There is a house that will always hold a special place in my heart. It can be found smack in the middle of a little street in a suburb outside of Philadelphia called Glenside. It stands much taller than the ranchers and cape cods that surround it, and although as a child I thought it was huge, my adult self knows it was alot less spacious than I remember.
I know at least one of my 5 siblings has a picture of it, but I could not track one down. I did, however, manage to pillage a shot from Google Maps of the house as it looks now:
The house in this picture is freshly painted yellow, but when I lived there, it was old white paint on some sort of block siding with a green trim- and I'm pretty sure lead paint was involved. The landscape here looks much nicer than when we lived there, but my mom's not to fault for that. She's actually an amazing gardener and she could have done even much better than this if she hadn't been chasing around 6 kids. Every spring, she would use what extra money she might have to plant impatients, snapdragons, marigolds, geraniums and petunias. She didn't have money to spend on mulch, but I remember her kneeling outside planting and weeding the dirt in her garden and it was always pretty to me.
That bush on the far left is an azalea that bloomed like a burst of hot pink fire every May for about 2 weeks.
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| My brother Joey posing for his 1st Communion. That's me on the porch photo-bombing the pic (or increasing the cuteness level- You be the judge!) |
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The front porch was a popular hangout spot for the whole family. On sunny summer days, we'd eat popsicles out front and pretend the porch was a boat on the ocean. On rainy days, we'd sit on the bench and watch the lightning light up the sky and the rain rush down the hill and collect at the bottom of the street forming a big pond at our school bus stop.
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| My beautiful mom posing with my oldest sister Jennifer on the front porch steps. |
Like many of the older homes in Glenside, our porch was covered in outdoor faux grass carpeting. I still laugh at the thought of a simpler time when people thought this was a fabulous idea! It always looked like it needed to be vacuumed.
The front door opened directly into the living room- no fancy foyer for us. I'm sure it was cramped, but my child brain remembers it as cozy. We had an old mottled brown carpet, and my sisters and I used to spin in circles and say it looked like chocolate-chip cookies when you looked down as you were spinning around. Later my parents replaced most of the brown carpeting with a pink carpet that was very "in style"- I can't remember the year, but it was back when the color teal was also very in style and hot for ski jackets and home accents.
The most defining feature of the inside of our house was the stone wall that stood on the right as you entered the front door. I believe my PopPop built it. All other walls were regular drywall, but this one wall as you walked up the steps was a fantastically textured wall of large, smoothed sort of river rock.
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| My Dad, circa Nineteen-eighty-holy-sideburns! (p.s. and now you know- THIS is who Anna gets that red hair from!) |
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This other picture (with the pink carpet!) really gives you an idea of the dynamic color and pattern the rocks formed. Don't mind my sister and her friend Monica, chillin' out on a typical TGIF ("It's Friday night/And the mood is right/Gonna have some fun/Show you how it's done, TGIF!").
What I think I remember the most about that wall and the steps is Christmas morning when, every year, my parents had all 6 of us line up, in age order, for a photo op before we stormed downstairs for a good ol'fashioned rip 'n toss session. The thing I remember second most is the countless hours my sisters and I spent pretending we were climbing a rock wall.
My mom always threw the dining room windows open when the weather was nice, and she had sheers in all the windows that would billow in the breeze.
It's that memory- a feeling- of the breeze lifting those sheers that I think of most often when I remember this house.
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| My youngest sister Joanna in a sweater that I believe many of us unfortunately wore at some point. Poor Joanna got all the hand-me-downs... the good and the, um, geometrically horrific. |
We had a small galley-style kitchen, but my mom used the space to cook a vat of Spanish Rice or Sausage & Meatballs with Gravy like nobody's business. She used that tiny kitchen to bang out a Thanksgiving dinner for about 15 people almost every year, complete with her signature sausage stuffing. At one point, we had an outdoor picnic table as our kitchen table, but she'd still find ways to roll out dough for pizzas or stromboli or batch after batch of Christmas cookies, or her Apple Pies that used something like 5 lbs of apples in each pie. The counters and backsplash were reddish-orange and the cabinets were dark wood. One day, in an attempt to revitalize the kitchen, my mom and older sisters painted all the cabinets white with tiny black dots on the inside of the trim. We had a dishwasher that stood next to the fridge and had to be wheeled out and hooked up to the sink every night. We had two Tiffany style lamps that hung on either side of the kitchen.
Upstairs, there were 3 bedrooms. My parents had a small room that barely fit their bed, my mom's hope chest and a dresser. Their closet was the go-to hiding spot for Christmas gifts. My MomMom lived with us for a while after PopPop died. She had the small bedroom that eventually became my oldest sister Jennifer's room- my memories of that room after Jen moved in were mostly of alot of Madonna music. Us 4 younger sisters shared the 3rd room. We had 2 large, wood framed bunkbeds and we each had about a drawer and a half underneath the beds. We used to drape sheets across the two top bunks and run across (We could have broken our legs! What were we thinking??).
When 6 kids grow up in a small house, you have to take whatever space is yours and make the best of it. Many of my friends had whole bedrooms to themselves! We didn't have that luxury, but I had the bottom bunk with the window that was half blocked by the bunkbed frame (which may or may not have been better than the window that was unblocked by frame but had an air conditioner in it!). It was my own area to make my own. We would hang sheets across the sides to give it the feel of our own little cubicles. I rigged up a reading light inside mine and hung decorations from the underside of the bed above me. At some point, we each began drawing with marker on our own personal walls. Pictures and doodles, whatever we were "into" at the time. My older sister Vicki wrote a list of her friends' phone numbers and pager numbers on her wall. I thought her bubbly 8th grade handwriting with heart-dotted "i's" was so cool, so I copied her. We didn't write any profanity- maybe some heart-wrenching cheesey Nirvana or Pearl Jam song lyrics here and there, but that's about as racey as it got. The thing that sticks out the most about this situation is that I don't remember our parents ever getting mad that we drew on our walls. You would think that mom or dad would be furious about this, but I believe our parents understood our individual needs for a space each of our own.
My brother had the attic as his bedroom. We all envied that space for sure. It had low, slanting ceilings and two built in shelves. His window looked out from the topmost part of the house. His bed was just a mattress on top of a box spring on the floor. He had a fish tank and a reasonable amount of privacy. Every once in a while, he'd invite one of us up to show us his newest fish or have us listen to some Guns 'n Roses, and we always felt pretty cool about it. I remember him calling me up one time to listen to some music- he played a track called " Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pic", by Pink Floyd. I thought it sounded like a bunch of noise, but it was the coolest noise I ever heard because I was in the coolest room of the house.
Out back, we had a big patio. This house was the house my mom grew up in, and the multi-colored slate in the patio was laid by my PopPop. When my mom graduated high school (I believe), my PopPop picked up a small white rock from the ground outside where she graduated. He brought it home and laid it in the wet concrete and told her she would always remember the day she graduated when she saw that rock.
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| PopPop and MomMom out back on the patio when the house in Glenside was their home. |
We had a swing on the patio for as long as I could remember. The swing wasn't built into the concrete-it just sat on top- so if about 3 of us kids sat on it and swung as high as we could, it would squeak like crazy and begin to lift off the ground.
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| Jennifer posing with PopPop infront of the swing on the patio. Obviously, I have a ton of 1st Communion pictures. |
Our backyard was pretty sizeable. We had a large garage out back that was a haven for crap. I never saw a car parked in there. One day, my dad rented a dumpster and knocked it down, then commissioned us kids to haul the lead-paint covered wood into the dumpster.
Do you see that teeny tiny wall just outside of the garage? It was only about 5 feet long, and after the garage was cleared away, my sisters and I used to play McDonald's drive thru there- one of us would stand on the grass-side of the wall while the others would ride their bikes up and order food.
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| Joanna out back by the ice cream truck. |
My dad used to drive ice cream trucks when he was in high school before he got into the business world. One day when I was about 10 or so, he came home with a rotted out Mister Softee truck. He owned a software company at the time, so I'm not quite sure what he planned to do with the truck- I think it was mainly nostalgia that fueled the purchase. It sat in the driveway for a few years before he finally let go of the dream and resold it. My grade school friends still talk about the ice cream truck. We also had a speedboat my dad purchased from our next door neighbor. We used to take it out for day trips on the Delaware river- we'd take it down by the airport and watch the planes take off from the water.
I still get nostalgic about that house when I smell marigolds. I think of when we would bring home live blue crabs and my dad would set a couple loose to walk around the kitchen before we cooked them in my mom's gravy with spaghetti on a warm summer night. When Dave and I moved into our house, one of the first things I did was take out the generic light fixture in our kitchen and replace it with a Tiffany-style lamp. At night when I clean up my own kitchen after dinner and I run the start cycle on my dishwasher, I turn out the lights and can't help but get a peaceful easy feeling because I always remember our little house in Glenside at the end of a long, hectic, kid-filled day, the dishwasher rolled out and whirring in the background.
This house is the home where my parents built our family.
Sometimes, it was tight quarters...
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| All 6 kids gathered around my mom and whatever snack she had, like piranha. |
But it's the house that instilled many of my personal values. It's where I learned that having a little can really be alot.
This is the house that built me.
