Being Home

Ninety years ago, when my father was five or six, my grandparents bought a house in Bryn Mawr. Sixty-five years later, my sister and her husband bought that house after my grandparents died, and now, I’m just waking up in what used to be my grandmother’s sitting room. I remember her glass-fronted hutch to my right where she kept her keepsakes. My favorites were a 6-inch porcelain Peter Rabbit and a pink marble cat. The last time I slept in this house I was three. My only memory of that visit was my grandmother vigorously drying my hair after my evening bath. She insisted it be fully dry before I went to bed so I wouldn’t catch cold. She rubbed and rubbed with a big gray towel and I liked it. We both laughed when I turned to the mirror and my hair was floating this way and that around my head.

Yesterday, I walked from this house to my parents’ house three miles down the road, the house our family moved into when I was just-about four.

As I set out, I saw Bryn Mawr College straight ahead where my sisters and I sold Girl Scout cookies for .50 cents a box when we were kids. I don’t know whose idea that was, but those dormitories were a gold mine! Later, my mom taught physics there. Further down the road, I passed the office where Dr. Zimmerman used to poke at my teeth then paint them with pink goop when he was finished. My friend Lori lived to the left, Sarah, straight ahead, John, Nancy, and Arthur to the right. Halfway to my parents I walked by my High School and Junior High, both of which have been replaced with state of the art buildings. Thankfully, the athletic fields, where I was happiest, are still the same. Ahead, my friend Sam lived in a Spanish-looking house. Then Jeff further on. I wonder where he is now. He was one of the three boys my friends Donna and Ann and I made lunch for one Saturday.  We created a restaurant in our basement with a menu that had only one choice: BLTs. I was the chef. Ann and Donna took our guests’ orders. Having never made BLTs before (I was twelve) I put the lettuce, tomato, and raw bacon on white Pepperidge Farm bread and stuck the sandwiches in the oven. I still get teased about that by Wil, one of those three boys. He’s married to my friend Leslie. They live a few blocks over but there’s not time to visit on this trip.

Eventually I turn left on the road to my parents. The church we all went to is on the corner. Jim the jerk who irritated me lived on the left, then the haunted house on the right. Ann’s house further down, then Donna’s, and Philip’s, and Sandy’s. This was the street where we all gathered on summer evenings to play Capture the Flag, Baby in the Air, and Hide and Seek until there wasn’t enough light to see. It’s the street where Donna and I tried to install a pulley system for note passing from my third-floor room to her second-floor window three houses away, but which her mean next-door neighbors couldn’t possibly allow.

There are so many memories. So much that’s reliable here. Houses that still hold the people and stories I love. By the time I get home I’m more aware than ever how lucky I was. How lucky I am. My parents and another sister are sitting in the living room, it’s time, once again, for lunch.

What’s left of the facade of Ardmore Junior High School. The building behind it is the new High School’s library. (Lower Merion)

After I posted this blog, my friend Arthur sent this pic. Those were the days, my friends.