Crowded House

  There was a time when I thought too many people lived in the house. Of course, my parents and sister and brother; they were always there. Uncle Joe lived with us as long as I can remember, in a series of houses in a few short years before Valley Falls. Aunt Helen came to live with us about a year after her mother died in 1950.  At one time my mother provided  day care for a number of different families, and then she provided overnight care, Sunday evenings through  Friday evenings for  a family, who would leave 3 or more kids with us, depending on their ages.  When that ended, my parents took in foster children who lived with us. Several were short-timers but 2 of them stayed with us for about 10 years.
  The house was fairly large, but old, with only one bathroom, and the bedroom I shared with my sister had a door in each of its 4 walls. Helen and at least one of the resident children would have to pass through our bedroom to get to their rooms, and Helen, with her job at a hospital laundry service, would leave for work at 6 a.m. Monday through Saturday.  She would have to make several trips through our room, tending to her oil burner and her cat and dog.
   There was always someone coming and going, noises, discussions, arguments. There was very little privacy or even time to be alone.
    Sara's store was next door, once accessible through a door in our middle room, which my father had boarded up. There was always activity there. Someone was almost always on the front porch, or the back stoop for that matter. I "helped out" in that store from the age of 11, from 6 to 7  all seven days of the week and then on weekends and school vacations also from 1 to 2. Sara had to eat lunch and dinner, and sometimes she and her sister would take a Saturday off and I'd be there all day. It was strange how adults, always women of course, would sit in the extra chair and confide in me, in Sara's absence. I had nothing to offer, but I did listen, which I suppose is what they wanted.
   The point is there were always plenty of people around, and of necessity almost constant interactions. And this carried over into my professional life as a teacher and later as a tutor and advocate. Most of my life I was paid to talk to people.
  For almost thirty years, the same was true for the smaller house I lived in. At first 3 people, then up to 5, all ensconced in a small residence, with all the usual coziness and conflicts. The number of inhabitants reduced gradually from 5 to  4 and then 3, and finally (or so we thought) to 2 of us. The excitements and discoveries lessened but still there was the interaction of another life in the house.
   A lifetime of being steeped in and saturated with human connections is replaced with silence and all the privacy anyone could want.