Second Chance
The following was written via a prompt from Sunday Scribblings.
I woke up this morning trying to remember my childhood closet. What was the door to it like? Did it have the same clear glass doorknob that the door to my bedroom had? If I could see the doorknob, remember the feel of the cut facets in my hand as I turned it, why couldn’t I see the closet and what was left inside it?
I willed myself to remember some of the clothes I wore in high school, bought in Quincy Square with babysitting money. There was a brown dress with yellow piping and a star on either corner of the collar, and the blue navy suit I was photographed in for the yearbook. I imagined how they looked hanging from the closet pole on wire hangers, and me flipping through them on a typical school morning, trying to decide what to wear.
My mind wandered up and down the streets of Quincy Square (a bus ride away from the small town of Hull) in and out of the stores I used to shop in as a teenager. I saw the big glass windows full of well dressed mannequins, the hairdresser’s shop my mother took me to once with a “Walk-ins Welcome” sign out front, and the alley tucked between two stores that led to the public parking lot. But even though I often find myself thinking about my childhood closet, I can’t remember any details about it. I have a sense of missing the stuff inside it, but I can’t remember what that was. Was the floor green linoleum like the rest of the room? Wasn’t it cluttered with a pile of junk?
Eminent domain means that the government can take your home away if they deem the land its on is needed for a another purpose. When the town took our family home and burned it to the ground, I was twenty-one years old, a working girl with an apartment in Quincy, jingling my tambourine at Boston Commons concerts on the weekends, making candles and sticking them in wine bottles, and enjoying some pot induced giggles. My family home was like a first kiss I had moved on from. The fact that it was going to be burned to the ground seemed like a rumor I didn’t have to believe.
“I don’t want to see it burned. I can’t bear too,” I said at the time. That was true enough, but not going home before the fire to collect a few things from my old room seems thoughtless and lazy to me now.
If I had a second chance and could do it over again, I’d go back to my bedroom of fifteen years and look through my stuff in the closet. But what would I find? A few pink spoolie curlers tucked into the closet corner and covered with dust? My first writings, crumpled up notes that someone has passed to me in school? An old beat up “Name That Tune Game” that I got for Christmas when I was ten, or the plaster of Paris handprint I made in kindergarten? Surely there would be a Barbie doll and some of the hand-made doll clothes that my grandmother made for my sisters and me before she died.
But it’s the things I can’t even imagine that I miss the most. The things I’ve forgotten so completely.
May 12th, 2007 9:58 am
wow, it all just got burned up? That’s sad. Although I also didn’t keep much from my chilhood home – even though my mother didn’t move out until I was past college. The few things she gave to me that she had kept, mostly got dumped during some move or another – I have nowhere to keep them, and no real reason to most of the time:-)
I am rather pleased to confine most of my childhood to intermittent memories;-)
Michele sent me here today
May 12th, 2007 10:01 am
Those are still in the deep crevices of your brain. Nothing is missing, only misplaced. Transformed.
May 12th, 2007 10:32 am
This began a pattern of leaving things behind, which may be a metaphor for not taking responsiblity for my own life. I think of these items as in a limbo. To love them is to love myself.
Also, I didn’t know back then that I was an archivist at heart.
May 12th, 2007 11:43 am
That’s sad about your childhood house. When I was born, we lived in Ocean Springs, MS. There was no hospital so my parents traveled across a drawbridge into Biloxi for my birth! Our house was literally across the street from the Gulf of Mexico. It was destroyed in Hurricane Camille, not long after my parents sold it. We kept it after we moved to Louisiana as a summer place for a few years. So, that’s the only house I know of that we lived in that is lost.
May 12th, 2007 2:06 pm
It seems quite outrageous that the town could just take your house like that and burn it. I can relate to your feeling of loss for undefined things.
May 12th, 2007 2:10 pm
Yes, the undefined things are not all material things.
The town did compensate my family, but because it was back in the day when many people didn’t know the benefit of having a lawyer, it was a pittance, and of course it didn’t come close to representing the loss we all felt.
May 12th, 2007 5:11 pm
Thanks for the visit, Colleen.
Your writing is so vivid…a real gift. I too, like to imagine my childhood home and hometown (which was Stuart, near you). In fact, I sometimes use that as a “relaxation technique” on the rare occasion when I can’t fall asleep.
How sad that your home was usurped in that way.
The Short People aren’t twins…they are 21 mos apart but India, the oldest, is a tiny munchkin.
Didn’t I read that your husband is a therapist? Me too!
May 12th, 2007 11:00 pm
Yes, Joe is a counseler.
May 12th, 2007 11:32 pm
Our doors had faceted glass knobs too, Colleen. I sure wish we still had them today. My closets are lost to me too. I remember very few of my clothes back then, except for the ones I wore in photos. Happy Mother’s Day! (That must be why it is dead at Michele’s tonight – people are travelling to see their mother’s?)
May 12th, 2007 11:43 pm
Hi Colleen. I loved the Green House story (I followed the link over). I agree about going back. I would take pictures.
~K!
Michele sent me, but it’s been too long since I visited anyway 🙂
May 13th, 2007 10:12 am
I love this post. I feel for you on this. I was a military brat, so there is no one home to yearn for, so it feels as if there is no home.
May 13th, 2007 10:21 am
I liked the little details in this post, and yet found it very sad. I have a small box of childhood things but sometimes a nebulous memory – a smell, a word, a font, a colour – will float over me and I know it’s a reminder of something I’ve given away.
I wanted to highlight two quotes from your piece: “My family home was like a first kiss I had moved on from”, and, “but not going home before the fire to collect a few things from my old room seems thoughtless and lazy to me now”. I doubt you were thoughtless and lazy as a twenty-one year old; it’s just that all those things that you’ve forgotten so completely now were commonplace to you then and you were moving on like any person leaving home. Just didn’t want you to be hard on the younger you!
May 13th, 2007 10:43 am
wonderful imagery and soul stirring, you make me think back and want to write my childhood days. for now I wrote about hope ( not a person) and how it is drawing me on toward a better day.
your visits are always appreciated.
May 13th, 2007 8:43 pm
That seems so incredibly awful that they could do that to your house! I’m sure I would have gone to retrieve what I could. I’m very attached to things of sentiment and of childhood. There’s not a lot I don’t remember about it. I hope your memory of these things comes back to you.
May 14th, 2007 9:11 am
This made me think of how long it took my Mom and I to think of what we’d done with my favorite baby blanket, at least 2 years. I couldn’t quite remember where we put it and Mom couldn’t remember at all (not unusual for her!). It drove me crazy until something finally sparked my memory….
May 14th, 2007 9:20 am
I couldn’t bear to see my childhood home, and where my parents still live, be burnt down…I just couldn’t bear it either.
May 15th, 2007 3:04 am
I want to take time and think about my childhood closet. I think I would have had some of the same things. That was aweful about your house burning. Mine still stands in my hometown.
May 16th, 2007 11:27 am
You speak of Quincy…. do you know of a college there called Eastern Nazarene College? Or now they changed it to University? I have been there several times and it is a nice area only a few blocks from the bay.