My father's parents owned the house & they lived on the first floor while we lived on the second. In fact, my father was born in that house & shared it with four siblings.
It was a non-descript house on a block of non-descript houses. Mostly 2-family homes built around 1900 with narrow alleys between them. There were no front yards really, as the sidewalks almost brushed the porches. The backyards were small. I guess the average house was 50' wide & 75' - 100' deep. The street was just wide enough for 2 cars to narrowly pass each other while avoiding the parked cars on each side.
The sun, years later & deteriorating.We lived in the 4 rooms upstairs. I shared a small bedroom with my year-younger sister until we moved out of the house when I was 12, having lived there all 12 years of my life. What was neat was the wooden ladder in the hallway which led up to a large, mostly empty attic. That was our playground when it rained.
My grandparents downstairs had 5 rooms with the dining room as the centerpiece for all holiday ocassions. The living room could be sealed off by its sliding wood doors. The basement was a dark, dreay place with the furnance & with a very long work bench with all sorts of tools that I did not understand. My uncle used to skin & fillet the rabbits down there that he had hunted for. Yuck. There was a small dirt filled extention that my grandfather used to store the wine he made - dandelion wine also, I'm told.
I remember my grandmother once toasting her bread over the open flame of her stove. Don't ask me why. I remember her with her high pitch yelling through the kitchen window at my sister for throwing stones at the window. "Sissy...SissyLynne...stop throwing stones at the window." Only they weren't stones - my grandmother's kitchen curtains were on fire & she mistook the crackling for stones! Another time my sister & I were down the block playing when the fire trucks rolled by. Excited, we chased after them, only to have them stop at our house & the firemen rush in. It was quite a shock for us. Turned out to be a furnace problem.
As I said, this was the center of the solar system & as proof to that fact there were always aunts, uncles, cousins & other relatives & friends of my grandparents drawn to it & stopping over all the time - especially during a holiday. The house attracted a lot of people.
I used to be terrified taking the garbage out -the alley was very narrow & pitch black. I just knew all sort of killers & evil-doers awaited each time I went out there. To this day I swear I heard the sound of a ufo land in our backyard, but was too terrified to go look. But night wasn't scary at Halloween. I tried to stay out as late as I could to get that one more candy bar or gum or nickel.
Until I was about 8-9, most of my school friends were on that block. Freddy Kennedy lived next door as did Barbara Boyle. Across the street was Evelyn March & down from her was Marion & Barbara Smart & next to them was Neil Armstrong. Further down on my side was Jerry & Dickie Watt. Next to them was an older kid I only knew as B-Boy. Frankie Degnan lived on the corner of Boyd in a 12 family building & around the corner from him was Sherry Fulton. Opposite Frankie were the O'neill sisters - but they were a few years older. Our backyard faced the backyard of Bobby Brown on Devon St. There was Rose & Tom McNish around the corner on Boyd St - sometimes I hated them. They being Irish, whenever Notre Dame won a football game they got to have pizza for supper. I know I've left some kids out. The evil VanDerLippe's lived across the street & they were always yelling at us for playing by their house. But the were about 160 yrs old & died off soon.
On the corner of Boyd & Chestnut stood a very small store - the only one nestled amongst the houses that ran down the streets in that area. For us kids it was our Mecca, for our parents it was a convenience. Harry's Candy Store. Harry & Thelma, his wife, owned it. They looked about 97 yrs old to us. Harry was a short, skinny guy & Thelma was the taller, heavy-set partner. Any extra pennies we had went to Harry in exchange for the yummy candy, loose & packaged, that he sold. We would collect soda bottles & bring them to Harry, where they were redeemed for cash - 2 cents a small bottle, a nickel for a large bottle. The proceeds went straight back to Harry after we hemmed & hawed about what candy to get. He sold other things I suppose, like milk & cereal & sugar & cigarettes & whatever parents needed, but that wasn't kid's stuff so we never paid attention. Thelma died one year & Harry ran the store for some years afterward, then he closed it. I ran into Harry once years later when I was an adult & he looked the same. I wanted to smack him for closing the store.
The street was our playground - roller skating, gutter ball, biking, hop-scotch, box ball, kick-the-can, tag & it's variations like freeze-tag & Chinese tag, hide-n-seek & whatever else. We used the four corners at Boyd St, as bases for box ball & stick ball. Back then most families had only one car, so there was room to play on the street.
The street had a fair amount of trees - & no they were not chestnut trees - oak & maple mostly. The one thing great about the trees, besides shade in the summer heat, was when the leaves fell in the Fall. There were a series of piles of the collected leaves along the gutter running down the block. We used to jump in the piles & hide under them. The adults would burn the leave piles - don't tell today's code officers about that! The smell of the burning leaves on a crisp Fall day was great - I still love that smell.
If I had to pick anytime in my life when life was the best, when things were simple & uncomplicated, it would be those years.
The sun - my house - became unstable when I was 11. My grandmother died. Things just didn't seem the same after that. There were less visitors, a more somber feeling or maybe a feeling of profound change. I still had my friends -but things were different. When I was 12 the sun - my house - imploded. My grandfather died suddenly. As irony would have it, the sun killed him. He was 71 & decided to paint it on a ladder in August when it was 90 degrees out. Duh. Heart attack, no heart attack, heart attak, no heart attack - watcha ya think? Two of his children, my aunt & uncle, quickly sold off the house - for $11,000, down from an asking price of $18,000. My parents, my sister & I were quickly evicted & moved to a 6-family apartment 3 blocks away. It was another solar system altogether. But it was never & never could be my sun - my home. My home was still at 186 Chestnut St - but now filled with strangers in my room, in my attic.
I hate change.
