Spooky

I don’t know if you know this, but evangelical Christians of the 90’s took two things nearly more seriously than God himself - virginity and hating halloween.  

It was evil, as was Harry Potter.  It was about witches, ghosts, likely satan himself. The costumes were evil, the skulls, grotesque.  The bats and spider webs and jack-o-lanterns were all a celebration of darkness, the opposite of God, we’re just going to say it, Halloween was basically a sin. Once my dad took me and my sisters trick-or-treating because we happened to be staying with him when Halloween landed.  I think my parents liked to piss each other off and pretend like they just accidentally happened to do something that irritated the other.  So my dad took us trick-or-treating.  I still remember it, it was the one time in my childhood I went. I obviously loved it, other than the fact that my mom and God were looking upon me with disappointment, but honestly that shame was tempered by the pillowcase full of candy. 

That was just one year though, the other years we only celebrated harvest because that was completely acceptable. Sub spiders for fall leaves and make the jack-o-lanterns smiling and BAM, God approves. We dressed up (no ghosts, no witches), we filled up bags of candy at the different booths (no saying trick-or-treat), we ate sweets until we were crazy little maniacs. I was a Hershey kiss once, a ballerina once, my mom ran the cotton candy machine, my friends and I almost got sick on the bounce house. We ran around under the big football stadium lights that they brought in, the kind that whirred from the use of a generator. It was always cold and it was weird being at school at night, like seeing a teacher at the mall. We ran around with freedom because everyone knew everyone and we played little fair games in the gym. The booths were sectioned off and there were hay bales everywhere. Throw the coin in the little bowl. Toss the ring onto the stick. Eat candy, play the game, eat a caramel apple, go get a face painting. It was always one of my favorite nights of the year.

Then it got even better when we got home because we had to be sneaky about not trick-or-treating. My Mom said that if you didn’t hand out candy but you had your lights on, your house would get egged. When I went to college and was deconstructing my childhood this was one of those things I rolled my eyes at, no on eggs your house for not giving out candy.  And then my house got egged (!!!!)  when I was with my infant daughter in the hospital one halloween a couple of years ago.  So sorry sweet children, that I couldn’t give you cavity causing, halfway made of wax, slave owner empowering hershey’s, I was busy with my sick daughter. Get off my lawn you little brats!  But I digress.  

Because of the very real fear of being egged, we would shut our lights out and crawl around the house so no one knew we were home.  In the pitch black we would be giggling as we fumbled down the stairs to get a treat.  With whispered voices we hid from the evil on the streets and I loved it.  Our home felt cozy and safe from all the spooky children on the cold October night. I remember filling up a piping hot bath and giggling in the warmth thinking, those kids have no idea we’re home, we got them good.  It was almost better than trick-or-treating itself. There we were, creeping around our dark house dressed up like giant candy with buckets full of sweets that friends had passed out at the harvest festival. Not a thing like halloween, not. a. thing.

Teeny Tiny

I liked collecting things as a kid.  For years, my sister Brittany and I would request porcelain dolls for every birthday and Christmas.  They stood on tiny stands and were hung up around the perimeter of our room.  From their lofty heights they would spend the dark nights staring down at us with their unblinking eyes hooded under their victorian bonnets. I personally never thought they were spooky, but I was also never creeped out by clowns, so some might say I’m not a great judge of character. 

I also collected tea sets.  Tiny platters with pots for tea, sugar and cream, tiny teacups and saucers, and if it was a really good one, teeny tiny spoons for stirring.  Some were cute, others were...murdery - a precious moments angel as the teapot whose head was the lid, as in, you take the head off to fill the tea pot (this is a lesson in not drinking on the job). Others were so cute you would have to resist clenching your jaw and squishing them, the same resistance employed when holding a fat baby. 

I spent hours arranging them on my shelves and having pretend tea parties. I would lift the pot and hold the small little so it wouldn’t tumble off then fill all of the cups. I would life the cups with my pinkie lifted and drink peppermint tea like a tiny aristocrat. I really think what actually liked was how tiny they were. I still like tiny things.  I recently stole a tiny tabasco bottle from a hotel just to keep it in my pocket.  Later Colette got obsessed with it and brought the tiny bottle everywhere we went, so she gets it.  We stole some tiny jams the next morning.

I pulled the tea sets out to give to Colette today and had some serious flash backs.  I remember the way I packed them away carefully in toilet paper to make sure they wouldn’t break.  Apparently I had written my mom a letter and told her that it was time to pack them up because I was done playing with them, I was growing up.  This breaks my heart for my mom and for my future self, because Colette will pack away her little girl things one day and it will sink me.

While I was pulling them out for her I had a Toy Story moment, imagining their little lives.  They were well loved for many years, filled with water and dumped out, meticulously set out on a shelf, carted around to tiny backyard picnics, broken and glued back together, taped onto the hands of terrifying porcelain dolls. Then they were carefully packed away for 25 years until they were opened by an older me and a little girl that bares no resembles to me, except for the fact that she might stare at someone a beat too long. She has blue eyes to my green, blonde hair to my brown, but the screaming and spilling water and the running around in the backyard having tiny parties, that part is the same.

These tea sets had the fingerprints of my tiny hands and the dust of the 90’s in Victorville. It’s as if the space of those years were shrunk and my tiny self had just packed away the remnants of one childhood to be pulled out for the beginning of another. I wish that version of me could play with Colette, I’m not so great about playing with her, even though I thought I would be. I wish she could know the version of me that had wonder and imagination, the part of me that could spend hours making up stories and living them out, the part of me that found it a perfectly good use of time to set up an elaborate party for dolls just for the sake of the experience. We would have had fun together. Whatever is left of that wonder comes out in writing, reading, and then of course, stealing tiny hot sauce. At least she and I can share in that.

Driving in Cars

My mom drove an old Mercedes station wagon. I don’t remember much about it but I remember being conscious that it was old. It must have been something we talked about. We used to go through drive-through car washes and the water would leak through the roof. I’m not sure the details of that and how such a thing was possible, but all I remember was holding a towel up to the roof to keep the water from raining down on us and laughing until we couldn’t breathe. It was a game, a fun one, who needed a new car when you had what amounted to a convertible in the rain.

My Dad had a Bronco that I was always kind of embarrassed of, but it was better to get picked up in that, rather than the motorhome, which he did once. I think that Bronco is worth like 30,000 now by the way, who knew? It was white and had a rolling bar inside because my dad says he is cautious and I say he’s afraid. All nine of us had to cram into one car and sprinter vans weren’t so common, so a Bronco it was. I was the smallest so I sat between my dad and my step-mom. Three in the middle and three in the back facing backwards. Once the eldest graduated I was demoted to the back row and the dog replaced me up front. My dad liked the mountains and we would often drive up to Lake Arrowhead, which is about an hour drive on windy mountain roads, sometimes just for dinner. Inevitably someone from the back row would puke on the way up, that someone was always my sister Hayley. She still has a weak stomach. I’m not sure how she got assigned to face backwards but life is cruel like that.

I like to imagine following our Bronco down the road -three kids basically in the trunk staring back at you the whole time. It had to be disorienting.

When my oldest sister turned 16 she got a 60’s Mercedes that had seatbelts with lift latches and an irregular gas meter. It was our first taste of freedom driving in the car with her when she got her license, a license it took her 4 attempts to get, but she doesn’t like to talk about that and by the way it was definitely the fault of the instructor because the lane was confusing and so was parking spot and that light was definitely yellow. She drives mostly fine now. We would roll down the windows and play Deana Carter as loud as we wanted because parents are the worst and only want moderately volumed music. I don’t have to say it, but now I obviously know that loud music is in fact the worst and it is much better at a reasonable volume. The car smelled like old and it drove like a boat, I assume, but it was freedom.

My sister Hayley got a lesser version of the cool old car, it was a 1970’s Cadillac Coup de Ville. It was the length of a stretch limo and took an adult male’s entire body weight to close the doors. She was (is) tiny and had thick brown hair the length of her back. She looked pure and sweet and I like to imagine watching this tiny girl walk out of basketball practice, through the parking lot to stop at her Cadillac, open the door with the strength of her legs and climb in. She would often get a wink from men that were likely part of the local drug ring but that wasn’t really her type. She looked like their kind of girl, of course until they saw her.

The two youngest of the kids, my sister Brittany and I, we got normal cars. Less than ten years old and of the Japanese variety. I’m grateful for that. But I don’t know, maybe I would have a better sense of humor or be more resilient if I had to bake in the desert heat without air and regularly run out of gas just to get a wink from ‘neck tattoo guy’. At least I got to catch rain in the car and puke facing backwards like a garden variety weirdo. At least I had that.

Patio Room

By the time I was five my mom had remarried my step-dad and we were buying our own home.  It was around the corner from our rental and it had TWO stories.  And you know how it was in the 80’s, people made some bold choices. We had blue carpet.  We had floral wallpaper.  We had a balcony that was the size of the entire garage on which it sat. In the corner of the balcony was a hot tub that never really worked, it had fake grass that we would lay our towels on hoping for a small amount of a tan before the heat would smoke us out.  For five minutes it was like we were in Vegas, Strawberry Wine blaring from our boombox, until we were just too hot and had to hose ourselves down.  We once had a desert tortoise and it liked the sun so much we left it on that balcony in that heat we could hardly stand.  Later that night we came to get it and we had baked the tortoise to death which is illegal for many reasons, one of them being that it was an endangered species. These are the regular traumas of childhood. 

Everything in our house was a cat walk of sorts.  The stairs curled around the center of the house so that you could start at the front door, curve around the open staircase, pass the master, two bedrooms and a bathroom and walk the bridge to the last bedroom and never once lose sight of the front door. Below the curving staircase was a garden bed the size of a king mattress.  We had plants growing in until my mom left the hose on and flooded our whole house. We sloshed around the house with water up to our ankles in shock of the pool our house had become. In response, the fire department came with their lights flashing, which was the greatest horror to my mom (“did they really need to have the lights on, for goodness sake!”).  My sister Hayley, always the extrovert, passed around homemade brownies to the hardworking boys shop vac-ing the pool out of our dining room.   

After that we chose to fill the garden with concrete while also re-carpeting the house after the damages of the flood, so we switched our school blue carpet (can you believe someone chose that color), for a teal green (clearly a much better choice).  We retiled the linoleum with white tile and my mom was a slave to the white grout which she regularly cleaned with a toothbrush.  We didn’t have the money to do all of the renovations at once so we lived on concrete for six months. It was such a big deal to live like peasants in that way, camping in our own home. My home now that we own and renovated has treated concrete as a permanent floor choice, it’s a bizarre cultural progression, I’ll admit.  

My favorite part of our house was our patio room.  Which was exactly as it sounds, a patio that was walled in with floor to ceiling windows.  It was part storage, part patio dining, part craft area.  Most importantly though, it was the place where the epic saga of the widows and their children played out.  My sisters and I had a flair for the dramatic, and we liked dolls and dress up.  My mom had this thick silk nightgown that went down to the floor and was in one moment a wedding dress and in another the queen’s day dress. We would wander around the house in these oversized gowns and act like we were crossing countries, weary from our journey.  We would hold our dolls tightly in our arms, protecting them from the cruelties of this world and more practically protecting them from that harsh wind we had imagined. Ducking our heads into our chests and holding our bundled dolls close, we were survivors.  Every moment was a tragedy as we trudged down the stairs like migrants across foreign lands.  We made it with great relief to the patio room where we would camp like widows just waiting for that letter from our war-torn husbands.  My mom would call us in for meals on Saturdays, but other than that, our days were lived out in another land. From the safety of our home we transformed our inner worlds into unknown places and endless dramas.  All day long we lived these other lives, without a hint of boredom we lived as story-tellers inside our own narratives.  It was all adventure, love, loss, fear, protection, the big moments of life, played out against the backdrops of storage bins and crafting stamps.

For most of us, real life never lives up to the drama of our imaginations as children. My life will never have quite as much adventure as what I lived in that room of windows.  Thank God for that. But then sometimes, I watch movies just because I miss it. 

Winnebago

It was a nineteen seventy something avocado green motorhome.  My dad was never really taken by the idea of a new vehicle, he was relentlessly protective over his used vehicles that he kept in mint condition for years (so far as you can with 7 children). We would park at the far edges of every parking lot and walk on the hot asphalt as the heat beat down ruthlessly.  This, all while the wind lifted the fine dirt that covered every surface of everything and blew it directly into our eyeballs. I remember once he was so distraught by a dent on the corner of his boat that he covered it with a bumper sticker from a company we didn’t know anything about. It wasn’t where a bumper sticker should ever be placed, so odd you would take note of it and tilt your head to the side and wonder if a toddler might have haphazardly placed it there.  But at least there wasn’t a near-invisible dent.  

The motorhome sat in the garage at Deep Creak for the most of the year as a home to small rodents.  I know this because once, my job was to go through all the drawers and clean out the droppings they left along the way.  There was a plastic carpet runner that went down the length of the hallway, I suppose so you could look through and see the difference between how the carpet should look in contrast to how the edges were darkened, faded and flattened by seven children. I guess it did it's job though, the center bit of the carpet being protected from the many spills and muddy feet tramping through.  The motorhome had a couch up front that transitioned into a bed which my dad and step-mom slept on and in the back was a dormitory.  My dad installed an enormous piece of plywood between the two lower beds and placed a queen mattress in between, thus creating a mega-bed to sleep 5 children.  The two oldest got the top bunks.  7 children sleeping in the space the size of an average master bathroom. 

It was our bed and our couch and our table. It wasn’t great.

My step-mom packed for all of us as there was such limited space our things were specifically chosen and meticulously stuffed into drawers and bags under the mega-bed. It’s that feeling you have when you have let your bags get out of control in your hotel room and you feel panicky and stressed out, but times seven. 

My dad in the night would wake up and need to use the restroom and would walk across our mega-bed while managing to step on the legs of every. single. one of us as he went.  With each step a head would pop up and grunt and then lie back down to snooze for five minutes, waiting for the inevitable walk back where the whole process would be repeated. The toilet would flush and the sound and smell is unmistakable.  It’s a faint waft of something unclean and the “wah wah wah” of water pulling from the pump and into the sink and toilet. The door was some plastic woven material that would open and close like an accordion. The magnet was always weak so you had to give it a good slam to keep it closed. 

In the morning we would wake up and have Donuts. They were the little ones in the box that you get at any American gas station quick-mart. A box of powdered sugar and a box of chocolate, stored in the fridge - they should only be eaten cold. Sometimes now when we come to my Dad’s house he has donuts in the fridge in case we want them in the morning, I always take one.

When we would arrive at a pit stop for a quick diner meal along the way someone would bend over the pit of shoes which is meant to be a stair that lead down and out of the motorhome.  It was the shoe spot.  You couldn’t step into the stairwell so instead you would lean down to grab the handle and stumble out along with 18 shoes. What does that look like from an outsider. A child with unbrushed hair and ill fitting clothes, dramatically opens a door and tumbles out along with 18 shoes, she squints at the sunshine and wipes the chocolate from the donut she had off her face and smiles. Ahh, fresh air, finally.  Then people start filing out of the motorhome, they count, 1, 2, 3, wow that’s a lot of kids, 4, 5, 6, 7, honestly is this a school bus, 8, 9, ok I think they’re done, oh wait here come a dog too. 

Yes, we took the dog. Because 9 people wasn’t enough, a chow that bites is a good addition. 

We would file into a diner, “table for 9 please.”  “Oooh a birthday party!”  No just a family looking for some food in the middle of Kansas.  How do you let 7 kids order? You can’t. So my dad would just make it easy, “Milk and pancakes all around.”  This was immediately followed by grumbling, teenage angst and children’s tempers. “But I wanted the…”

He told me recently he only did that twice, but we still talk about it all the time. A staple of our childhood. We begin our story, “Every time we went to a restaurant my Dad…all around...seven kids...can you believe it?”. 

The seven of us are rarely together but whenever we are we talk about the motorhome.  It was a shared experience that only we knew, something that was bizarre and unique and sometimes utterly miserable.  We laugh about our crazy parents and how cruel they were to shove us all in that small space just to take us to places like Missouri.  We act traumatized over the experiences of the avocado motorhome, the older ones with clearer memories have more of an edge to their tone when they reminisce. 

It’s true it was pretty rough, when I think about the motorhome I think about the dirty couch, the mouse droppings, the smelly fridge and the pile of shoes. But I also remember playing hours of uno on the mega-bed and mostly I remember the T.V.  It was a small 6x6 cube that sat on a small rotating shelf with a sticky mat that was meant to keep it from falling off.  It did however fall off onto my sister Summer’s head in the night but she turned out ok anyway.

My favorite part was when my dad stayed up late driving.  We would all be cuddled up in our bed with Sleepless in Seattle playing on the TV and we would slowly doze off to the cadence of the bumping road.  We would sit up half asleep and pull the thick curtain aside and see flashing lights of somewhere unknown pass by.  It was a world we didn’t know but we were cozy in our bed and so anywhere felt safe.  We moved along in our small home towards our destination while we slept soundly under the layers of quilts.

To me it felt safe and cozy, no lights but the glow from the T.V. 

Snow

If you were ever driving north on your way to Vegas and stopped somewhere in the desert for In-n-out, you likely made that stop in Victorville, my hometown. Apparently the economy was booming there in the 80’s so my dad moved the family up there from Orange County to start a business and own a proper piece of land. He still owns the land I think, it has a pre-fab home we once lived in when my parents were still married and the plans for a grand house are buried somewhere in the garage. It sits high on a hill overlooking the vast desert below it and we called it Deep Creak, or maybe it was actually called that, I don’t know. My dad joked that we were going to get married there, I think he still makes that joke. He really loves that view, his own land, the sea of tan below it.

When we were kids we went every once in a while usually to do some dusty task like clean out the motorhome for a trip, or go through boxes looking for something my Dad needed, or to simply wait in the Bronco while he worked on the boat. My sister and I were waiting in the car once and while fighting over a cup of water I chipped my front tooth and I still have to eat apples from the side of my mouth. I suppose if deserts are your thing you might find the view beautiful. I couldn’t tell you.

Victorville is a desert town, nothing to see, track homes, chain restaurants, a town mall with a Sears department store. It’s one of those towns you drive through and set a wager with people in your car - ‘how much would you have to get paid to live here, ok, ok, but what if someone gave you a million a year but you had to live here three years, no? I think I could do it.’

Small desert towns make me feel panicky now, actually small towns in general give me the creeps. But when it was my town, I loved it. I grew up being told that it’s the only place other than Israel with Joshua Trees, I don’t even know if that’s true, but it felt Biblical anyway.

There was one road that carried all the traffic through our town and the two neighboring towns. We would find ourselves trapped in the red light train from church to home and it could double the length of the trip - Auto zone, Vons, the bagel shop, the dollar store, an empty lot, next up, eternity.

It snows sometimes in the high desert, unlike Palm Springs where it’s always hot. The high deserts are extreme, lots of hot and lots cold. I remember when it snowed for the first time, at least in my memory. The day started with the roofs covered and the tree branches weighed down. It covered our lawn with just enough powder for us to roll a snowman. Well, we didn’t quite enough for the whole thing so our elderly neighbors offered us the snow in their front lawn to finish its misshapen head. We ran around for hours until the snow melted away and we came inside for warmth and rest. It was movie magic to play in the snow all day, to have our world transformed for a moment from beige to white, something other than blue skies and high winds. The snow plucked that day out of obscurity and firmly fixed itself in all of our memories.

I haven’t been back in 15 years. I wonder what it’s like now. I wonder if the mall is still there, if the bagel shop with the best veggie cream cheese still stands. I wonder what our old house on Caspian street is like, it’s probably beautiful in the snow. Is the view from Deep Creak actually beautiful? Someone thinks so.

Home

Everything had amber tones in the 80’s, even my memories of it are tinted. I’m pretty sure our couch was brown and gold floral velvet but that can’t be true because, who would do that? (But let’s be kind to the fashion of our childhood because I can hear my kids saying, “love the jeans mom, why?” - because it was cool Colette, you wouldn’t understand). Our carpet was brown or something close to it. Was the air itself actually amber too? Always golden hour?

I remember being around four and reaching to pull back the embroidered curtain over our front door window and being terrified to see my mom screaming, alone and stuck outside. It sounds as dramatic as it was in my small world, I thought I was leaving her to die.

The truth was, she was trying to soak out a skunk from a hole in our front yard and it came out. I don’t hear about skunks a lot but they were a very prominent part of my childhood, we smelled them all of the time and saw them often. Are there more in the desert, are they becoming extinct? But there she was trapped in our front yard with a skunk and a child who for some reason was unable to open the front door for her.

It was one of my earliest memories. It felt traumatic I think. That memory and running toward my mom and away from my Dad who was bringing us to his house for the weekend. I was running down the very path my mom and said skunk once battled. Which came first I don’t know.

Little pains. One significant, another less so.

Divorce wasn’t that uncommon I don’t think, but we were one of the few families fractured down the middle the way we were. I remember my mom’s house felt like home, it smelled like home, dinner tasted like home, bedtime routine was home. My dad’s house, we call him Papa, it wasn’t ours, it was theirs and they did everything differently. Small things that make a child feel out of place were different, the cereal wasn’t honey nut Cheerios, it was the plain kind. The apples weren’t Granny Smith. The peanut butter was the kind you have to stir. There was no juice in the fridge that had been poured out of a can of concentrate from the freezer and mixed with three cans of water from the sink.

To be fair, it usually wasn’t his home either, it was typically a second home near my mom’s house in the desert. Who has good snacks in their second home? Who stocks grape juice from concentrate at a place they’re only at every other weekend.

He did have better movies. Bookshelves stacked to the ceiling with VHS tapes. Many of them old black and white films we were forced to watch. Others of them, our Disney favorites with the large plastic covers that opened like a book. We once watched Gone with the Wind and after six hours of many scoldings and being told over and over to sit up, wake up and pay attention, we absolutely loved it…so I’m told. This memory is foggy for me, filled in by my sister’s recollection of it.

At my mom’s - the Disney classics, Sleepless in Seattle, While you were Sleeping, and a bunch of Christmas movies. It’s all we needed really.

Home is so much more than a place we are. Especially as children, it’s the sound the fridge makes when it opens, it’s the tone of light and the way the amber velvet crumples under you back when you sit on the corner of the couch, it’s the smell of casserole and the feel of the sheets and the place your toothbrush always goes and the hamper in the closet. The simple sameness (sepia toned or not), as a child it is those details that matter. They still do.