girl, I didn’t want them to be scared.
They were also invited in on those horrible hot Michigan nights to camp out in our room, the only one with a window air conditioner.
The bathroom had two doors, one to the hallway and one to our bedroom. There was a kinda small useless area on that bathroom wall between the sink and the toilet where it eventually became a perfect cabinet to store like hundreds of sanitary napkins and tampons, figuring there were five women in the house…that’s a lot of sanitary stuff every month.
The walls going down the stairs to the living room showed the nail holes where frames once hung and held some of my favorite shots of my favorite four.
And the 13 steps down? Well ask them one day.
I bundled them up with blankets and pillows and rolled them down those steps, we called it “put-put”.
They laughed, they giggled all the way down and my heart? well my heart laughed with them.
“Put-put” was a fun way down the stairs my mom taught me when I was a little girl like them.
But those 13-steps were something else.
They were the steps of pain.
When two were caught fighting (which was often) and there was no resolution (again, often), they were sent to the top of the stairs and they had to sit side by side.
The only way to go outside to play was to get to the bottom of the steps and the only way to get to the bottom of the steps was to either hug each other or give each other a kiss.
Each time they did it, and it sometimes took a while, they were able to move down a step.
That meant 13 hugs or kisses.
By the time they reached the bottom, every time…they were laughing with each other but hated me! I was the enemy then.
I went down the steps to the empty basement, the root of so much action for so many years.
First the walls on the light-switch side of the stairs where a daughter had in crayon and rather large written an F and a C on the wall and in between that F and C was a U and a K after the C in another color of crayon and different handwriting.
Like, we didn’t know immediately who did that?
The wall artists were confronted, found guilty and scrubbed that wall til it was clear of their message.
At first it was a laundry room with not much else down there but before long, we built a fun room under the rafters made just for little people.
Big people couldn’t stand up under there, they were too tall but it was perfect for the little people that lived in our house and all their neighboring friends.
We drywalled and then encouraged all of them to write on the walls and….they did.
There were dolls, lots and lots of dolls….just figure over a few years how many dolls four girls could accumulate and then at least double that number. And games, lots and lots of games including ATARI set up on the TV for all of them to play.
We bricked the front of the wall leading to the rafters like a house, made a small door with an address on it and inside that door was, a magical playroom for my little ones.
The oldest one had a spot that was private all to her, under the stairs, with a door and a light and a lock.
There was an avacado green phone mounted on the wall with a cord that could win a contest of the longest stretched cord in the world.
I stood in the playroom bent over, looking at the writing on the wall…all the writings on the wall.
So many kids names, so many memories.
I tried to take a mental picture of that wall, I never wanted to forget it.
I remembered all the little girls that dug in that big ole trunk and dressed up in dresses I wore to proms and dances once a long time ago.
Two bedrooms had been quickly made downstairs so each girl could have her own bedroom with her own desk, corked wall and waterbed; two up, two down.
So the two oldests happily moved down.
Down to too much privacy.
Down to stuff that happened that I never knew til too late to do anything about; one smuggled boys in and the other dogs, cats and Sea Monkeys.
I walked through those empty rooms, I could FEEL their presence, all the craziness; making them empty their desks so I could find missing glasses, dishes, spoons, knives & forks, standing watching while they made their bed…..”my way”, not like they just had a session with a sumo wrestler on top of their bed, inspecting a closet because I’d heard a rumor from maybe someone in the family younger than them that they were harboring something live in their closet all night.
Oh the memories.
Now it was all empty and quiet.
I wondered if some of the young spirits that ran and danced through that house would remain there with all the writings on the wall and craziness up and down the stairs.
All I knew for sure is that it was over and we were moving on to the unknown. I cried, of course I cried.
I was leaving such a huge part of our lives behind, a good, easy, comfortable known part of life to follow a dream to California and the unknown.
We were a parade of 4 cars. We drove slowly out of our subdivision and many neighbors up and down the street who we’d known for what seemed like forever, stood outside and waved. We honked, and damn I cried some more.
TO BE CONTINUED…..