In 2012 the only thing I wanted for Christmas was the black garbage bag that held the diaries of my childhood neighbor, Eleanor. I don’t know why I wanted it after all this time; for twelve years it had been left to rot in the storage building behind my mom’s house. It sat in the corner of my living room for more than a week after Mom dropped the bag off at my house in Georgia on her way to Tennessee for Christmas. Eventually, my husband grew tired of tripping over it. Fearing that he would throw it out - or worse, begin looking through it - at 4 PM on Christmas Eve, after several days of frantic cooking, cleaning, crafting and panicking about the upcoming holiday, I opened the bag to commune with the dead.
I had forgotten the ivy-like curls of her letters. I used to think it looked so graceful and elegant when I was a child. Now I could see that what I once found elegant was nothing more than mimicry. It was the writing of a child who had seen the beautiful script of some long dead relative in a family album and attempted their own scribblings in the same fashion. Each letter was meticulously written and re-written over and over until each word was boldly etched into the paper that still smelled like her.
The woman, her home, and now so many years later, these papers held a particular sweet and acrid odor. My whole life, I had known that scent and while it might sting the nose of anyone else, it held for me a strange yet comfortable familiarity. Everyone has a unique and personal odor. This is neither bad nor good – it simply is. A person’s home will take on their odor, but sometimes the house is the source of scent instead.
Eleanor had not lived in a house at all – but then again, no one I knew did at the time. At least, not anyone I was close to. Single-wides, double-wides, modified trailers, and RVs; these were the status quo. She was the only person I have ever known to live in an Airstream trailer. A great silver bullet glistening in the sun, it had always been there, just to the right of my life. I assumed it would be there forever.
Widowed with no children, no driver’s license, and no telephone, Eleanor relied on the assistance of my parents who saw her as both an obligation and a burden. If they didn’t look after her, who would? She hadn’t had a driver’s license since I was a very small child; the cars in her yard had been sitting, gathering rust for as long as I could remember. When I was in the second grade the county decided that we had to clean up our yard which was littered with appliances in various stages of assembly. My dad was a handy-man by trade and he made a decent living off of repairing washers, dryers, refrigerators, and air conditioners. One of my favorite toys as a child was a washer drum which I could hid inside, roll on top of, or roll down the hill toward the swamp and chase. I saw our yard as an ever changing playground, but the county saw it as an eyesore and made up clean up or face what was sure to be a crippling fine. Eleanor’s derelict cars were included in the order but later removed when the county realized that she wasn’t going to clean up her yard no matter what they threatened. Meanwhile, my dad had a heart attack in the process of cleaning up ours.
She would only come out at night, and then, only around the time her widow’s pension from Social Security check came in the mail. All month I watched her door from my bedroom window with rapt attention for signs of her eminent emergence. Rarely did anything of interest happen in my drama deprived childhood. It was a good day when the cows escaped from the pasture at the end of the dirt road and made a break for the paved county road. They never made it; cows are slow and the dirt road was half a mile or more. For a small child though, there’s nothing more exciting than to find your yard host to a dozen head of cattle who at any moment may have decided to charge at your home. The red house we lived in until I was six was built by hand from a pole barn and salvaged materials my dad was able to cobble together into a livable construction. I’m not sure that it could have withstood the barrage of a disgruntled bull. Sadly, cattle escapes were even more infrequent than the visits from our neighbor.
No comments:
Post a Comment