Home : Alone

     I don't remember the second day or the legions of days after that, but I have a vivid picture of the first day.  My father drove the car into the middle of the  back yard, whatever driveway that had been there long since unused and gone back to nature.  When my sister and I opened the doors to get out of the car, we were up to our shoulders in grass, or hay, as it were. My brother, a few years older and quite a bit taller, was probably not so overwhelmed.  Since I was not quite six years old and my sister only four, the overgrowth may not have been as wild and exciting as we perceived, but to us it seemed like the wild west.  And there was the house, empty of life, waiting for us.   It was pale yellow with the more prominent side boards and finishings painted a darker tone of peach. 
   We were too young to understand what home ownership must have meant to our parents, but now I realize it must have been a monumental triumph.  Both my mother and father had come from homes where a parent had died, and following the throes of the Great Depression, money was hard to come by.  When my parents first married, they lived in an apartment building which used to stand by the entrance to the Valley Falls Mill.  Later they moved to a  tenant house on the Bates farm in Melrose, from there to a house on what is now Brundige Road, after that to a farmhouse near the Reservoir, and the last rental on the curve outside the village, owned by a woman named Schmidt. 
     Back in the day, when people were to leave their homes for one reason or another, it was customary to let family and relatives know in case they had any interest in acquiring the property.  I understand this is still an expected tradition, especially when it comes to farmland.  So when my mother heard that the Barrett home was going to be put up for sale, she went to work to try to get it.  How she even heard is a mystery; we lived in the boondocks, with no telephone, and the only transportation was my father's car, which he mostly drove only to work, where he was gone all day.  So it must have all been done through the mail.  After she learned the price from my father's sister Kate and her husband, who had decided to live separately, Ma set out trying to make the sale happen. We could get a mortgage, since my father always worked, but we needed a down payment.  Again, a flurry of letter-writing: she asked her brother Matt to lend the money for a down payment, probably around $200 since the price of the house was about $1200, a considerable amount of money at the time, at least in our circle.  I can still see the calendar on the kitchen wall marked with the scheduled repayments of the loan to Uncle Matt.  My father would have been equally gratified to have become a homeowner, after all those rentals, but he was not as optimistic about the possibility, and may have been too proud to ask a relative for a loan.
     The history of the house is a little blurred now.  When we moved in, there was a very tall pine tree in the right side of the front yard.  My father recalled that when his sister Lizzie was a little girl, his father cut a branch off that tree to make a Christmas tree for her. And once, only once, I heard my father say that his own father died in what we called the Middle Room. I never asked for any more information because kids then didn't ask questions, at least not us kids.  But my grandfather had been dead for years before my parents married, so family had to have owned the house since some time in the 1800's.  When we moved in, there was a long porch across the front of the house which extended to what used to be a barroom, but by then an empty shell.  That space would later be renovated and leased to Jack's Confectionery Store, a business  forced out of its previous location, which was to be Kerr's Variety Store, I think. 
    The front porch was the center of childhood life, especially in the summer.  The porch pillars were fitted with thick substantial molding a few feet above floor level.  When we were little, standing on those wooden wedges gave us a perfect view of the train tracks, a treat since we weren't allowed to cross the road.  And even more intriguing, the last post at the far end of the porch had gnawed areas where people going into the bar would have hitched their horses.  Those bite scars gave a lot of credence to what was then a favorite pastime of playing Cowboys and Indians. Yippee!