Autobio. Week 3

Setting

The Friendly Trees

 

Ten acres of land

surrounds the old house,

my only address from birth until college graduation.

 

 Dozens of trees grow in the yards and pasture.

 Several varieties of evergreens, a tulip tree,

and a chestnut tree fill the long, sloping front yard.

 

 Crab apple trees grow in the back yard,

mingled among the grape arbor,

 and a pair of plum trees

create a protective umbrella over my childhood years.

 

 Walnut, ash, elms, and maples

 cast their graceful silhouettes against the

western sunsets seen from the back yard.

 

 A childhood swing cascades down

from the plum tree branches.

 I love the excitement and gracefulness of swinging

and growing to understand the very soul

of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem,

The Swing.

 

A sandbox sets beneath the shade

of the two plum trees,

where my sister and I spend hours

of serious childhood creativity.

 By some amazing magic, the fruit of the trees

turns into Mama’s fantastic plum jelly, every summer.

 

 One of the crab apple trees is my favorite climbing tree,

a secret and private place where I can sit and think,

 when things need to be sorted out.

No one can see me here

but I can look down on the back yard activities

of several neighbors.

From here I can watch my mother working in her garden,

watch my dad mowing the yard or

tending the livestock in the barnyard.

 

 I usually go to my crab apple tree

when I need to figure out who I am becoming—

 inside and outside of my family.

 I love the new perspective that it offers to me.

 Not even my little sister knows of my secret place.

 

A yellow apple tree stands near Mama’s garden.

 We shake the limbs and watch the apples fall

 onto the sheets that we arrange beneath its branches.

 No one, absolutely no one,

can make better apple butter than Mama.

 

Perhaps the best tree memories

are the ones that my sister and I make

when we saddle up our pony on a hot summer day.

 We ride her to the back pasture.

 Along the back fence are mulberry trees.

 In spite of the summer heat and the flies,

we sit on Smokey’s broad back

 and pick the berries.

We stuff our mouths with the fruit,

knowing that the purple stains on our hands and faces

will remain for several days.

But it is worth it.

 

 Dozens of big trees

 fill my grandparents' yard, next door.

My favorite, the graceful weeping willow tree,

stands as though it is guarding their back door.

 

 Because our property is on the highest hill for miles around,

the wind can be relentless.

 Iowa tornadoes threaten our trees every spring.

Electrical storms send lightning into some of the tallest evergreens,

 burning them and splitting them in half.

 

 Disease took the rare tulip tree

that had lived in our front yard for ninety-two years.

The one hundred and thirty-three year old chestnut tree

still stands guard at the corner of the front yard.

 

Trees are like my long time friends,

living things that I respect and love.

They provide shade, beauty, and fruit,

and lasting memories.

The first thing I remember it was summer and our apartment was very hot. Since the birth of my little brother, I had been cooped up there for many days. On this day my mother was busy changing the baby and I took that opportunity to peak out the kitchen window. From the second floor, I looked down upon the back yard of the building. I still remember how it looked. The garden was a patchwork of green down there. A man with a straw hat and a hoe was walking among the plants. It was so strange to think that right here, in the back of my house, was this little oasis. I wondered why I had never been taken there.

As I stood on tiptoe to get a better look, I was suddenly grabbed from behind and the window came crashing down with a loud thump. Bewildered, I started to cry. I just wanted to see outside. I didn’t do anything wrong!

We were tenants in a two family house and the only thing I ever saw outside were concrete stoops and sidewalks where the neighborhood housewives would congregate in the late afternoon before it was time to cook supper. The mothers would sit on the stoops and rock the baby carriages as they watched over the older children playing their various games. There were scraggly little trees set in patches of dirt where the boys played marbles. The little girls commandeered a stoop and spread out their dolls on miniature doll blankets, imitating the mothers gossiping among themselves.

The apartment was accessed by a long flight of stairs which led into the kitchen from the front door. One day the doorbell rang and I ran to the top of the stairs. It was my Aunt Cookie! She was small in stature with a big smile and she was always very talkative and attentive to us kids. Her hat, voice and perfume preceded her as she rose up the stairwell. She tended to wear high hats and platform shoes which seemed to increase her stature. I remember a tall black hat with a veil which draped over her face. On the veil were big black dots and I’m sure this was high fashion for the time. I know she smelled nice and wore fresh make-up and lipstick. I think this must have been my baby brother's Christening Day because from the picture I see the same hat I remember as a little girl.

Next to the stairs and running the length of the apartment was a hallway accessing each of the rooms. Across the back of the building was the kitchen, then running toward the front a bedroom, the living room and next to it another small bedroom where, I suppose, my brother and I slept. It was a dark and dreary place, except for the kitchen which I remember as being full of light.

Another thing I remember from when I was very young was sitting in the kitchen eating lunch. I was given the meal from the previous night which I had refused to eat. There was a little cup of ice cream waiting for me in the ice cube section of the refrigerator, but, on orders from my father, I had to finish the dinner before I could have the ice cream. I still refused to eat the food. That night the same plate was put before me and I still refused to eat it. Finally, at lunch the next day, I finished the plate and was given my ice cream treat. By this time, the ice cream had melted and it was a big let down. From then on I knew that no treat was worth it if I had to eat food I didn’t like. The battle over food lasted well into my teens. I particularly disliked beef stew, pea soup and peas and carrots. When I was a little older I would push the vegetables into my apron then excuse myself and dump them down the toilet. Luckily, I also had a brother who would eat anything. Behind my parents’ backs, I would off load my plate onto his.

These are memories I have carried with me my whole life. What was life like on a daily basis? I’m sure I can’t remember but it must have been very routine which is why I believe some of these incidents stand out in my mind because they were very unusual to me.

On The Bridge of Four Lions

It’s hard for me to say when exactly this incident took place but I know the day was not wintery cold nor was it warm. It was probably sometime in the spring of 1946. I had done my daily morning work and play at kindergarten and it was time to go home for lunch. My instructions as usual were to go downstairs, cross the street and wait by the lion for someone from our busy and overcrowded household to pick me up. “Wait by the lion and don’t cross the bridge by yourself,” I was told.
Often my Omi would come to walk me home. She and her sister had recently come hundreds of kilometers on foot from Russian occupied Berlin, to live with us in southern Germany in the American zone. Sometimes Agnes, the kitchen maid, was sent. She and I had fun together as the least important people in the household. The grown-ups paid attention even to my brother who was only two years older than I. Sometimes I got a ride home with my uncle Jo on his way to our house for lunch. It was never my father because my father was busy at an important job helping to rebuild our town. Würzburg was almost completely destroyed by American bombs the year before.
So I waited by the lion. Two huge bronze lions on stone pedestals stood across from each other, one on each side of the street. They snarled over their shoulders, guarding this end of the bridge. The other end was guarded by two more lions just like these. Under the bridge flowed the river Main, slowly, majestically, green. I stood and waited. The granite base by itself was twice as tall as I and I looked up and stared into my lion’s roaring mouth for a while. It was a dark pit behind a fence of teeth and looked mean.
A loud four-wheeled contraption grated across the bridge toward me, leaving a black cloud behind it that smelled awful. A few cars followed it, also a man in a long three-wheeled cart moving himself with arm levers that he pumped alternately forward and back, almost like rowing a boat on the ground. His missing legs were covered with a red plaid blanket. I watched him until he disappeared. And I waited.
I looked down at the water lapping the embankment. A few twigs were caught against the stone and every time they began to move out, another wave came and pushed them back to the wall. It was a dance of wave and twigs and wave and twigs.
Two pigeons cooed close to me. They must have decided I was part of the bridge because I had been there so long . One kept turning in circles while the other never looked at him, just kept pecking between the cobblestones. They were busy. I thought about sitting down on some curbing. I noticed the tail of the lion across the street arcing in front of the blue-gray sky and how it ended in a clump. I decided these go-nowhere lions were really just show, stuck up there in soundless roars.
Suddenly my father’s little green car pulled up. My mother jumped out, and my Omi and my father, even Uncle Jo, all ran toward me to grab and hug me. Turns out each had thought someone else had gone to pick me up. And were they sorry and guilty! They yelled at each other, how could you etc. etc. It seems that it was my pal, Agnes, who finally pointed out that I was not at home and shouldn’t I be? Anyway, it worked out very well for me. I knew I hadn’t done anything special but I didn’t turn down the desserts, either. Best of all, though, was that for the first time ever I was made to feel important. That’s why I remember the day so clearly.
A couple of years ago I visited those lions on the Löwen Brücke. I relived that fractured day as best as I could. I couldn’t remember any of the buildings but the lions are quite magnificent and still roaring into the sky, soundlessly.
v

In the fading light of a cool winter afternoon our world was burning down, and there was nothing we could do but watch. The black, tarry smoke swirled out of the side windows of the white house, and slithered out the door, to climb to the porch ceiling then to divide and hurry to the sides of the roof and drift off into the gray sky.

We had moved into this house about six months ago, when Hype Dinus’ husband had died from some long and lingering illness. She had told my mother she was going to go to California and make herself a new life, and offered to let us live there at a rent we could afford. It was like nothing we had ever known.

This place had three bedrooms (no one slept on the couch). Instead of old, worn out linoleum, or splintery wooden floors, this house had hardwood floors that gleamed when they were waxed, so that they reflected the light, like brown jewels. There were closets to put things in and real wallpaper on the walls. We had definitely come up in the world.

We were living in Wellington and Mom waited tables in the only café in town and my dad was working in Cheyenne, Wyoming, welding fuel tanks at the air base. And, as usual, Orville was our leader/baby-sitter, and, the one who figured out how to make almost everything in life fun.

Mom would put up a list of things that would “be a help, if we could do them”, and Orville would take a look and see if there was anything that the younger kids could help with, then set out to get things done. In this house, it was a pleasure.

My particular favorite, when it came to chores, was when we polished the floors. Now, anyone can wax a floor and then walk around with a rag tied over the dust mop and polish it up, only Orville, could come up with the idea of making rag sleds, for my sister, Dolores, and I to sit on, and, racing through the house with brother Bill pulling me, because he was smaller and I, at five, was the baby, and Orville pulling Dolores. The game was made enormously exciting by the fact that there was a walk through closet between my parent’s bedroom and the living room, and all of the floors were hardwood. It became a circular race-course, starting in the living room, hurtling down the narrow hall, through the bedroom door, leaning into the curve to save yourself a fall, then, another immediate right turn and a race through the dark closet and out into the light of the living room, again.

It always seemed to me that we were going (like Superman) faster than a speeding bullet, and, there was more than one accident, when centrifugal force flipped the weights off of the rags and Dolores or I would go tumbling, but, what a shine on the floors. Occasionally,
Mom would mention to us that the clothes in the closet were getting knocked down and we should pick them up when we were done, but, she never interfered with the way Orville got things done.

This was a house where we could invite friends to come visit, and, it had an extra, added attraction; it had my mom, who talked, and laughed, and sang, and baked stuff with incredibly enticing smells. Every weekend, when the kids knew Mom was home from work, they would start arriving, and, she never turned one away. She did, however, try bribery. She promised to buy an ice cream sundae for anyone who didn’t show up before she’d been home an hour. She only had to buy one, and that was for Dumpy Farillo, who had a consuming passion for ice cream.

This had been a real house, not a shanty, not a shack, nothing ramshackle about it. Now it was burning down.

There was a crowd gathered around the front of the building, and we four children were standing a little bit back, watching the grown-ups fighting the fire. We weren’t crying, and we weren’t talking to each other. What was there to say? We were all intrigued, however, by the behavior of our neighbor, Peter Rabbit Kelly, who kept trying to get into the house. He would crouch low and start in through the door, with two men outside, on the porch watching him. He would only be gone a second or two, when the two men would cover their mouths, lunge through the door, and drag him out by the feet. He had done this, at least twice, while we were watching.

Now, Peter Rabbit was not really Mr. Kelly’s first name, but his real name has disappeared into the mists of time. He raised rabbits; lots and lots of rabbits, and some child and nicknamed him Peter Rabbit (I have no idea why Farmer McGregor was passed up) and, among the children, the nickname stuck. He had always seemed like a nice man, but, at the moment, his actions were beyond understanding.

Finally, after we watched his third attempt to enter the house, Orville pulled at the sleeve of the man in front of him and asked, “Why does he keep going back in the house?”

The man jerked loose, impatiently, and snapped, “Because, there are kids in there and he’s trying to save them.”

Orville turned back to count noses, made sure we were all there, and then said, “No, there aren’t, mister; we’re all out here.”

Peter Rabbit Kelly was saved, but, not the house. It appeared that the coal-oil heater had exploded. It didn’t make for a quick burn, but it made a hell of a lot of oily, toxic smoke. Mister Kelly was truly a hero, because, even though we weren’t in the house, he risked his life believing we were.

My mother had gotten word of the fire and ran home. She gathered her children to her first, then just stood and looked at the house. Another woman might have cried, but, tears weren’t a large part of my mother’s life, not tears over things, anyway. She thanked everyone for coming to help and, particularly, Mr. Kelly, who was sitting in black-face on the side of the street, then asked the head of the volunteer fire department how long it would be before she could go in and see what could be saved. It wasn’t long, as most of the fire had been pretty well confined to the area around the heater.

I remember watching my mother walk through the door and silently falling into step behind them; Mom, Orville, Bill, and Dolores. I was the last, because I was the youngest. The inside of the house looked as though it had been painted a uniform black. The lovely flowers on the wallpaper were gone, forever, and the floors that we had polished, with such glee, were dull and lifeless. All the delight of this place that, for a time, had given us an entry into a different kind of world was gone. We all knew that this had been an aberration, a time out of real time for us. My mother found her Bible. I still have it, singed around the edges. There were clothes that could be washed and my mother’s pictures and keepsakes, which she kept in an old tin box, were intact.

We stayed with some neighbors for three days and, then, my dad said we were moving away. The new house rested against the foot of the Rocky Mountains, had only two bedrooms, old linoleum floors, and a wood and coal stove to cook on. There was a Ben Franklin stove in the living room for heat, and hard-packed earth for a front yard.

We were back where we belonged; back in the world we knew.

By
Reiss

“You can’t remember anything about that house. You were a baby when we lived there!”

My brother, Paul, when I called this morning to confirm facts for this assignment, insisted it was impossible for me to remember the house, the Hiendals or anything that happened there. I do, however, have memories... memories that he, finally, had to admit are accurate.

Mama called it Back Yard Avenue, an apt description of the little house in which we lived and from which I glean my earliest memories. It was, indeed, a little house behind the house occupied by the Hiendals.

The very first recollection, I must admit, is not because of my phenomenal memory. I had help. It was during a demonstration in a child psychology class that the professor used me to demonstrate how far back, with his techniques, a person could be taken. Seated in front of the class, he took me to the earliest memory I could muster. I remembered and described the pattern on a linoleum floor covering on which I was crawling. I described the border and how I traced my fingers around the large, leafy, green and gray pattern. I described the room, the warmth and the people there....my sisters, my brother, Roy, and Mama. Another part of the memory was Mama’s singing, but then, Mama sang as much as she talked. Distinctly absent from this reverie are my older brother, Paul and Daddy. Paul explained: We were in that house because it was one of several “separations” Mama and Daddy experienced before the final break-up. Mama had, evidently, taken her children and moved to this small house on her own. Though small, it was OK because it was still in the neighborhood she considered home and was around the corner from almost everyone in her extended family. Paul was not part of that first memory as he was fourteen years old and as Mama said, “never sat still long enough...” to be part of a hazy memory.

It might be worth mentioning here... the professor insisted earliest memories affect some aspects of our lives. I don’t know. Maybe. To this day, I enjoy Architectural and artistic patterns and have, over the years, used leaves in my art and music is probably the force that guides my life. Humm. Paul, now in his early eighties, still never visits for long periods. He, you may remember, can’t sit still long enough. Does my earliest memory of him have an impact on who he is today? Maybe, it’s all part of the Self Fulfilling Prophesy. Another Hummm.

In the short conversations with him this morning, I told him I remembered a loud male voice moaning and yelling from inside the Hiendal’s house. The Hiendals, he told me, had a mentally disturbed son. His voice was heard but he was never seen. “How can you remember that?”

“I don’t know, I just do. I also remember a portable heater that, when sitting in the middle of the living room floor, cast an intricate circular pattern on the ceiling.”
“Humph, that was the old oil heater. It did cast a shadow on the ceiling. You remember that?”

“Um hum. I also remember Mama calling the shadow Pache Lune.”

“That’s impossible! You can’t remember that. Someone must have told you about that!”

“Oh, but I do and I remember Mama singing,

‘Little man you’re crying,
I know why you’re blue,
Someone stole your kiddy cart away,
Better go to sleep now,
Little man you’ve had a busy day.’ ”

“Yeah, she sang that to me too when I was a baby. What else can you remember from that house?”

Well, I remember Mrs. Hiendal. She was a lady with a big, rosy, round face. I don’t remember a Mister Hiendal.”

“Yeah, she was a sweet lady. I don’t remember her husband either. He was probably already dead. She was an older lady. I know they were from Germany but don’t remember them having accents. They were probably not recent immigrants.”

“I remember her very well.”

“OK, what else do you remember?”

“The next thing I remember is the new house around the corner and Daddy was home.”

“Humph!”