Papa's House

(Another installment of My People's Place)

For years and years after Papa was gone my little family (my Daddy, my Mom, my older sister and myself) spent almost every weekend, two-week vacations in the summer, and every Thanksgiving, Christmas and any other day I’ve left out, at The Farm. Back then I wasn't exactly sure what it was about the place that had so captured Daddy's heart. I do believe that growing up dirt poor tends to endear a person to the land, and that some people are just more prone to appreciate place and home than others. Daddy was certainly one of those people. The Farm represented his roots and family.  It was his anchor, his hiding place and his physical refuge. There was no place on this huge earth that he would rather be, and because we all loved him, we went.

We stayed in Papa’s little house with the one light bulb and no running water. We got our water from the well just off the front porch and everyone slept in the front room. That’s where the beds were. My sister who is five years older than me (and by the way, much smarter) and I slept in one bed and Mom and Daddy slept in the other.

In the winter Daddy would build a big fire in the fireplace right before we went to bed and heat up some bricks (just regular red bricks) that Mom would then wrap in a towel and some newspapers and place under the covers at the foot of each bed. Oh how I loved to put my sock-clad feet on that brick when I finally slipped under the huge stack of quilts and into that cold bed at night. Being five years older, my sister’s legs were significantly longer than mine so in order to reach our brick I had to scrunch down pretty far in the bed. I would have scrunched forever just to find the warmth of that brick. Because of my determination, it's now a proven fact that you can sleep under 5-7 heavy quilts with your head about midway down the bed and not actually suffocate. As toasty as bedtime may have been though, a fire only burns for so long, and things could still get pretty frigid in the early morning hours.

A good measure of just how cold came one night when my pet goldfish who had made the trip with us (we were going to be there about two weeks over the Christmas holidays and had no qualified fish-sitter at home) was frozen into a solid block of ice in his bowl as it sat on the fireplace mantel. We tried to revive him the next morning (by careful and gradual melting) and at one point he did show some weak signs of life when he gasped two or three times. Sadly he (or she, I suppose I was never sure) ultimately succumbed to the hypothermia. May he or she rest in peace.
After that I always thought of Daddy as a hero for consistently getting up before anyone else in the morning and reviving the fire so the rest of us did not go the way of the goldfish.

It wasn't always winter of course, and sometimes it was beyond hot. I mean it's central Texas for Pete's sake. In the summers we would throw open all the windows and doors and pray for rain or a breeze. Neither usually came. I do remember how excited I was when we got some kind of outlet (where the light bulb was) that allowed us to plug in the green Emerson Junior fan. That fan kept us alive, plain and simple. I remember laying in bed and praying for the fan to 'oscillate' back toward me, not being sure I'd live 'til it did. Never let anyone tell you prayer doesn't work.
Several years ago I had that fan re-wired and it still works like a charm. I could not cherish it more.

During the worst times, when it was just unbearable inside, we'd sleep on cots out on the porch.  As hot and as sultry as it may have been, the utter joy of having fireflies (or lightning bugs as we called them) land on me as I lay there sweating more than made up for the misery. I'll never forget the first time I realized that their little bodies looked just like beetles and not like the cartoon fireflies on TV that sported glowing light bulbs on their abdomens! Just one of the little life lessons gleaned at The Farm.

There have been so many more.

( to be continued...)