Feeling at home … together

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Beat-up orange lockers made them VERY happy. So much so, they began to argue over who got the top and who would be by Elizabeth’s. Who knew?

Then again, the theme for my first session of Artsy Fartsy Saturdays was “Creating a sense of place” and it began painfully apparent these girls – from a large subsidized apartment complex in my neighborhood – don’t have much to call their own.

After a caring neighbor safely delivered them via a local church van and we settled, I asked them to keep three questions in mind during the afternoon. Questions they could answer for themselves:

• Where do we feel at home?

• What makes a place special?

• How can Artsy Fartsy feel like home?

In the midst of a scavenger hunt designed to help them navigate the space, rules and what’s off limits, they clustered in the hallway, ten beats ahead of me, asking if they could each have a locker. That was on my list for after the hunt, when I would briefly mention they could keep things there during Artsy Fartsy, but take them home each time as they were not secure.

Can I bring a mirror from home? What about a lock? Oh, let me put this magnet (intended for the AFS schedule and their home refrigerator) on, it sticks. But I want a top one. This one doesn’t work. No, I don’t want those short ones. I don’t want to have one by myself. Can I have one down at the other end of the hall?

I almost dismissed it as pre-teeny female flightiness, but then I would have missed what it really was: these girls begging for a space. Just a tiny one. A 10”-by’12”-by-36” dusty, metal cubby. A private space they could call their own and fill with whatever they wanted to fill it with. How could I say anything but a resounding YES and tell them they would be provided with locks next time, unanimously consented to by my exceptional adult volunteer advisors, all teachers.

Layla was so intent on getting hers ship-shape that she quickly finished our main project, then toiled away with Windex and paper towels. It shone … probably more in her eyes than on the metal surface.

I am certain no set of lockers has ever been as fussed over as these vintage 1970s specimens in harvest gold and sunset orange in a 100-year-old school. Perhaps because they weren’t assigned or that they were chosen, maybe they called to these girls. I like to think it’s because these girls were making themselves at home.

I know how important it has been to have my space … a room of one’s own as Virginia Woolf termed it. Mine started as a small stand-up desk (an old hostess station from a shut-down restaurant) in a kitchen window, progressed to an eight-by-ten studio in my garage, and, now, a 400-plus square foot former classroom lined by lockers outside.

These spaces have been places I have tended to my soul. Private spaces where I could feel safe and escape when I chose or invite a selected few in …  all on my terms. What would it have been like to have my own locker, aside from at school, when I was in fourth, fifth or sixth grade? May not have made a huge difference in my life because I had things of my own. But, what if I hadn’t?

I would have been scrubbing away at a dusty old locker claiming it!

• Where do we feel at home?

• What makes a place special?

• How can I make where I am now feel like home?

• How can I do that for someone else?

• What difference has having a room of my own made in my life?

All smiles

bounding off

the van and

waving

I had

experienced

their enthusiasm

two nights

previous

as I delivered

last-minute

permission

slips

a quick

task that

became a

two-hour

adventure

at the hand

of my

fourth-grade

guide

I don’t think

she wanted

to let me

leave

except,

she knew

something

special awaited

her

the secret

was

that an

even more

extraordinary

gift would

help us all

feel at home

together

Green rivers and black hearts

You know, you really can go home again. I just did.

On the trip back from vacation, instead of sitting bumper-to-bumper in Chicago traffic, we swung to the west and visited my old stomping grounds: the neighborhood where I lived from ages one to eight. Now that seems like a short span, but it was such a pivotal time. That early childhood experience has influenced much of my life, including my dreams. I also recently toured my old house, school and downtown aerially on bing.com. It was weird, but kinda neat. I had no inkling that I would virtually be re-tracing those footsteps anytime soon.

The opportunity just presented itself.

Oh and what a delicious treat it was. First we went straight to my old house at 274 Forest, an address forever etched on my heart. It's a beautiful Dutch Colonial on a tree-lined street. not the barn red I knew, but taupe and twice the size. All of the primarily 1920s and 1930s houses have been enlarged and well tended. Funny thing is, they seemed so much closer together, but I'm probably at least twice as big as I was then. One neighbor I swore was two block away was, in reality, four houses to the south. And the school was a two-block walk as an adult. An eternal trek – especially at lunch time or after school scurrying to catch Dark Shadows – as a primary student.

The house looks wonderful and it struck me that it feels like the house in which I currently live. My mother always said that, but I didn't believe it until being there again. Both houses even have funky little windows at the top of the stairs.

We parked in front of the house and I tromped up and down the street, remembering which neighbor lived where ... some I had not thought of since we left in 1968. The visual aid really opened the memory gates. Names and faces surfaced that I had not recalled since I was eight. And, really, not much had changed physically.

The house on the corner was home to a big brood called the Hersfelds. As a kid, it seemed like they lived in a castle with a wide L-shaped hall spacious enough to accommodate several bunk beds. Kind of like a big dorm. A really fun big dorm with lots of neighborhood pillow fights. It, somehow, seemed diminished in stature to my adult eyes ... until I smelled the peculiar musty musk of books. Only in front of this house. Likely what I would have sniffed it there as a kid. Interesting what smells can evoke, isn't it? It was a place of grand memories no matter the literal size.

I relished plodding my old path to school. And the fact the old brick Main Street Elementary is now a very active rec center, carefully remodeled to be fully functional, yet preserving the fine old bones and woodwork. My kindergarten room is a preschool, my first-grade, a dance area and, best of all, my very favorite second grade class is the arts-and-crafts studio. Nothing could have made me happier.

As I lurked around the side of the building to that bottom corner room, I relived the memory of a classmate with some disabilities who walked out into traffic and was hit. She survived with a broken leg, but it was the worst thing I had experienced in my young life.

Yet it was also within this story that an adult Sunday School teacher told me at age three my heart was black with sin. That is something with which I have been struggling a long time. I intuitively knew it wasn't, but was not capable of saying so. It had not occurred to me, until now in processing my time travel, that so much more happened in those years than merely that.

Maybe that's why I was called home ... to see the blessed community that shaped me so early in life ... much more so than a well-intentioned, but very wrong, adult.

Funny, we did not have time to drive by my old church. I was more bent on walking downtown to the drugstore where we'd go as a group for green rivers at the soda fountain and by:
– the community pool where I took my first strokes;
– the haunted house now astonishingly beautiful;
– the turreted Victorian where I adored pre-school;
– the train station from which my father left and returned each week day;
– the dime store where we (my twin and I) spent our first allowances; and
– our favorite babysitter's house.

Although the drug store is now a restaurant, we stopped in for lunch and did, indeed, have green rivers and I was satiated on so many levels.

I had returned home on my terms and it was heartwarming!

• Is there a time/place to which I have returned that provided a different glimpse?
• How has that changed me?
• Is there somewhere I need to "travel?"
• What places form childhood do my dreams take me?
• How have I paid attention?


through
the haze
of sleep


I return


walk
the streets


and
replay
the
joyful
days


of
life
as
a
child


it
was
safe
then


sure,
Bradley
locked
us
in
his
garage
and
said the
bloodsuckers
would
come up
through
the drain


but
any
fear
was soon
forgotten
and avenged
by
changing
his
last name
from
Steinhilber
to Frankenstein


the
sweet
days
of
childhood


were
a
gift