Observatio

It occurred to me last night that I can’t remember a lot about many of the houses I’ve lived in since I was a kid. I can easily, and in plenty of detail, recall certain parts of them all, but I can’t seem to do a mental walk-through and point out where closets were, what the baseboards were like, the window hardware, how many steps to the second floor. It’s as if my brain has erased the transitional spaces, in particular, the nooks and crannies and all those little things we take for granted every day because they’re in the background.

One house in particular is a real blur. My family lived there for only a few months when my mother couldn’t afford the mortgage on the one home we’d really gotten used to. (Not her fault, by the way.) The new place was a rental in a different part of the county, meaning that we’d be going to a different school on top of the fact that we didn’t much like the house itself. I can remember a strange divider between the living room and kitchen, a bizarre red (or amber?) Plexiglas thing, but I can’t remember which side of the room it was on. I can’t recall the kitchen cabinets or the tile -- a dull beige vinyl more than likely. I can’t remember what the front window looked like, or the color of the living room walls (white, I’m assuming), nor do I see much detail heading down the hall toward the bedrooms, of which I think there were three. How they were laid out I have no idea whatsoever. Odd.

The thing I remember most about the house was the garage, which had been converted to a bedroom. I dibbed it because I liked the idea of extra privacy, and I thought the Persian rug in there was exotic. The walls were of a rough gray stone about to waist height, then a cheap, dark-wood paneling took over to the ceiling. Where there’d once been the garage door was now an entire wall of that stone.

The unforeseen problem with the room was that it was unheated. Mom got me a second-hand space heater to use on cold nights, but I was always afraid it would burst into flames while I was asleep and I usually turned it off after a while. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I offered the room to my brother Joe, who was excited to take it off my hands.

That’s when I took over a bedroom in the back corner of the house, which I only remember because it had a window on two walls. Or did it? Maybe I’m mixing it up with another room from another house. I do know its walls were painted a sickly shade of sky blue. I hated the color but didn’t want to spend a lot of time painting it myself.

The bath tub in that house was infested for a few weeks with roly poly bugs. We had to scoop them out and flush them down the toilet before we could take a bath.

Another thing I definitely remember is the adhesive carpet squares Mom got to cover the bedroom floors, which were linoleum, I think. The carpet squares were a pukey moss green the texture and consistency of thick felt. I think I can recover the smell of them too. Not good. Armpit soup.

There are other places I’ve lived that I can’t piece together in their entirety, but this place might as well be a ghost house. Probably says more about my state of mind when I lived there than anything else. A strange feeling, though, all these years later, to realize that I walked through that door a few hundred times and remember so little about it.

A blessing?