Our House

This is the home where I grew up. It started out as a granary in a field, moved to town, got new windows, a sidewalk, a step, electricity and running water. I lived in this house for 12 years. It was here that I learned about faith. About gardening and friendships and disappointments and hard work. It was here too that I shared this space with three siblings and my parents. We had a dog for a few years and a crazy cat who loved the roof. At the time I lived there in the 60's, we faced an empty field where crocus and buffalo beans grew wildly and where my brother and sisters and I built snow forts in the winter and rafts in the summer if the slough had enough water. Sometimes that field was a dumping ground for cooking mistakes we made that we didn't want our mother to discover. We only had one door so when it snowed - and in those days it really did snow - the drifts would enclose us prohibiting our exit. We'd have to call a friend or neighbor to come dig us out. This happened more than once.

Our mother made beautiful curtains and kept our home immaculate. Because she worked full time, it was our task to keep it up to her standards which we did each Saturday. She made a lovely garden in the back each year which was the envy of all our neighbors. That far window on the right was the bathroom. It wasn't insulated properly and it was the coldest room in the house. Absolutely freezing in the winter - you never wanted to put your bottom down on the seat fearing a frozen kiss. The little attic room was where my sister H and I slept. Our dad had built beds with a connecting bookshelf. When we were really little my sister and I would leap from one bed to the other. Sometimes we would try to put our legs into each others pyjamas to see if we could be siamese twins and how they could get in and out of bed. Our mother mended them frequently always wondered how pysjamas ripped in our sleep. As we grew older that little attic window served as a surveillance perch to spy on our old sister S who had a BF. We'd wave and try to distract whatever might be going on in that car.

The stairway wasn't enclosed for the first few years and my sister H and I would crawl under there and play house. We would roll up paper and pretend we had cigarettes and held grand tea parties and played school. Years later when my dad was renovating he pulled out those stairs to find the innocent remainders of our childhood. He also found a little blue china teacup and gave it to my sister.

In the evenings, we always had dinner together though we didn't call it that. We were "supper" people. We didn't ever have Christmas lights on our house not because we were Jewish but because we simply didn't have the money to decorate like that. We weren't poor but we weren't rich. Right in the middle.

This house still stands though it looks quite forlorn and neglected. If it could talk, it would tell of a family who tried their best to make it a welcoming place, a better place, a learning place, a forgiving place. It would tell of laughter, of snoring, of quarrels and of reconcilations. Mostly it would tell that here six people strove the best they could to be a family.