"The Wonder Years"

The matchbox house, color of melted butter, sat on the farthest edge of the patchy yard. My childhood home in Erie, Pennsylvania was just close enough to the stretch of road where the traffic interrupted its potential quaintness. Sometimes I hated that main drag of pavement. I want to remember that house lolling in the partial shade, a housecat curled in cutouts of sunlight streaming through half open shades. But the thick, saltiness of exhaust and the hiss of rushing traffic contradict that image. Still, you can’t help but let your attention linger when you passed its charming form, just enough for the yellow to hover in your memory.

Our yard was secured with a flimsy chain link fence, sagging as if made from wax. Tips of drooping branches grazed the metal looping the way my hair brushes the surface of pages of books I now hunch over in dim library light. My parents knew the fence wouldn’t hold back a meteor-sized motor vehicle but I’d like to think they believed I was the kind of child who wouldn’t dart into the middle of a busy street. How small my home looked from the outside; it always seemed to be veiled behind a partial shadow, a child shy for a photograph, concealing what ever they can with small hands and body parts. Did passers by see it the way I did? Was it as small to them on the outside as I knew it was on the inside? Almost impossible to live in because of its size. But that’s what made it cozy; it could be my own nook, when I wanted it to be.

A wooden deck hung off the side of the little house in such a way it was as if the weight of it would have sent the entire structure tipping to one side like a seesaw. I used imagined my home was my own life-sized playhouse when I was a toddler. I was its figurine, a dollhouse girl. Now I think of it as a memory box. When I peer inside, images rush back into me like currents of air that swirl around in the atmosphere. I can’t see them but they make themselves known in their own way.