My House, My Memorabilia

 

“What did you say?” I called out to my niece Alyssa just as she finished going on and on about the family tree while mopping her kitchen floor. “I said,” she answered, “You can get a print made of the house you lived in when you were a little girl. You just go to the website, type the address of the house and print out an eight by ten of your childhood home.”

I liked that I thought to myself. A print out of the house was much better than my niece digging up all our ancestors (almost literally) and marking them down on a family tree. I told Alyssa I didn’t know why she was so interested in our ancestors that were dead when she has so many relatives that are alive and only rarely, if at all, did she visit them!

I printed out an eight by ten of the house in Richmond Hill, Queens. It’s the only house I remember living in from the time I was about three to nine years old.  What a piece of memorabilia this picture turned out to be.  When I look at my childhood house, a flood of memories come back to me. Join me as I share a few memories that were evoked from just one picture

There it is! I see it in the picture, the door knocker. The house never came with a bell way back then. The thing was everyone in the family had to use this special knock on the front door. My father taught us the beats and we needed to learn them quickly. There was a reason for the special way of knocking and that reason was since the bill collectors didn’t know the special knock, the door wasn’t opened to them and they couldn’t demand payment of the gas or electric bill.

The blinds on the windows bring back such bittersweet memories just as the door knocker did. The blinds always stayed pulled all the way down and shut tight. I remember many times peeking outside from behind the blinds. We were very poor and no one was allowed to see in through our windows if they tried to be nosey about how we lived.

When I look at the picture and see all the windows in the house, I remember in my mind’s eye where each bedroom was upstairs and exactly how the living room, dining room and kitchen were set out on the first floor.

The shingles were very dark and very old looking. My feelings always got very mixed up when I look at this piece of house memorabilia.  I had challenges of learning a special knock to keep the bill collectors away to shutting the window blinds and keeping neighbors away.  Many of my memories taste sour in my mouth but yet I have memories that taste sugar sweet such as playing in front of that childhood home and having more friends to play with than one could ever imagine.

I made a mental note to tell Alyssa that she should print a copy of her childhood house, if she hadn’t done so already. I was certain it would become to her just as important a piece of memorabilia as the family tree that she had been digesting for years.

 

Ellen G.