The First Place I Knew

The lilacs bloomed in a row behind our house, separating us from the schoolyard beyond. My memories of this place are sketchy. From old photographs I can tell you that, to my surprise, the house was red-orange. I remember making the houses on my street out of scraps of lumber cut in wavy patterns giving them each an abstract future. Looking at the old picture of the house throws my mind back—a glimpse of mixing the red and the orange to match our house. The flash is my only proof that at least once in my life the color was not surprising to me.

I moved around a lot when I was young. I am the son of a preacher. This first was his longest stay at a church. I was seven when we left the only home I knew. The rest of my childhood runs together like wet watercolors, I can’t distinguish memories, but instead see them all through the transparent layers of the rest.

My earliest memory. I see a dresser, with the second drawer pulled open. My dad pulling out baby clothes. I am three, this I know only because that was my age when my brother was born and the clothes were for him. Dad packed them to go to the hospital. A day or two later I remember thanksgiving, my Mom and baby brother were still in the hospital, and Dad and I had thanksgiving dinner. We went over to the house of a couple who came to our church. This too is but a shred of memory reconstructed from a picture of lefse that exists only in the album of my mind. Even now my mouth waters for the Norwegian treat.

Now I see myself in a small apartment. There was an exercise bike and I walk around with an old ear plug from the days of the crystal radios. The couple that babysat me in this small unique place were unique themselves. Pete was a hundred years old, which was no fanciful imagination on my part. I may have been the only five year old to know what it looked like to really be a hundred. His wife was only seventy.

I remember singing, alone, in the garden. I walked around singing whatever came to my head, songs of my tender love for the God so central in my family, until the song was lost completely forgotten, the words gone from my tongue and received into heaven no longer my own. After repeating the last phrase I sung a few times, with furrowed brow, I shrugged and played at something else. This memory is fast in my mind, but I cannot say if it is the place I knew first or next.

On the day we left the red orange house, I recall the image of the neighbor girl racing me to the lilacs. That is how we said goodbye. A race and no words, but it was the way of a seven year old boy to bring closure on the only place he had known.