3rd Moanin' of Christmas

October 7, 2019

Greetings from the space between,

Men came to work in the factories, from cotton fields and barren farms and small towns and big cities where there was no work.  The company invited them in and gave them hope for a future.  And the factories chewed up men and spat out fenders and engines and automobiles. 

The company cleared acres of land and scraped roads and dug basements and hammered up hundreds of houses at a time.  Because the men, and the families they wanted with them, were living in tents along the river.   Years passed and the streets were paved, and schools were built and shops sprung up and parks were groomed and the streets were named Mackin and Dupont and Chevrolet.  And Barth.

Modest.  That’s what you would say if you stood at the street and looked at the house.  The metal numbers were nailed to a post near the door.  2102. 

The wedding party filled up the entire living room and spilled into the space where the dinette table would be.  Scotty and Barbara started their life together there, in the modest house.  Two tiny, cramped bedrooms, a comically narrow set of stairs to an attic room that could store Christmas decorations, or where Scotty’s brother would stay when he arrived from the old country.

It was impossible to think of raising four children there and so that’s what they did.  Babies and toddlers and adults and the few meager things they needed. Dawn Elizabeth. David Scott. Leslie Ann. Jennifer Wilde.  One day, at another house, Douglas Hume.

The basement was nearly filled with huge furnace, a monster of ductwork that seemed to be reaching up to pull the house down into the basement.  Scotty cobbled together a room there where, for a while, another family from Scotland lived, because that was impossible too.

The driveway was unpaved, split with a spine of grass, leading to a tiny garage.  A Buick would sit there, dwarfing the garage, mocking it for being too petite for a modern-day automobile.  In the dim garage was a few tools, a bike, a toboggan, a wooden ladder.  Spiders and roly-poly bugs.

The distance from the front porch to the sidewalk was two long strides for my father who was a giant in that time.  He built enormous snowmen and assembled wagons and bikes and mowed the tiny square of grass and went to work.  He walked us to the park.  He leaned under the hood of the Buick and listened to the Tigers lose on WJR.

Barbara stood in the narrow galley kitchen in the back of the house and while she did dishes she looked out the window at the children in the back yard.  A wire fence bracketed the yard, a strip of garden on one side, straining to join with the neighbor’s version on the other side.

She sewed clothes and washed them and hung them to dry on cotton lines over the grass.  She cooked from scratch and picked up babies and wiped noses and kissed scuffed knees.  She somehow got us scrubbed for church or school or for when company came.  She took food to the neighbors.  She sent her son to Mrs. Dodge’s for groceries.

There was music on the hifi.  There were celebrations.  The house swelled and groaned to allow everyone in, until it was a mansion, until the size no longer had anything to do with the dimensions the carpenters intended.  Grandparents and neighbors and families sat in the living room, opened gifts, ate dinner, other children mingled in, filled the tiny house, covered the postage stamp square of grass.  There was an intimacy that can only be had when there is barely room for everyone you want to make room for.  The house and the people and the things they said and did became part of my life, now knit into me like a skin graft. 

A few years ago there was a federal grant, one of those dense documents that no one outside of government understands.  The big print said this: nearly five thousand houses would be euthanized.  Places that no longer had value.  Five thousand places where people once made memories just like mine.  No one asked any of us to read the grant.

There was a day I drove by the house on Barth Street and saw the front door was gone, the house gaped at me like a Munch painting, terrible and terrified, empty and hopeless.  Not even squatters would go inside.  I’m ashamed that in that moment I didn’t want to acknowledge it was my home.  It was like seeing a relative on skid row and wanting to help and knowing it was futile.  And looking away, hoping something else would happen.

And the next time I drove down the street the house was gone.  There was only weeds and wild grass there.  The air above where there was once a house, where there were shutters and windows, and four numbers, held no memory of the shape. Just a patch of grass with a hint of where the driveway was.  A good long jumper could clear the whole thing and not get a gold medal.

Just empty space. There were no stories.  No snowman in the front yard, or a little boy playing with his matchbox cars on the porch.  There were no parties that filled the house and spilled into the yard.  There were no Christmas decorations, no paper Santa on the front door.  No little girl pouting on the sidewalk while her brother rode her bike.  No Easter pictures.  No smiling couple looking out from their beginning.

Those stories are with me, and my family.  There is no one else to remember them, so we will. And now you know some of them, and so you will.

There was a time before us that this tiny plot of land was just part of a forest, a field, a wild place without the squares of man to define where we were, where others were, and then we weren’t. And perhaps in time it will become that again.  The grass is already reclaiming it.  But not all of it.  So much of it is in me and my family.

Not even a hundred years went by from the time the company built the houses until they were gone. In the space between we lived there, and it mattered.  The people at 2102 Barth had names.  They had pain and happiness and dreams and disappointment.  They went on to live amazing lives, launched from a tiny place of love and hope and promise, into this world where nothing is permanent except what we carry with us.  That light never dims.

Hope this finds you holding on,

David

Copyright © 2019 David Smith