The Greenhouse

Off the driveway in the back of the house is a little separate house that has plumbing, a roof, one wall and several windows.  Given its possibilities we decided it was best to let it be the greenhouse, or rather, in our case the green-try-to-grow-things-and-end-up-being-storage-for-garden-stuff house.  One day when we were kids, the dog was staring at an injured bird in the backyard.  Typically, as we were 3 young girls who have tripped over an injured animal we let out our inner snow-white’s and sleeping beauty’s and started going ballistic.  We went running into the house and told Daddy to “save it! save it! SAVE IT!”  He picked up the bird and brought it into the greenhouse, laid it on a towel and diagnosed a broken wing, he said that he would keep an eye on it and that we should go play, after protests at his suggestion of just putting it out of its misery.  Naturally, we said no, save it.  It wasn’t until about 3 years ago did I, the youngest and apparently most naive, discover that as soon as we were out of sight it started buzzing around the house and hitting itself against the glass walls.  My dad, knowing that it would suffocate from the heat, die of shock, poison itself from the borax and caseron we kept there, or drown itself in one of the many buckets of water from washing cars and watering plants, put it “out of its misery.”  That was the last efforts we put into saving a poor injured bird and from then on out just let the dog eat them (don’t worry he’ll cough it up later).

As we got older we started to see the potential in this little greenhouse.  Where most people only had a little planter in front of their kitchen window, we had an entire little building with all the correct and spectacular amneties and really began to see the possibilities.  Once we had possibilities, we had thought, hope, and determination.  All three of us at one point discovered however, is that thought, hope and determination were pointless without follow-through.  At one point, all of us had a little planter or a tray of herbs, or vegetables, or flowers that were lovingly planted, watered, fertilized, sunned and checked on-for 2 or 3 days.  For years we developed a little graveyard in the greenhouse of said trays, pots and planters where we mourned our plants that never completely grew.  The same could not be said for our mother who successfully grew strawberries and tomatoes starting from the greenhouse and made it to the little garden she had outside.  To this day the strawberries still grow every spring and summer.  The cherry tomatoes grew for years until one year we pulled the  plant up during routine weeding; without tomatoes on the plant it looked like a tall ragweed and to a kid pulling up a really big plant was worthy of a pat on the back.  Weeding the yard each year was our mother’s day gift to our mom (upon her request each year) and wanting to do a good job I pulled the whole thing up.  Mom was upset the tomatoes were gone but said it was okay, we had the greenhouse so we could start over and they would be bigger and better, live and learn.  We never grew them again.

Mom always believed that plants should be a part of the family, same as the dog, the children, the parents and, in our case at least, the house.  Every Easter mom would give each of us a flower in a pot that started out as one blossom and it was our job to help it grow.  The first year we got them we discovered that Nicole didn’t have the patience for growing a whole pot of flowers and from then on out was given a cactus (one of which still survives to this very day).  Mom told us that we could keep them in front of the kitchen window instead of in the greenhouse so it didn’t dry out and so it would be easier to witness its growth.  I loved and cherished those flowers one year that they grew to be too big for the kitchen and were moved out to the yard.  Mine and Sabrina’s were little rose bushes, hers was white, mine was red (naturally).  I decided to put hers in a little flower bed by the sewing house and put mine next to the back patio.  Unbeknownst to me, the spot I planted mine in was the same spot where the run-off from the gutters landed, all the water drowned my roses.  Sabrina’s are still growing in front of the sewing house and are tall enough to be seen from the window directly above.

The greenhouse was never really forgotten so much as dismissed.  When the siding started coming off we tried to board it back up which didn’t appear to work, as it rained more and more it deteriorated until the insulation was exposed.  It was then that we thought we could deter the weather by stapling garbage bags over the insulation to protect it for the rain.  That too, sadly, didn’t work for very long.  A couple winters ago we had a horrible cold snap that froze the pipes in the greenhouse.  As there is an irrigation system in it, there are also a lot of pipes and we were terrified they were going to burst.  After two days with frozen pipes and the cold snap wearing off they did, in fact, burst.    I realized what happened when I heard running water from inside the house; I frantically ran to all the sinks we had turned on to try and get water flowing and when none of them were I went running outside to find the greenhouse submerged in an inch and a half of water and the wall swelling and threatening to explode, as it turned out we had turned the hose on in there and at some point failed to turn it back off.  My heart still goes out to the plumber who had to come out at 8 PM on one of the coldest nights of the year to fix it.

In the recent months I’ve watched the progress on the house as it receives repairs.  One day when I forgot my front door key I walked down the driveway to the back side of the house to go in the back door and passed the greenhouse, which I haven’t thought much of in the recent years.  The windows and whole front had been removed, all that was left were shelves, a concrete floor, and the irrigation system that all these years we weren’t certain worked, even if it did, we never used it.  I realized that all our trays, our lonely gardening gloves who had long lost their pairs, our many watering cans, chemicals, and buckets, were gone.  The more I stared the more it looked like a hole had been blown through it and started to cry.  I realized that while all of us and our plants are living, breathing things, so is the house.

 

Secret hiding place

One of the greatest features about my bedroom was the walk-in closet. It was about 3-4 feet wide by about 7-8 feet long with shelves along the far end and along the top. It was always a mess, littered with shoes, clothes, toys, posters, and other clutter.

But underneath the lowest shelf at the back of the closet was a hole, not much larger than a doggie door. Beyond the hole was a small crawl space, as wide as my closet but only about half as long. The roof angled down to the right, so the ceiling was too low for anyone to be able to stand up straight. Beyond the crawl space were support beams that stretched over the front porch of the house, exposed fiber glass insulation in-between the beams.

My dad told me and my sisters to never go beyond the crawl space. He said it wasn’t structurally sound for people to be walking back and forth and that if we were to try to cross the beams we would fall through onto the porch.

A rough outline - not drawn to scale.

The reason for this warning was because he knew that this secret path was too cool to resist. You see, Nicole’s room was right next to mine. She had the same walk-in closet with the hole and crawl space at the back. Hers was on the left side of her room while mine was on the right. The beams and fiber glass over the front porch completed a secret path from my room to hers.

How could we resist?

I don’t remember ever traversing the beams to sneak into my sister’s room (though this doesn’t mean I didn’t do it). Nicole, on the other hand, was fearless and invaded my room this way at least once. Sometimes this was necessary, as our bedroom doors had old locks with skeleton keys, which was a lot of fun to show off, but sometimes they stuck and we would lock ourselves out of our rooms. But we could unlock it from the inside…

No one ever fell through the fiber glass onto the front porch. Though our dad may have known we crossed the beams, we were never caught.

When I was 12, my best friend, Brianna, and I decided to make the crawl space our secret fort – like our own clubhouse.

With a couple of flashlights and poster paint, which didn’t spread very well on the wood-slated walls, we went into the crawl space at the back of my closet and covered the walls with hearts, our initials, B.F.F. promises, and pictures. (I’ll try to get in there and get pictures to post next week.) It was really something special that I was able to share with my best friend.

As I got older, and the crawl space lost some of its intrigue and mystery, I started using the space to hide personal items. When my first boyfriend and I broke up, I put all of the momentos that reminded me of him in two shoe boxes and placed them just inside the the hole, off to the left. That way, they wouldn’t be visible if someone were to open the make-shift door and peer into the crawl space. I forgot about those items. Over the years, I stumbled upon them once or twice. But it wasn’t until I was packing my room, preparing to move into the dorms at college, that I found them and really looked through what I had saved from that first relationship.

As a child and an adult, this was one of the greatest secret hiding places I’ve ever encountered.

 

The kitchen floor

I don’t really remember the first conflict that brought my mom, my sisters, and I to the kitchen floor of our home. Perhaps it was the first time we thought we were going to lose the house. It might have been after the first time my mom and dad told us they were getting a divorce. Maybe it was when my mom told us that she was sick – anorexia. Whatever the first occasion may have been, my mom, my sisters, and I would return to the kitchen floor in the midst of hardships and conflicts many times over the years. With our back pressed against kitchen cabinet, door frames, and appliances, we would talk, cry, and console. Through many of the years, Baloo, our half Black Lab – half Newfoundland, 150-pound dog would flatten himself against the floor, his head resting in one of our laps, trying to bring comfort in any way he was able. He took up most of the room, and we loved him for it.

Soon we will be losing the house. Over the course of my childhood, I heard this several times. Each time, my mom managed to find another way to tweak the finances so that we could stay. We tightened our belts. My sisters and I got jobs. We worked together to accommodate shortages so that we could keep our home.

Now my sisters and I are grown. Nicole, the oldest, is married with two beautiful little girls. Holli, the youngest, is married with the world at her fingertips, as her husband embraces his new military career. And I am hundreds of miles away (for now), spirited off by career aspirations, living in a place that is not my home. Until late this past winter, when the heat went out for the second time of the season, my mom was holding down the fort, opening the doors to all of us as life’s tribulations brought us home in search of comfort.

The house is spacious and welcoming with four bedrooms, an office, three bathrooms, a darkroom, kennel, shed, sewing house, greenhouse, garage, and a (broken) hot tub. It was ordered out of a Sears catalog in 1908 and delivered in pieces by train. The town doctor bought this house and used it as his office space after it was completed in 1910. Holli liked to boast that it would be 100 years old the same year she turned 21.

Our home was a central hub in our minds. We were within walking distance of the elementary school, middle school, and high school. Dari Mart, the local corner store that ate our allowances, was four blocks up the street. The Ben Franklin was further away, in the heart of downtown, but also a favorite place for us to go and buy decks of cards, fuzzy coloring posters, and pencils. Most of the time, we could go wherever we wanted with only one condition: “Hang a whistle,” my mom always said. It was her theory that screaming children didn’t receive the same urgent attention as a whistle would, and this was how we were to alert anyone if we were in trouble.

More than anything, Nicole wants to raise her growing family in the home and community that raised us, and kept us safe during the most vulnerable years of our lives. As she says, even now, “It’s perfect. It’s the perfect house.” Painfully, this is an aspiration that no one our family can afford to make a reality.

We are grieving. The loss isn’t yet final, but still we grieve, and I long for the comfort of our kitchen floor. Kitchen floor gatherings don’t guarantee solutions, but they bring us together for support and comfort to help my mom, my sisters, and I tackle some of the greatest challenges we face.