The Little House Where I Grew Up

The last time I visited my parents in the house where I grew up, before my Mother died, I sat on a stool with my laptop on the bed. This is the room where I lived for seventeen years of my life, the first fifteen along with my older brother Jack. The room is small, sixteen by fifteen, or 240 square feet. These days my brother and I get along very well. Now I know why! If we didn’t, we would have killed each other long before either of us ever graduated from high school. And the room seemed much larger than it does now.

I don’t remember getting along with my brother. Just the opposite. Memories of torment filling every waking moment abound in my mind, torment that usually lasted every single day until one or both of us fell asleep at night. If that’s true, then how did we keep from killing each other?

As I sat there, staring at the walls now decorated with pink print wallpaper, I wonder – did my Mother secretly want girls instead of boys? Even the sheets and comforter on the bed are pink. Yeech!

Now there was a queen-sized bed in the room. Jack and I each had our own beds, small beds. I remember moving them around like forts, taking the plungers out of our BB guns and having cork wars, shooting at each other until my Mother would hear us and race into the room screaming, "Your Daddy’s going to whip your butts when he comes home. Now stop it right now and straighten up this room."

My Father worked in construction and was away from home a lot. When he returned on weekends my Mother would meet him at the door with a belt. We almost always got a whipping before we got a hug. He never hurt us; the whippings were always more bluster than substance.

After pondering this great mystery of life, I’ve decided three things – the way we remember people we once knew is probably totally wrong, our memories of how things used to be are likely completely false and, last but not least, size only matters to adults.

One more thing bothers me, though. Am I wrong about the pink wallpaper?

Fiction South