My grandparents on my mother’s side, Nanna and Pappy, lived on a quiet road in Lebanon, PA (technically Quentin). They lived in what I can only describe as an old farm house surrounded by big trees and the rolling hills of the Fairview golf course. There was a big red barn on the property where my grandfather restored old sprint cars. One side of the barn was rickety and dark and had critters among the wood piles – it was a place where things might topple and if you walked and shimmied around you’d emerge dusty and covered in a rust colored dirt. There’s a garage here in Memphis that smells exactly like my Pappy’s barn – a little like motor oil, a little like machinery, and a little like sawdust. My grandparents had a burn barrel in the yard where they burned their trash. On summer nights, the hum and buzz and chirp chirps of crickets and cicadas was a background track occasionally punctuated by the low whine of a semi-truck driving through the night. We didn’t go there often and seldom spent more than a day or two there when we did – yet, that house is the setting of some of my richest and most vivid childhood memories. It was a place of wonder, it was a quiet country home very different from the suburbs of Philadelphia. It became my young mind’s vision of what country living looked, felt, and smelled like. In some ways, it was a fantastical place – a place where my own history feels wildly exaggerated. It was larger than life. It was warm. It was often filled with family and laughter and good, down to earth people.
Details Details
Thinking about the house, my mind is able to recreate, with some accuracy, some of the oddest details. I can remember the two lights that hung in the kitchen and almost see and feel the brass looking ornamentation. I remember not being allowed in the basement where the furnace was, and being told by my grandfather that there was a furnace monster down there. I remember the clanging and echo-y sound of stomping on the low-to-ground angled, red, metal doors of the storm cellar which always seemed like a hatch to a different world – a secret trap door to the basement and the furnace monster that I assumed was a lot like the dragon that lived beneath the stairs at 1313 Mockingbird Lane on the Munsters. I remember the empty locust shells stuck to the tree in the middle of the yard and the patch of mint that grew by the barn. I can hear the early morning chatter and crunch of gravel under the spikes of the golfers making their way from the green to the next tee. Being at the house on Zinns Mill Road was a lesson in detail – a world full of tactile, auditory, and visual sensations. It was where we ate things like scrapple and red sausage and Lebanon bologna. It was where my relatives spoke with a funny accent that sounded a little like up talk with it’s upward questioning inflections and the use of the word right: “right, Pappy we’re gonna go get ice cream?”
My Two Amazing Feats
I have no idea how true my recollections are. They feel real, but memory is a tricky thing. I’ve always had an insatiable appetite for fruit. Nowhere was this more evident than on visits to Zinns Mill Road. For the big family holiday gatherings, we had buffet style food with ham sandwiches and potato salad, cheese, and vegetables with dip and ambrosia and fruit salad. I seldom had fewer than 3 bowls of fruit salad at these gatherings. But there was one time when my appetite for fruit got the best of me. I believe we were visiting for either the Sherk Family Picnic or the Smith Family Picnic. The night before, I absolutely gorged myself on plums. I’m pretty sure I ate between ten and fifteen of them. Thinking back, I often wonder why the hell my grandmother had so many plums in the house – though I know she bought extra fruit for when we visited. The next morning, I was sick beyond belief. I had so much acid in my stomach I couldn’t keep anything down – from either end. We either went to the hospital or the doctor, and I was prescribed a diet of water and a little toast. My mom and I missed the picnic.
Today, just before sitting down to write this, there was a fly buzzing around my apartment. It landed on the table in front of me. I swatted at it and got it on the first shot. Among my many talents, I am an expert fly hunter. I developed the skill over a long weekend at my grandparents’ house. The key is knowing one very crucial piece of information – and that is that flies often take off backwards. If you swat at them from behind, you almost always get them. I’m not sure how I came across this information, but I learned it one weekend while staying in Lebanon. Someone must have told it to me or I read it in that precursor to google, the encyclopedia. For the entire weekend, I walked around, flyswatter in hand stalking flies both inside and outside of the house. With each swat, my aim got better and I learned to sneak up on them. It became a game and then my mission. When all was said and done I had registered over 130 kills. There were fly carcasses in every window sill. I was the sheriff of flyville or maybe it was flytown, I was quick on the draw. It was as if I had a gift… was destined for fly-killing greatness. Swatting the one in my living room reminded me of that weekend and my status as a prodigy of extermination.
I like thinking about the house on Zinns Mill Road. I like feeling like there were parts of my childhood that were larger than life and filled with an odd kind of wonder. If nothing else, it’s fertile ground for memory and stories. Being there helped define a sense of family and taught me to appreciate a simple home that was always welcoming. All these years later, it’s easy to get lost in the visions of the dew and sun glistening on the golf course, and the lights of the lone car shining through the bedroom window elongating and stretching from ceiling to wall and then disappearing as the car drove by under the stars and old heavy trees that lined darkened country road.
The house was sold many years ago. The last time I was there, it seemed so much smaller than I remembered. The kitchen lights that I had to stretch to reach were head height. The hallways seemed narrow and the lengths of which used to take so many tiny running steps to cross now only required a few long strides. As a tot, the world is big – almost immeasurably so. As an adult, I just felt big and clumsy. This is our natural progression. We move from places of screaming wild with childhood joy and giggles to the heavy awkward silences of growing up… our magical powers long forgotten in a world that has gotten far too small and practical.