by Gwen McMath
As I round the picturesque curve on the street that leads up to the modest black and white frame house at 3518 Rinehart in Grand Prairie, Texas, I am surprised at how rundown and small it has become. It was the first and only home remembered from my childhood and I always thought it was so ideal and much larger than it looked now. My family moved there when I was about three years old from a small duplex in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas. My memory of that duplex is just images and shadows and maybe a few memories from some old black and white photographs of the place. The new house we moved to in Grand Prairie was a wooden frame, two bedroom, and one bath house. Sometime along the way as my brother got older and no longer wanted to be in the same room with his two little sisters, we added a third bedroom, dining room, and enlarged the living room. I lived in that house until I left for college. As I drive down that sleepy little street I remember joyous bicycle rides through the tree-lined streets, basking in the sunshine with the wind blowing my hair. I remember the euphoria I felt as the carefree child that I was. I can still hear the ring of the ice cream man as he came down the street and we children waited excitedly with our quarters ready. As I get out of the car in the now run down neighborhood, I look around and notice that the trees are still beautiful. There is a large cottonwood out front and chinaberry trees on the side of the house.
Walking up to the front porch, I notice the driveway is cracked and deteriorating. I can still picture my older brother, David, rolling his newspapers in that driveway for his afternoon paper route (in those days we had both a morning and afternoon paper). I remember many times as a child running up to that door, busting to share some exciting news with my family. Later on, in my teen years, I remember dreading the walk to the front door because I was late and there stood my dad waiting for me (if it was nighttime, he greeted my date and I in his underwear!). The front porch is smaller than I remember but we managed to make countless pictures of family, friends, and relatives on that porch so the space seems dear to me now. I glance around to the left side of the house; I remember where my parents kept their metal lawn chairs and the many times neighbors stopped in for a visit during the cool evening hours after supper. Sweet peas were always growing on this side of the house and they added a splash of color there in the summer.
Opening the door and walking into the living room floods my mind with memories. The furnishings of our living room stayed the same all those years. My mom and dad had recliner chairs in front of the TV and there was a beige couch with a matching chair. The accessories were mostly made by a neighbor, Golda Lynch, who made ceramics and made us a very prized clock trimmed with pink roses. Daddy had a smoke stand that he got rid of along with his cigarettes when he had his first heart attack and then bypass operation. The living room was the site of many enjoyable holidays. At Christmastime we had an aluminum tree that rotated and had a color wheel that turned and made different colors shine on the tree. Every year we had the same red decorations. The living room was where my sister got married. The furniture was all taken out and folding chairs were put in for the ceremony. She married a Catholic and at that time (1963) she couldn’t get married in the Catholic Church so they had to settle for our living room. Part of the furniture was moved out of the living room another time when my grandfather, at the age of 87, fell in our house during a visit and broke his hip. He had his hospital bed there in the living room. In fact, our living room was used as a recovery room on many occasions because at that time it was unheard of to have more than one TV set! I recovered from having my tonsils out when I was eighteen, and my father recovered from his heart attack. When my sister Shirley was recovering from mumps or measles, I was so jealous of all of the attention she was getting I pinched her arm with a clothespin! The living room was the background for all our prom pictures and was the welcome site for my brother when he came home from Germany during the Vietnam War. The biggest catastrophe we had in the living room was when the water heater that was located in the hall burst and flooded all over the hardwood floors in the living room and ran into the floor heater. My mother tried mopping it up until someone had the good idea to call the fire department. They came quickly and helped clean it all up.
From the living room you entered the cozy, small kitchen which was my mother’s domain. It was painted a bright turquoise blue. My mother was the kind of mom who cooked “supper” every day. On the days I came in from school after riding the bus home, I would immediately follow my nose into the kitchen to see what mama was cooking. She would always be mixing up a bit of this and that from the kitchen and shortly there would be the aroma of my favorite cornbread, cake, or cobbler.
There was a door in the kitchen that went out to the backyard. Having been raised on farms in East Texas, my parents wanted a big, fenced backyard. It was paradise to me. There was always a garden in the summer with my dad raising tomatoes, corn, okra, squash, and onions. We had big pear and peach trees of which I enjoyed the lacy white blooms in the spring and their heavenly smell. I got sick because of eating green pears more than once. We always made pear preserves in the fall. We had a clothesline because it was before the days of dryers. We kept our dogs out back too, a black cocker spaniel named Gigs and later, after he died, a black and white terrier named Rochester. We kept our pet raccoon, Sam, in a cage outback too. My brother brought the raccoon home from the woods one day and we adored him. When we had to give him away, we grieved over him for a long time. There was a couple that lived behind us that always talked to me when I was in the backyard. They were the first people I was ever aware of that talked to me about Jesus. They told me they prayed for me and I liked them very much. I probably owe them my life for praying for me. I am so grateful the Lord led them to talk to me and give a little girl an idea of what Jesus was like. My parents didn’t particularly like them because they were “Pentecostals”, or “holy rollers” as my parents called them. Little did any of us know at the time that I would later become one!
Another doorway in the kitchen went into the dining room. It was paneled and had a pair of plates hanging on the wall that someone made for us that were of an old-fashioned man and woman with red gingham checked clothes on. Outside the dining room windows daddy always planted castor beans. They grew very tall every summer. My fondest memory from that room was when I told my mother that I was going to marry Charley. I remember I was eating spaghetti at the table and told her Charley had proposed to me and that I had accepted. As I look back on that memory she was very kind because we were both sophomores in college and he didn’t have much to offer me but she kept her misgivings to herself that was the way she was. We ate three meals a day in that modest room. Our family was pretty stiff with not a lot of thank yous and I love yous but my mom always knew how to put love on the table by preparing wonderful meals for us.
Connected to the dining room was my brother’s bedroom. What I remember most about his room was there was a built in quilt box under his window. We had lots of handmade quilts, but decided to throw them out and replace them with blankets! My brother had neat closets stuffed with junk. When I got bored I would open his closet door and junk would fall out which would keep me busy for hours! He was a car, boat, and plane kind of a guy and the room always smelled of airplane glue from his model airplanes. When David married I inherited his room but I was never comfortable there because it was so far from the rest of the bedrooms. The air conditioner (before central air) was also loud and I didn’t use it very much because I was afraid someone would get me and carry me off and no one would know until the next day!
Making my way back through the dining room and living room I made my way to the small hallway that led to the other two bedrooms and bath. The bathroom was very tiny, and was painted the same blue as the kitchen. I remember my dad was always the second one to get up in the morning (my mom got up first to make coffee and breakfast) but he was the first to get cleaned up in the bathroom. He was a foreman at an aeronautics plant (Ling, Temco, Vought) so if he had someone he had to prepare to chew out at work he would practice what he was going to say in the mirror. He would say, “Well, today is Monday (or whatever the day might be) and most days would carry on a dialogue with himself which I loved to listen to from my bedroom. One of my earliest memories was about the squares on the bathroom walls that were made to look like tile. I pretended that an animal lived in each square and when I was taking a bath they would come out and play with me! Right outside the bathroom door was a small linen closet and a dirty clothes bin. My biggest delight as a child was to hide in that clothes bin until someone unsuspecting came out of the bathroom and I would jump out and scare them to death!
From the hall you could go into either my mother and dad’s bedroom or the room my sister and I shared. My parent’s room was pretty simple. This was an example of the way they were, they provided for everyone else in our family first, and kept very little for themselves. You could lie on their bed and look out into the backyard. They had sliding doors on their closet and on the top of the closet shelf a box held all our important family papers. We called it the “important box.” My parent’s room housed our one family telephone that the whole family had to share. My dad always went to bed at 9:00 p.m. so pity the poor boy who tried to call my sister or I after then!
As I finally enter my own bedroom more memories begin to flood my mind. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom that I shared with my older sister Shirley (I now say that word “older” with glee). We each had a small closet to keep our clothes and other possessions in. When we got older my sister had a job at Woolworth’s so she had better clothes than I did. I remember most of the clothes she had in her closet because I always wanted to borrow them. In my closet were clothes for church and play, and many clothes made by my grandmother. There were skates that fit on the bottom of your shoes, my hula hoops, and a baton that had batteries because it had lights inside. We had bedroom furniture that was a deep grey color with a double bed, dresser, and chest of drawers. We had an imaginary line drawn down the middle of the bed and if one of us crossed onto the others side of the bed we had license to pinch the tar out of the other, which we did most nights! On top of the bookcase bed rested a black horse made of chalk that we won at the Texas State Fair. In the bookcase were my treasured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belton books. Our bed rested under one of the windows which we kept open on hot, summer nights because these were the days before air conditioning. We were often scared out of our wits at night when we remembered the urban legend of the man who came and slit open your screens! On our dresser rested two matching lamps that were glass and had crystals on them like a small chandelier. I thought these were beautiful and recently bought a pair like them at an antique shop. When we were younger, we had a small blue table and round little chairs for coloring, etc. I remember the table had the face of a clock on it. On one particularly boring afternoon my sister and I decided to paint the table. We took our temper paints and painted it with red, white, and blue stripes and when you sat down on the little chairs the paint would come off on your bottom until the paint faded. We had a green parakeet in a cage on a stand in front of one of the three windows in the room. Our biggest delight with that bird was to put him under the bedspread and watch him crawl around and try to get out. We thought it was so funny, and we entertained out friends with him! We loved that bird and when he died we had a grand funeral and buried the bird in a white leather jewelry box trimmed in gold. I still remember the place in the flower bed where we buried him. As teenagers we kept we kept our high-fi record player with the speakers that were attached to the sides on the top of our chest of drawers. We had our record player strategically placed there so we could easily see ourselves dance in the mirror! I had Fabian (my favorite) and my sister had Frankie Avalon and Elvis records. We had the color posters of our teen idols from their albums tacked up on the walls. Right inside the door was a small doll bed where we kept the remnants of our childhoods—a blue stuffed Elsie the cow and various other dolls that we hadn’t managed to tear up over the years. We talked our mother into letting us paint the room bright chartreuse green to match our bird, so we had a stimulating color scheme too. Later on when I got this room to myself when my sister married, I painted the room red. I had red brocade curtains, bedspread, and my very own red phone. I’m sure it looked gaudy but I thought it was beautiful.
Being so close to my parent’s room drove my parents crazy at times because not only did we listen to everything they did and said they had to listen to us fight and bicker and giggle. One night when my sister came in from a date to find her hair curlers in my hair (why didn’t we have two sets of hair curlers?) she yelled at me and tried to pull out my rollers. I proceeded to try to beat her to death with a hair brush. My dad had to get up and referee!
As I walk back through the house and close the door behind me I silently thank God and my parents. I am so grateful that my home was a safe haven for me the years I was growing up. I’m thankful I had a family I could count on to never hurt or abandon me. I know now that I was fortunate to have the unmerited favor of my family. As I walk back to my car I realize I have a responsibility to live before my children and soon my grandchildren in a way to provide them with the heritage I had. It is no small task.