156 Cottonwood

At 156 Cottonwood, we women ruled the roost. 
This was a given.

My sisters and I knew every nook and cranny of our domain as intimately as we knew each crevice and bend of our own small bodies…

the irridescent pearl finish on Mom’s favorite lamp that we knew she paid too much for – the slight relief of its landscape of painted bouquets…

the funny cabinet it sat on – it’s printed wood veneer….
the soft, friendly thump it made when the front panels pulled themselves shut…

the lime green songbook that lived inside – its unfamiliar codes and dissected speech and sweet musty scent…

the forgotten birthday candles crusted in mysterious crumbs relentlessly patient in the back corner of the silverware drawer…

that random tall skinny closet in the kitchen – its mysterious, woody stench that, like a dirty family secret, we never understood and tried to keep quiet behind its closed, hollow door….

the thin, mottled, cold brown tiles of the junk room in the basement and its landscape of cardboard and old tin beer cans collected from rural sinkhole dumps…

the smell of dust trapped in sheer, stiff, blue, nubby curtains… I can almost taste it today. 
How did I become so familiar with the smell and taste of our living room window dressings?

We claimed
We inhabited
every square inch.

We rubbed and rolled over and tasted all of it.

We tapped its depths in lengthy episodes of hide-n-seek.

Out of boredom, on rainy days, we dug through dark shelves hoping to find forgotten treasures.

We took it all apart and put it all back together.

We bent over dirty tubs scrubbing.

We made the porch swing chains sing creaky songs for hours.

We pawed every branch of every tree that could bear us.

We knew there were dimensions in our yard that grown ups could never see.

It was our private fort in the afternoons after school.

I practiced being Wonder Woman in the back yard religiously,
then moved inside and practiced kissing the Fonz on the wood panelled wall of the basement when my sisters weren’t around.

And sometimes I simply waited in the bay window of the kitchen with our jam box and stacks of tapes…. listening to outdated radio recordings of Casey Kasem's Top Forty or recording the sound of myself chomping potato chips…
waiting for the return of our Queen….

our honey haired Queen Bee who faithfully bore gifts of food and kisses and warm baths and clean laundry…

our Queen Bee we faithfully knelt beside on cracked ceramic bathroom tiles while she bathed…

our Queen Bee that occasionally performed wild miracles like moving furniture and making runny ice cream out of salt and ice by wrestling a grumbling machine in our kitchen sink.

She was Queen of the Curling Iron
Queen of Furniture
Queen of Yes
Queen of No
Queen of Hamburger Pie
Queen of The Green Dress
Queen of Enjoli Perfume
Queen of Washing Machines
Queen of Wal-Mart
Queen of Swimming Pools
Queen of Chewing Gum
Queen of The Dirty Purse
Queen of Woman
Queen of Sisters
Queen of Us,
her hungry, wiggly devotees.

She smelled nothing like the man that walked in at 5:40pm everyday.
He smelled of foreign lands – of strange pink paper in duplicates.

He did not have a shiny green dress or any other pretty surprises.

He was as relentless as a clock in his measured, repetitive routines.

He inhabited small domains on the outer edges of our queendom.

He claimed the rear corner on the top of the refrigerator with his keys and wallet and loose change that he emptied out of his pockets at the end of the day.

He claimed the hall closet that was never properly on its hinges and filled it with his man shirts and big shoes.

He ran the woodpile on the far edge of the yard.

And his throne was the dull, dirty honey mustard Lazy Boy recliner in the family room that we would reluctantly acquiesce upon demand.

He only stunk up the blue bathroom when he did his business… which was mostly his domain as well.  The old stereo perched on the toilet tank was always set on an AM station which repelled us all.  Its frequency had the same effect on us as those devices you plug in the wall to drive off mice.

When he claimed the tv for Cardinals games and spit into the brown slimy tobacco soup in the Folgers can that usually lived behind the television, we were horrified to no end.  We skulked around during these endless hours, uncomfortable and tense, lamenting the state of our queendom, clinging to our Queen’s limbs, tugging at her skirt, begging for some sort of intervention.

This man baffled us completely in so many ways…

He loved to bumble around shamelessly in the old, rusty radioless Chevrolet truck that we called “The Blue Bomb.”

He impaled worms onto metal hooks and wiped their guts on his pants.

He scaled and gutted dead fish in the backyard.

He ate wheat bread.

And he got up early even when he didn’t have to.

But sometimes he delighted us…

Sometimes, when the Queen wasn’t around, he let us perch ourselves on the edge of the Blue Bomb’s truckbed while he drove us to the park.

Sometimes he made hot chocolate on the stove while we watched Saturday morning cartoons.

Sometimes he bought us sugar donuts at Foster’s Bakery.

And one time I slept with him at Grandma’s house and was overwhelmed by the unfamiliar, sweet feeling of sinking into his big, deep, warm, furriness in the dark.  He was like my favorite doll I slept with every night, but bigger and warmer and 20 times better.

Little did we know at the time that he made our entire queendom possible with his long absences and hours at the kitchen table spent bent over bills and checkbook.

His guitar sat quietly, covered in dust…. his dreams carefully tucked away in the hall closet with his work shirts and dress shoes.

And though he spoke little of making dreams come true, he always drove me to ballet class.


These memories that I jingle around in my pockets never change all that much.
As I get older, I’m probably losing a few here and there. 
And though I never seem to gain any new ones from that time, occasionally, when I empty them from my pockets to the top of the refrigerator and add them up,  I come up with values greater than I ever came up with before.

Thank you, Dad.
Thank you, Mom.
All hail the King and Queen of 156 Cottonwood.