Much Ado About Nothing

By Editor | June 29, 2023 |

Carmen Ensinger

We are but the sum of our memories

I got the idea for a column after I finished my last one, then dismissed it. I heard the song “The House That Built Me” by Miranda Lambert and it got me to thinking about the house that I grew up in and lived in for the first 30 years of my life.
But, I thought, who would care about that. Then, I started getting some signs.
A couple days later, the woman who was just a baby when I was around 20, posted a family portrait of them and their parents when they were just babies for Father’s Day. The memories started flooding back because their mom used to sit out with me and my mom every evening and drink coffee and shoot the bull as we watched the cars go by.
The third sign was a meme on Facebook. It kind of solidified that I should definitely write this column. It asked the question: “If you were able to move back into your old neighborhood where you grew up, would you move back into the house you grew up in?”
Then I knew I had to write it.
My old home has been at the forefront of my mind for the last few months ever since I saw a post about it on Facebook. Apparently, now it is abandoned in such a state of disrepair that the neighbors are asking that it be torn down by the city.
I saw that on Facebook and immediately got a lump in my throat. The memories started flooding back. My bedroom with the green shag carpeting and the big queen size waterbed that took up most of the room. The living room that covered two-thirds of the left side of the house and went into the kitchen. The kitchen with the cabinets with the side shelves over the sink which held knick knacks which seemed to have been there for most of my life and never changed.
Then there were the cabinets that my mom built way back I guess in the 70’s that never got the stain put on them nor the handles put on them in the entire time I lived there. Leading out of the kitchen was the little back porch that just had a path leading out of it because it was stacked up with stuff that was at least 50 to 60 years old. We are talking those metal cracker tins – stuff like that because my mom never threw anything away. I can still hear the slam of that wooden screen door – of course I am reminded of that every time I go out my own porch now because I also have one.
My hometown of Zeigler wasn’t built in the 1800’s like Carrollton. It was founded in 1904 by a man who came to the area to sink a mine. Ten years later, in 1914, it was finally incorporated. I think the house I lived in was built in the 1920’s. The mines built the homes and rented them out to the miners. I guess they eventually sold the homes.
I’m not sure when my family purchased the home. I have photos of my brothers and sisters in the home when they were teens, which was in the early 60’s so I would say it was sometime in the 50’s. The mines closed down sometime in the 50’s I think.
The house had this concrete porch with brick lattice banisters across the entire front of it that I dearly loved. When I was about 14 years old, I walked home from the bus stop one day and the porch was gone. Well, it wasn’t completely gone – it was still there – it was just busted up into rock.
Apparently, my mom had decided that she was going to enclose the front porch for more storage room. I had absolutely no idea that was going to happen. I had this way of living in my own little world back then – and still do at times – but that came as a total shock. For the record, that was the stupidest thing she could have ever done. It wasn’t a year until she had it so stacked up there was just a path from the door, that was put on the side, to the original front door, which was in the middle. The rest was stacked up with junk.
As I think back, I realize that the things I remember most were the times when I was a child. It seems like those memories are cemented in my brain. I can’t tell you what I ate yesterday, but I can tell you the artist of just about any song from the 70’s or 80’s.
When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9, the one thing that I always loved doing was going through the junk drawer. We all have a junk drawer – that drawer that draws everything that we don’t have a regular place for, right?
We had not one, but two. I think they were chock full of every single toy or trinket ever gotten out of a box of cereal and some from when my brothers and sisters were young as well and they were 20 years older than me. It was always a treasure hunt going through that drawer.
Then there was the color of the living room – this bright and unusual shade of green. My mom always told the story of how I was supposed to be a tumor. She was almost 41 when I was born and the doctor had told her she had a tumor. Because she figured she would be laid up for awhile after the surgery to remove the tumor (aka, me) she decided she would paint the living room.
How she ever came up with this god-awful shade of green I will never know. It was 1964 and things were quite “flashy” in the 60’s, but come on. If that wasn’t bad enough, we had these two light fixtures on the ceiling with three lights each with little round saucer like lampshades. She painted them as well!!
On the wall hung one of those pointy clocks that if it happened to fall off the wall and you happened to be sitting under it – you were dead meat. I don’t think I ever remember that clock actually working or keeping time – but it always hung on the wall until it came down when the walls were painted this even worse shade of peach sometime in the 80’s.
Of course this was long before cell phones, so on the wall in the kitchen there was a wall phone with a long, long cord. Directly across from it was the side of a cabinet where mom kept a calendar – like I said, no cell phones with calendars back then. So what was so special about that. Because she never took the one from the year before down. There must have been around 20 years of calendars there when she died. It was kinda cool actually.
It is little things like that which spring to my mind when I think of my 30 years in that house – or I should say “home”.
Oh, another thing that comes to mind was the intersecting closest between the middle and back bedroom. When I was younger it was always a thrill to sneak through my room to the other room – if I could manage to make it through.
I don’t know when it happened, but to make more room in my room, they had taken out the closet so I had this little cubby hole where I used to have a desk to do my homework, so I just had this little three foot space for my clothes.
Which brings me to the back bedroom. That room was many things at many different times. When I was younger, it was a room of mystery. It had the big connecting closet that had all of these clothes which used to be my sisters, or maybe my mom’s. I remember there being this poodle skirt in there. Lots of really old stuff, which is probably where I learned to love old stuff. I could spend hours in there going through things.
It was also a play room for me. There were lots of toys from when my siblings were young. My sister had this three-foot life-size doll that my mom kept hanging on the wall. It was as big as me and creepy. I spent many an hour in there playing.
When I got older, because we didn’t have any closet space, my mom put up this clothesline and it became a big closet with clothes stretched from one side of the room to the other. The dryer went from the kitchen into the back bedroom which made it handy when hanging up the clothes.
But I think the best memory of all was the Christmas memories I have. There was this big picture window on the side of the house where mom always placed the Christmas tree so everyone could see it. We always had lots of colored lights and ornaments on the tree.
We had the same tree every year that I can remember until I was in my late teens. It was the kind where you had to poke each branch in. It took forever to put together. We used the same ornaments over and over again so I knew them all so well. But the thing that stands out the most was the icicles we put on. We kept them in a shoe box and I remember having to take them off after Christmas was over. It was so tedious, but we did it year after year.
By the time I moved up here, the house was in pretty rough condition. There was no heat in the kitchen at all and it needed a new roof. By the time the mortgage was paid off, I ended up with $508 from the sale of the house. I used the proceeds to buy my beloved Schuyler.
Every once in a while, I will get on Google Earth and draw up my old street and look at the house, but I haven’t done that lately. Not sure I even want to now.
You know what they say “We are but the sum of our memories.”
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n Carmen Ensinger is a pet-lover and a reporter for Campbell Publications.