This old house

The house where I grew up was an average sized one-story red-brick ranch house in northern Spalding County, about 40 miles south of Atlanta. It wasn’t the country, and it wasn’t in town, and it wasn’t in a suburb.

I guess you’d just call it a neighborhood, but it didn’t have a pretentious name like Forest Trace or Falcon Glen. I see a lot of neighborhoods with words like “glen” or “trace” in their names. I don’t even really know what a glen is.

The house was on the corner of Vineyard Road and a short, dead-end road that was called Vineyard something, though there wasn’t a vineyard within 10 miles of there. I remember the dead-end road because it featured a tremendously steep hill, which I used to ride my bike up and down. It took me years of trying before I was strong enough to pedal all the way to the top without having to stop.

We moved from that house when I was 15, and many years later, I decided to ride by and see how things looked. I was shocked to discover that the hill, the Mount Everest of my memory, was really barely a hill at all. It was nothing more than a slight grade. How could this be?

The road was paved now. It had been only gravel when I lived there. You don’t see many gravel roads anymore. If you ride a bike shirtless, as I mostly did, a gravel road is a most unpleasant place to wipe out on your bike. I still get queasy when I think of the time I went flying over the handlebars and skidded down the road on my scrawny bare chest. I was a walking scab for about two weeks.

When I revisited my old house, everything seemed smaller. The backyard, where I set Whiffle ball records that will never be broken (all without the aid of steroids, I might add) seemed half the size I remembered. The ditch I used to jump over with my bike no longer seemed as deep and wide as the Snake River Canyon. The world can seem like such a big place when you’re small.

I dream almost once a week that I’m back in that house. I never dream about any other house where I’ve lived – it’s always that one. Maybe that’s the period of my life I most want to re-live.

I remember that my mama used to fuss all the time that the kitchen was too small. “There ain’t enough room in here to turn around twice,” she would say. I wanted to show her that it could be done, but she wasn’t the kind of person you disputed, so I always wisely let it go.

One of my strongest memories of that house is of Sunday mornings. Even though I would grumble and complain about having to take a bath and get ready for church, I was comforted by the sounds and smells Sunday would always bring – bacon sizzling in the kitchen, gospel music playing on the radio (“You’re invited to the gospel jubileeeeeee..”), my dad tying his tie and smelling like Old Spice after-shave. The bacon smelled a lot better than the Old Spice.

I don’t like to go by the house anymore, because it makes me sad. Some obviously trashy people have lived there in recent years and let the house go to hell. The last time I went past, the yard that was always kept up so nice was weedy, the gutters were hanging off the house, and there were so many rusted cars scattered around the backyard, I expected to see Fred Sanford and Lamont walk out at any minute.

It doesn’t matter. They can’t take away it looks and feels in my memory, or in my dreams. Maybe I’ll go there tonight. I hope there’ll be bacon!