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Home Fires: First House

It is the first house. In one of the few photographs of that first house, which predates conscious memory, my unfolding family history presents itself. My brother and I were only fifteen months apart, so we look almost like twins. I would guess my age to be one and half and his to be three.

We are lined up on a couch, my mother in the middle. She is unfathomably young, and she is wearing a ruffled apron, the kind that housewives — the Harriet Nelsons of the fifties — wore. Her hair is black and curled, her legs crossed, and she has an arm around each of her children. My brother looks poised for flight as he always was in those days and even now. “Obstreperous” is the word my mother used for him.

The thing that stands out to me is the wallpaper. It is patterned with large medallions and I remember years later asking my mother why she didn’t take that wallpaper with us when we moved. For some reason, I have always loved the wallpaper in that photograph. I loved it more than my smocked dress, my black patent Mary Jane shoes and more than my white cotton ankle socks or my brother’s horizontally striped T-shirt.

How did that photograph come to be? Did my father come home from work and call as he came through the door, “Doris, get the children and let’s take a picture!”

Pictures weren’t taken as casually then as they are today. Maybe they planned it before he left for work at the Five and Dime. Maybe he bought his Brownie camera that day and wanted to try it out. The moment, though, for whatever reason and however it came to be, is recorded.

There we are, our little family, my father off-camera but there. If feels like he snapped the shot just before dinner. My mother is wearing a short-sleeved BanLon-type sweater and a pencil skirt with a kick pleat. My brother is in shorts, so it must have been late summer or early fall – perhaps a humid Midwest September afternoon.

Why that day? And where were we pulled from, my brother and me? Was he on the front sidewalk underneath the giant century-old elms that formed a canopy on that street before the Dutch elm disease killed them all? Was he riding his tricycle wearing his red plastic fireman helmet and waiting for our dad to come home?

What was I doing? Pulling the books out of the bookshelf as I have been told I relentlessly did, my chubby wrists smacked again and again? Was my perfectly coiffed mother cooking, smoking and keeping an eye out for the next door neighbour in case she wanted to drop by for a Coke?

The circumstances are outside conscious memory, but never mind. There we are, the three of us in the first house, the memory defined by wallpaper and a black and white snapshot with rickrack edges.

There we are, the three of us, in a small, landlocked town in 1952, on a green and blue planet spinning with post-war promise and optimism. Spinning like the beach balls caged at filling stations underneath snapping pennants. Spinning like the records on the turntable playing songs by Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney and Eddie Fisher.

And, whatever my parents were thinking that day, whatever worries may have plagued them, whatever stresses they may have had, that little moment is preserved for me as one of family happiness.

This is the house where I was born and this is my memory: my parents young and vital; my hair in soft brown curls; my mom’s warm arm telling me that I am safe; and my father recording the indelible truth that was as clear to me as the freckles on my nose — it would surely always be this way.

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