where I lived #1 part 2

I was recalling the details of my first home.  The details were to spark smells, memories, relationships, and so on ... and they sure do.  Each detail seems to hold hundreds of memories, but I will not go off on all those tangents now - I will only complete the description of from where I lived #1

There was a hallway at the top of the stairwell. Adjacent to the stairs was my parents bedroom.  One day my hand trailed behind me in the doors hinge where I gripped absently as I was about to go down the stairs.  My brother Josh was running from my mother and from some punishment and he slammed this door behind him along with three of my fingers.  I screamed but was helpless to reach across my body with my other hand to reach the door - I couldn't reopen it and Josh was hesitant to open it himself.  To this day I don't know how my fingers were not broken or hardly even scraped.  Their bedroom had a built in closet, a king sized bed that we all crawled into or slept on the floor in front of at some point in our childhood.  Their bed was where a lot of sickness was spent - Aaron's broken collarbone, somebody throwing up, bad dreams or bad days.  Their room had a window that looked over the front yard and later, the only air conditioner in the house for those hot and humid summers.  They had a full bathroom with another window that looked into the front yard.  The boys' room was across the stairs.  It had blue carpet and window looking out the backyard.  It was Seth's room, and later Josh's and finally Aaron's.  All the rooms had built-in closets with the same folding wood doors.  To the right of the stairs at the end of the hall were three rooms.  A small room to the left was mine, and later, Sherah's crib was added, and even later an office.  It also had a closet a window looking over the backyard and window looking over the backside of the garage roof.  It had peach carpet.  A hamper sat in-between this door, the end of the hallway, and the other two doors - one to what I remember mainly as mine and Sherah's room.  It had green carpet, and I think Aaron and Josh shared it before us - but most of my memories are Sherah and I in this room.  At that time in our lives we fought, but never seriously.  We did silly things like drew a line down the center of the room, or tugged on each others' blankets, or put a glow-in-the-dark bracelet on the cat so we could see him before he attacked us at night.  This room had two windows too - one looking out the front, and the second over the front side of the garage roof.  (I always figured Aaron was out of luck when it came to fire safety because we had the proper two exits and he only had one).

I guess I should have originally stated our house was a 4-bedroom, 2 1/2 bath home on 10 acres with a pole barn.  I still don't know what a pole barn is.  My guess is it's a tin structure that looks like a barn, but actually is a large garage to park tractors, extra trucks, and store more tools.

We had a two car garage that with both doors open we'd bike or skate endlessly in circles through the garage onto the cement pad out front, and back into the garage.  The garage was lined with tools and its attic seemed to constantly be housing a new batch of kittens (which I loved and my father hated).  The garage smelled like grease and a propane heater in the winter, sawdust and oil in the summer - two smells I will always associate with my dad.  To the right of the garage was a simple high wooden fence that served as the backside of a wooden frame with a plywood lid that housed three garbage bins.  Three solar panels sat on this side of the house as well, from my father's years at Solargizer.  An huge ugly propane tank sat here as well.  We'd climb on it and sit as if it were a horse.

My mother had done a lot of planting on our land - something I didn't appreciate until I was much older, and now I like her, wish to go back to that land and see how the all the fruit trees she planted had fared.  I supposed they have grown and died by now, but when I was young, the years passed to slowly to wait for trees to grow.

She also had a 42-bush rose garden on the south side of our yard.  I know it was 42 bushes because our Mother's Day "gift" each year was being forced to uncover each bush in the garden.  The bushes had been pruned and buried in dirt and hay in order to survive Minnesota's Deep Freeze.  Clearing the hay was easy enough, but clearing the dirt had to be done by hand in order to not further damage the branches.  And those branches had thorns and gloves couldn't stop the endless pricking (and complaining) or those stuck with the job.  Our backyard hills were big for a child's legs to climb on a snowy day.  The back hill and the side hill were the largest and we sledded, tubed, skied and built forts and jumps all around this yard.  In the summer we laid a large tarp down the hill - a tarp that finished to early and grass and mud became the slides end.

There seemed to be patches of woods everywhere.  A patch of woods was directly behind our house, so small it served only as a devision between the side hills that met at the bottom into our garden.  It was a large flat stretch that my mom had planted many things for years, including trenches for asparagus that never grew and a raspberry patch that was reluctant to die.  I dreamed of (and actually started at one point) building a pool down here - I thought it was the perfect spot and figured it couldn't be too hard - dig a hole, put some rocks in the bottom, maybe by a huge piece of tarp.  I shoveled the outline of the pool and only dreamed up the rest.

The north side of our yard had to gentle slopes, one from the front of the house, and another into the back of our house.  The north side itself was line with pine trees on its edge - the line between our yard and the field - planted to shield from the cold north wind and unbelievable wind chill.  The flat area between the pine trees and our house is where I learned to hold a bat, lefty like my father, and hit the ball off a tee - a large road cone, which - come to think of it - and I wonder where we got.  It's where we played a lot of catch and played ball as best we could with only a batter a pitcher and a fielder at best.

Directly across from our house was a small hill that hid the private drive behind it - where it continued onto the third neighbor whom I never really knew.  This hill was perfect arched like a brontosaurus's back - and I imagined for many years this would be my archeological find.  (And I knew this was absurd, which was why it would be such an ingenious find - because I insist on looking for such an anomaly as this).  To the left of the hill was another patch of woods, and one of the large trees held a swing - a swing we hardly used and for some reason was hardly a part of my childhood.  I remember the place more for it being where we buried our dog Ingamar.  A fat yellow labrador retriever that passed horrible gas, was a good hunter, was run over three times (once by my mom), and broke it's leg at least once.  He was a good dog, loyal and gentle.  He died in the winter time, and Seth built a fire to soften the ground in order to dig a hole.  He was Seth's dog, for it was Seth that sent posters out and somehow got on the radio pleading for help in finding his dog when Ingmar was still young and wild and had run off.  My father found that dog some month's later running with a pack near our cousins house.  He whistled and our dog came home and didn't leave ever again.

Someone put a stone there to mark the spot.