But I have a secret to tell here. When I think of “home,”
I most often think of the four-room apartment where I grew up in mid-town
Memphis. There were five of us living in that apartment, but the rooms were
huge and we never felt crowded. I lived there with my Mother, my brother, and
my grandparents until I was almost thirteen years old. It’s where those solid,
ingrained memories are, and it’s where I travel to so many nights in my dreams.
We lived on the second floor of a three-story
apartment building on Madison Avenue. It was an unusual type of building with
two sets of apartments located on each floor at the front of the building and
two sets similarly located in the back of the building. Our apartment was in the back. The front set of
apartments and the ones in the back were not connected except by the hallway on
the first floor. Needless to say, that was one long hallway! I used to love to
roller skate down it and even ride my bike, but that was amazingly often discouraged
by the doctors and dentists who mostly made up those first floor suites. I really
never understood that. It was my
home, after all!And home it was. My Mother had to move the three of us in with my grandmother (Babby) and my step-grandfather (Poppy) when we were very young. They never complained, and I think even enjoyed the fact that we were there. I know Babby did. She loved to cook and bake, so having more people around to eat her scrumptious food made her feel wanted and useful.
As I mentioned earlier, the rooms in this apartment were enormous. We had our own long hallway to connect the front rooms (living room and eat-in kitchen) with two enormous bedrooms in the back. The bathroom with its classic four legged bathtub was located half-way down the hall. The hall itself was wide enough that my brother and I could play ball, build forts and even put in the dollhouses which he would sometimes make for me out of cardboard boxes.
There were two special features of the apartment.
One included a screened-in porch that was accessed through French doors leading
from the living room and that also had a door leading into the kitchen. It was
a great play area for us. In the winter, we used a special plastic covering
to go over the screens that would allow us to play and be fairly warm. The
porch itself was as big as the kitchen area, and our imaginations allowed us to create all sorts of wonderful places on that porch.
The other distinct addition to the apartment was the
fire-escape landing that we shared with our neighbor across the hall. It was
off of our ‘back door’ and was large enough to have seating if we wanted to,
but we never did. We did, however, have a clothes line strung from one side of
the building to the other and which we used each week. There were two; one was
ours, the other our neighbor’s. My brother and I would often take bread crumbs
out to that landing after meals to feed to the birds in the winter months. We
never did that, of course, if there were clothes on the line!
One of the two large bedrooms had a fireplace in it.
Unfortunately, it was unusable, but the mantel and the fireplace itself were still beautiful. My brother and I
would hang our stockings on the mantel in that room every Christmas waiting for
Santa to come, and we’d always worry how he was ever going to make it down our
chimney, since it was blocked. He always managed to get there, however, and one
night I even heard him! I actually woke up in the night hearing sleigh bells,
but when I told everyone the next day, nobody believed me. I knew after I grew
up and know even today that it couldn’t have possibly happened, but I will
swear till my dying breath that I heard those bells. I can still hear them now if
I close my eyes and think about that night.
I’m not sure how Mama did it, but every year we got almost
all of the things we had asked for from Santa. Looking back, I think she must
have saved up all year to do that. I never asked her about that as an adult,
and I really wish I had. Nevertheless, she made sure that Christmas was exceptional
for us. There was always a real Christmas tree that my Poppy had helped her carry
down that great, long hallway and up the stairs into our apartment. This event
would occur after we’d gone and chosen one at least a week before Christmas.
There’s nothing like the smell and the look of a real tree. It had to be cared
for very specially, and each of us took our turns so that it would still be
beautiful even after Christmas day. The decoration of the tree was a special
event, which involved everyone in the household and took time to complete. Mama
always decorated the apartment herself, often with beautiful things she had
made.
Every Christmas morning was a true time of
wonderment for us. On that morning, I was always the first one to awake. (I
still am!) Mama would wake up immediately afterwards and make us wait in our
beds as she went to "prepare" the living room. She would turn on the tree
lights and put on Christmas music to add to the atmosphere as we walked into
that room to see our long-awaited gifts. A huge Christmas breakfast would be
prepared by Babby, who would turn around almost immediately to begin
the dinner preparations. She was such an outstanding cook, a quality that I really
wish I had inherited.
I know that everyone has their own memories of
Christmases past - some good and some possibly not. But the love that we five
people shared in those "growing up years" in that apartment made each Christmas
a very unique and amazing experience for me and for my brother.
“Still, I suppose we all see our youth as the Eden
of perfect days…”¹ Perhaps my memories
are a bit distorted by time, but that apartment is still and always will be my “home,”
and I will always be certain that I heard those sleigh bells on that glorious
Christmas Eve!
Yes, I’ll be home for Christmas. I’ll be here in the
home I’ve created and where I’ve lived for almost thirty years. But I’ll also
be in that heart-felt home of long ago – most certainly in my dreams.
¹McCrumb, Sharyn, King’s Mountain: a Ballad Novel, St. Martin’s Press, NY. 2013. Page
63.
