Prompt Post #1

For most of my younger years, I would recite my address as “1082 rt.8, Glenshaw Glass, PA, 15116,” not realizing that the Glenshaw Glass plant (I’m still fuzzy on what actually went on there) wasn’t part of the Postal code. Living on the highway, we were never allowed to have pets, for fear they would get out and get hit by a car. We got used to the near-constant roar of cars and the thundering of 18 wheelers, having to pull U-turns between packs of cars, and being the last on the bus route home from school.

We—Mom, Dad, Art, and I—lived on a hill that had been flattened out enough to make room for a small row of houses. Behind our house there were hills covered in trees, and at the top of that were baseball fields that  my brother and I were never allowed to walk to. We had a wide side-yard to the left, in which I lost my walking stick from Germany, and to the right was a (very) little copse that we turned into a tree fort. Next to that lived my cousins, for a while, and then Mr. and Mrs. Miller, who composted and had a rock garden (a term I never understood, since you couldn’t grow rocks). We had snakes and deer trails, groundhogs and rats, mice and spiders. We had a steep of maybe 25 wooden steps from the parking lot below to the house above that, when the time came to sell the house, actually scared a couple so badly that the wife refused to leave her car.  

We were maybe a mile away from the Eat’n Park (The place for smiles.) where my dad caught the bus to work most days. We would drive our old station wagon to pick him up, and if we were lucky, he would have a Tootsie Pop for Art and I. Mom would switch to let Dad drive sometimes, or sometimes he just got in the car, and we would head back down the road.

A mile the other way were the Shaler Flats, right next to a creek that flooded every year. There were lots of floods, but I don’t remember any of them, except the one from my Senior year of high school, from Hurricane Ivan. There was one the year I was born, I think, that took away my Uncle Ron’s car. He had gotten out of it because he couldn’t see to drive anymore, and went and sat on the side of the road, on a hill. A few minutes later, the water was so high that when a wave came, it just picked up his car and carried it away. That’s where the story always ended, so I never knew what happened to the car.

Each year, we got snow. My dad would shovel out a place in the driveway for our cars, and pile the snow into the empty space between us and the Miller’s. My brother and I would stand on the wall above the driveway, and jump into the snow, up to our knees, or our waists. We would sled down the small bump between the Miller’s house and our own. One year, after a particularly strong snowfall, a tree from our copse fell down and came very close to hitting our house. My mom tells me that Art and I collected the pine cones from it and sold them to a local florist for a penny a piece; we each made $7. One year my brother and I were sick with the flu, and couldn’t go outside to play. Our cousins built us snowmen and gave them signs, telling us to get better soon and come out to play. Our parents brought snow into the kitchen, and we played with it in pans.

We moved from the old house when I was in the middle of first grade. We thought it would take forever for the house to sell because of the location, but it only took four months. I’ve called it The Old House ever since. Art and I couldn’t sleep at the new house, because it was too quiet without the trucks and the cars constantly whizzing by.

Route 8 is the main vein into Pittsburgh for the North Hills, so on field trips to the Zoo and the Benedum center, I would always sit on the left side of the bus. I would put my head against the window, and grab my seat mate, and say, “I used to live there.” I get quiet, contemplative, driving by it. It’s sold several times since we’ve moved, but it is still my Old House.

This place is my perpetual childhood. It wasn’t a perfect place—it leaked, the pipes had a tendency to freeze up in the winter, there were mice living in the walls—but the woods were my playground. All of my memories from it are fuzzy, warm, and soft, like the pictures that I have. It's a place that begs for reflection any time I go by. That, in turn, has helped me become such a reflective person overall.