Front Door

Settle down and breathe easy. Think of a time when you were young. Think of the front door. What color was it? Tell some more about that door. Can you remember what it looked like, exactly? Was the wall around it wood, or brick, or something else? Plaster, maybe? Were there any plants around? Tell me everything you see, smell or hear when you think of that door.

Would you like to open that door and go inside? Or would you rather stay out of doors and talk about what you see out there? Maybe you had a secret hiding place, like the one I had over behind the shrubs that grew between the driveway and the tall wooden fence of the neighbor’s yard.

The way this exercise worked for me:

I am going to plant myself on my front porch. This time it is the one on Ave G. Which would make me five? Something like that. The house would be a craftsman house, if it were in California. Since it is in Texas I do not know what it would be called. A little old workman’s cottage, I guess. It is a white house and there are privates around the foundation. Rather rangy in my memory. The front porch is concrete. Flat to the ground with steps up to the house. Rather backward, but one could ride their tricycle off the porch without breaking one’s neck. It was cool and shady. The house was white clapboard and there were brick piers that built up to wite four by four columns. We played in the front yard, not the back. The back half of the lot was fenced for chickens, although I do not believe we had chickens. If that is so, it would be the only house of my childhood that had no chickens…no that is not right the second time in Govalle we had no chicken yard. Mama must have been lonely without her chickens.

Let’s see. There was a front porch. Jack played down the street with a rather obnoxious little boy that was his age. The kid’s name was Monte. Once there was quite a todo when the Monte kid ran away. The police were called and everything. I think that e was found out behind his own garage, finally. I think of him as having been out behind the garage smoking cigarettes. That may have been a figment of my imagination…in my childhood there was always that link…out behind the garage and smoking purloined cirgarettes. I think the Monte kid was a Yankee. I do know that he called children kids, and we always had to say that goats had kids…people had children. No wonder the poor little tyke ran away. Jack went down the street to play with him. As far as I know I never did. I don’t think I minded. I stayed home and played on the front porch. I suppose with dolls. Or maybe I just watched doodle bugs. Who knows? I do remember that we listened to W. Lee O’Danniel and his Texas Doughboys on the radio at noon. One day the announced that they were going to sing Home on the Range especially for Jeannie…on her birthday. Mama tried to tell me that they were singing it for me on my birthday. I didn’t believe her. Because, they were radio people. Radio people could not me. I was a real person. I must have been a disappointing child to have. I am sure Mama had sent in a card and requested that they sing my favorite song for me and I wouldn’t believe her for a minute.