The Homestead
The house we lived in at 7th & Robert still stands but the red brick is now painted blue. I walked to third grade from here, 6 blocks due east. After my baby sister died, my mother wanted to be elsewhere. We moved more than a dozen times when I was a child but we never owned a home.
Sadly my parents provided no homestead but we had one, nonetheless. It was my grandparents’ house on Washington Avenue in Newport. It was the last house before you came to the floodwall. 111 Washington faced west and we would watch the traffic crossing the Central Bridge. This house that had survived two floods, witnessed babies and grandbabies being born and leaned a bit toward the north. This house hosted the Christmas gatherings around grandma’s tinsel tree with the light wheel casting a change of colors as it turned. This was where we celebrated Easter in our lovely little dresses and suits. We had family cook outs in the yard and dinners in the dining room, each of us waiting our turn by age at the big wooden table or at the red formica in the kitchen. This house was our homestead. We even lived there off and on when times were tough or Mom and Lou had gone off somewhere. Lou
moved us quite a lot, trying new adventures or working on the river but we always came back to the homestead. Valarie and Aunt Sheila on the front porch
On the sidewalk in front of Grandma’s house at 111 Washington Avenue. The stairs up the floodwall were narrow and broken. Now the stairs are new and wide across from the office building that replaced my grandmother's house.
My mother holding me on the side of grandma's house.
The Scott's house had not yet burned down.
The house at 111 Washington was a shotgun with three rooms up and three rooms down. The bathrooms were added onto the back but they never were warm and the pipes froze in the winter. The side yard doubled when the Scott’s house next door burned to the ground. Grandma bought the lot and Lou put in rich, green sod. Each night in the heat of summer Grandma would water the grass with her hose, sprinkling any grandchildren who ran through the yard. She would carefully check the fence to make sure no dogs got in to violate her dandelions. “It makes great wine” she said. “But mostly I eat the greens. Don’t want no dogs ruining my dandelions”. She’d even water the dreaded forsythia bush near the front gate that offered up switches to swing against our bare legs for any wrong deed. It took the place of the willow switches she had felt in her youth. Just the same, we had to cut our own switch, trim the yellow flowers and deliver it into her hands. I still remember the swish it made as it came for flesh.
We would sit on the front porch and watch the cars go by. In the early 1900’s the view was of the river, not the tal
l floodwall that now protected the city. We’d climb that wall to see the Delta Queen go by and in our late teens, to watch the WEBN fireworks with a ring-side seat. Nancy and Aunt Juanita in the kitchen.
My favorite memory of the back yard was grandma’s quilting frame. My cousins and I could sit beneath and watch the fingers and the thread weaving through the fabric as friends and relatives would talk as they worked. So many of us had played there that the yard behind the back porch was bare of grass. It was shaded by a large tree and we could take the bent, galvanized tub and fill it with water for a cool dip on a hot day
The basement of the house was musty with a dirt floor. You had to stoop to go down the steep, wooden steps from the dining room. I rarely went down there except when grandma needed something that had been canned and stored on the shelves of the old pantry that sat in the back. Thankfully Grandma didn’t need canned goods very often.
Behind my grandparents house was a trailer park and one tiny little house. Mr. and Mrs. Givens lived there. They were a large couple who lived in its three tiny rooms. In the evening
they would sit on their front porch which faced my grandmother’s back yard. Both of them chewed tobacco and smoked corn cob pipes. “Mountain folk” my grandmother told me.Sheila and Grandma in the back yard. The Givens’ house is behind them, tucked into the trailer park.
Sheila and grandma in the back front
with the Givens' house behind them.
My mother wasn’t born in that house, just a few blocks over on Saratoga but her younger sisters and brother were. Two sisters died there and Benny left for Korea from that house, never to return.
I remember when grandma saved up for wall-to-wall carpet for the living room. It was gold and new and soft to the touch, much quieter than the squeaking linoleum in the other rooms. Grandpa thought it much too fancy and being his ornery self would spit tobacco as he walked through the room. Not much, just enough to leave a tiny spot to get the old woman riled.
I slept many nights on a pallet on the living room floor. There was no air conditioning but grandma had a fan and when I was the only grandchild there I would lay right in front of that fan. The hum and the air would lull me to sleep. She told me that they had slept on pallets in the yard, watered down to keep them cool when the weather was too hot to be in the house.
In the cold weather, while I was still small, grandma would rock me to sleep in her skirt. As a young child my grandmother looked mighty. She lost weight as she aged, living on coffee, Grape Nuts and grapefruit. When I was grown and she was 80 she was half the size I remembered. Grandma would sit on the sofa with her knees spread so that her long, wide skirt hung clear to her ankles and the fabric would create a swing. I could sit in that skirt and she would sing to me, thumping her feet and swaying her knees. “Who da linga dink dump do dump da, do dump du dumpa do dumpa” were her words. Words without meaning but soothing. Some nights I would curl up behind her on the sofa as she watched the late movies, conforming to the hollow made by her knees with my head on her hip .
In the daytime she sat on her sofa, sipping her instant coffee, cold from her saucer. She watched the same stories every day from when the soap companies first put them on the air. We knew who she loved and who she hated. She wasn’t afraid to tell the actors just what she thought of them either, yelling at the black and white screen. In the summer we could stay up late with grandma. After the movies were over and the National Anthem sung, she’d get up from the sofa and we’d wander up the steps and snuggle into her bed. The rhythm of her snores and the tick-tock of grandpa’s mantel clock took longer to put me to sleep than the fan. The house was old and it creaked preventing me from closing my eyes. The room was dark except for the streetlight behind her house that shone through the window. I never liked the dark.
I tried to adjust to darkness as their house was always dark except for the light from the television. The depression had shaped them. Not caring of my fear, Grandpa would send me through the dark rooms to the bathroom at the back of the house to get his spittoon, an old coffee can he used for spitting tobacco. I would go, not only to stay in his good graces, but to earn the nickel that he offered. Sometimes after grandpa had had a glass or two of Weideman beer he would give me a quarter. He’d make me come close to take the quarter then he would pinch me on the leg and ask “where’s my sugar”. I’d kiss his scratchy check, trying to avoid his mouth, wet with the spittle of tobacco. He’d grin and laugh but a quarter was a treasure. With a quarter I could walk two doors down to Marcella’s bar and buy a bottle of Coca Cola, a bag of chips and a Hershey bar.
(Continued in Part Two)
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