The Neighbor's Burnpile: On Memory and Writing the Story "Poolside"
I lived in the same small town, off the same road, and in the same house my entire childhood, leaving for college from the driveway where I had parked my bicycle a decade before and burned fireworks every summer. When I visit home in my 40s, I head to the same address--even though that changed from Rural Route 3, Box 52 to a jumble of numbers in the late '80s/early '90s when 9-1-1 arrived in our area and the road became 230th Street, which means nothing to anyone who actually lives there. (In fact, when my father was dying, and we called 9-1-1, the dispatcher was confused about our address, even though it was the new-fangled one intended to expedite help.)
Regardless, when I visit home, I expect the bones of the house to be there, even though my mother has since had the house sided, hung different pictures, and recently had a new shower built for a woman in her late 80s in place of the bathtub I'd climbed in and out of all through the 1980s. But some of my father's photographs and paintings still hang where they always have, and the wooden robot he built stands downstairs, looking out of the same lightbulb eyes, and a small assortment of the glass insulators he collected remain in the basement where he once kept his workshop. The house is the same but not the same, which is a thickly bittersweet drink.
Many of the same neighbors live in the surrounding houses, but the meadow and its horses, then sheep, that grazed on the grass at the bottom of the hill are no longer there, like the cows down the road who have vanished with the barns and fencing, replaced with a small subdivision and, I suppose, future, other homes.
However, one of the biggest changes to the neighborhood is the small house next door where an older couple lived during my childhood. Budd and Leafa. (Her name was Leatha, but as a child, I associated her with gardening so I always called her Leafa and heard it that way, too.) Leafa grew a large, beautiful garden in the long back yard, and Budd repaired lawn mowers and other small machines in the shed behind the house. She hung her clothes out on the line like my mother and had a swing in the back yard where we would sometimes sit in the early evening. Budd hung a bug zapper from the large tree and its electric sizzle snapped off and on all night, signaling another mosquito gone to ash.
It has never been a neighborhood of fences--except for those keeping in the dairy cows or the one separating out the bull. So I would walk through one neighbor's yard to and from the school bus, and take a step from our yard into Budd and Leafa's yard to visit her on her back porch or to help her in the garden or to watch Budd work in the dimly lit shed that smelled of cigarettes, important chemicals in old cans, and the dirt floor necessary for fixing broken things.
I was a teenager, it seems, when Budd then Leafa died, though I can't remember exactly. They died before my father, and before his cancer, so maybe I wasn't yet a teenager when the house went empty. For a few years, the adult children rented out the house and continued to maintain the yard to their parents' expectations; it was easy to imagine that Budd and Leafa were still there, just inside at the moment.
Sometime later, after I no longer lived there, the house was sold, and though none of us realized it, that was likely the moment when the house began to falter in foreseeable ways, but no one hurried to its aid. Over time, the house has fallen apart in the way that I once imagined only old, abandoned farm houses fell apart--the ones that appear now and then along country roads, set back in the fields as though backing away in embarrassment, their walls gone gray, the windows broken out, the weeds growing around the bases of the few large trees that continue to grow, though memories no longer do.
At my last visit this spring, the roof was caving in as though someone had karate chopped it in half. The once bright yellow paint is shedding off into the dead grass. The back yard shed is gone, as is the tree, the clothesline, the bench swing, and the garden where I once let a temporary pet box turtle walk away, never to see it again.
Were the house in the town's city limits, it would have had a CONDEMNED sign posted on its door years ago. A stranger would assume it's the remains of a bad fire, or the beginnings of a salvage yard. It is still owned by the people who bought it, though only nocturnal creatures live it in now, in the corners of cabinets that may not have been crushed by the roof.
Now and then the owner visits the house in order to set fire to a backyard pile of things, off which rolls a black, black smoke that hovers over the neighborhood. When we visited this spring, my son couldn't bike in the neighborhood as I had hoped, wanting his rural trips to echo my childhood in even the most basic ways, because the ashy air felt so bad to breathe.
It is hard to see parts of my past fall down. I had always thought the past belonged to everyone else, and that I would never start stories the way my mother did: "When I was a kid, this used to be . . ."
While writing the story "Poolside," I crossed the back yard of my memory into Budd and Leafa's back yard. All was green again, the metal windmill was clicking over the garden, and Leafa was on the back step in a house dress, shelling beans. It was good to be back, even though that aspect of the story is just for me and the rest, from plot to characters, come to life thanks to the help of fiction.
Last November, the online magazine Bone Parade published "Poolside." When I find a home for my next story collection, it will be in there, too. Until then, you can start reading the story here and follow it to the journal (free of charge), or go there now.
Either way, I hope you'll dip into the story, and that you find moments this summer to resurrect those now idyllic memories of your past, regardless of what remains standing there today.
Cheers,
Erin
Poolside
by Erin Pringle
Tiny Gina is dragging a white pool ladder she found behind the shed up through the backyard toward the house, leaving twin lines through the grass. Grandpa’s at the library, so she’ll have to ask Gramma if she knows where it came from.
Gramma is sitting on the back porch swing, barefoot and shelling beans into the bowl on her lap. Her daughter, Big Gina, sits on the middle porch stair, her hair parted down the middle like it has been since junior high. She’s shelling beans, too. Both women look out over the backyard, now and then glancing at the weathervane on the shed or the birdhouse hanging on the lowest branch of the tree where Big Gina used to spin in her tire swing.
What’s Tiny Gina got there? says Gramma.
Big Gina looks up from her bowl to the girl walking backward toward them, leaning and pulling something through the grass. Big Gina says, Maybe a ladder.
We keep the ladders in the garage, same as always. Gramma raises her voice to reach Tiny Gina. Whatch yoo been getting into, girl?
Tiny Gina pauses and looks over her shoulder toward the house.
Ladder!
Ladders are in the garage, Big Gina says.
Tiny Gina starts shaking her head and starts walking again.
What’d she say? Gramma says.
What’s that? Big Gina calls, cupping one hand to her mouth for help.
Tiny Gina raises her voice and pulls at the same time. It’s hard talking loud while your neck’s turned. This here’s a pool ladder, she says. Found it behind the shed.
Tiny Gina stops and lifts a bare foot out of the grass. She points her toes, patting the grass until she feels her shoe and slips it back on. They’re see-through jelly shoes with bits of silver glitter. When she takes them off at night, there’s a dark dirt line around each foot. Like a waterline dried to a drinking glass, but gross.
Gramma yells that she doesn’t want Tiny Gina fooling out back of the shed. It’s not safe.
Okay! Tiny Gina says, shifting her hands on the ladder and then taking another step back. The ladder is made of white metal with a blue stripe around each main pole. The steps look made of plastic, and there’s only one side to it instead of the usual two sides required for standing-up ladders.
Who knows what all’s back there, Gramma’s saying to Big Gina. Broken glass, wood gone to rot, rusty nails, tetanus.
Big Gina shifts so she’s got one knee bent so she can see her mother better. You wearing your hearing aids?
Gramma shakes her head.
I’ll get them for you, says Big Gina and she starts to stand.
Gramma shakes her head and shoos her hand at her. I can hear fine.
When you’re wearing them anyway.
I wear them when I need to.
Big Gina frowns. And where’s that?
Church. Grocery. When I take Snodgrass to the veterinarian.
But not when we visit.
If you visited me at church, yes.
Big Gina turns more in order to face her mother full on, so her mother can read her mouth and facial expressions. She talks louder. You get a pool after we moved out?
I wish.
What’d you mean, you wish? All we wanted growing up was a pool. Nothing fancy, either. Just one out of the Service Merchandise catalog.
Continue reading "Poolside" at Bone Parade . . .
