possible on its wooden floor boards. On warm evenings after dinner, I liked to sit there
on tall rockers with Ma and “watch all the funny faces go by," as she would say.
In the back, off the kitchen, there was another porch and over it an upper
porch. The space under the lower porch was accessible through a door in the lattice
work that enclosed it. Used primarily for yard and garden equipment, for kids it was
a good hideout. And for kids to slide down, there was the cellar door - that pair of
inclined wooden doors that protected the stairwell leading from the cellar to the
surface of the yard. (“Look down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door, and
we’ll be jolly friends forevermore.")
A lawn about 25 feet wide ran on the side of the house from the front wrought-
iron fence to the end of the house. The space from that point to the foot of the lot was
mainly planted in roses and other flowers. but there was also a grimy, sticky peach
tree which, when I knew it, produced small, almost inedible fruit. Worse, its peach
fuzz made my eyes itch and swell. but the grapes on the arbor that ran from the house
to the back fence were quite edible; I can taste them to this day. The remainder of the
property was a neglected, barren area given over to clothes lines, an abandoned
cistern and copious unwanted black walnuts, from the neighbors’ tree, which stained
kids’ hands and clothes, exasperating the adults. beyond damage, it was a good place
for children to run and dig and “rassle" and carry on.
One spot in particular returns from the past with pleasant nostalgia. Near the
bottom of the back porch stairs grew a mock orange bush and a lavender lilac bush
that were my grandmother’s great delights. And nearby there was a rock, shaped like
a small, round pillow, which someone had painted green - surely just for a little boy
to sit on.
6
