722 N Georgia

It was only a house. But now it’s much more than that. I have an old digital clock in my kitchen which permanently displays the address, 722. My children notice when other clocks show those numbers, and they'll say something about it. They, the numbers, have acquired a hallowed status.

On those rare occasions when we’re all together, we will likely regale one another with stories about the place. Each child has a special feeling of belonging and ownership about the whole piece of property—the house, the yards, trees, back pasture—and probably about some private space as well, like the hideout under the stairs with its passageway past the furnace and water heater into the food storage room.

They played wiffle baseball in the backyard and crack the whip in the front—hence Andrew’s broken collar bone. And Richard’s half pipe in the pasture was his pride, but word gets around in a small town, and the thing attracted visiting skateboarders I had never seen before, and that made me nervous. They'd just show up at odd times, wander through my yards and make themselves at home. Not my kind of thing. I'm big on private property.

We had a round trampoline for a while, and the kids moved it close to the house so they could jump onto it from the roof. I may have put a stop to that.

But you can’t put a stop to what you don’t know about. Not until they were grown did I learn that more than one son climbed out of the basement windows at night to sneak off somewhere while his parents slept unsuspecting upstairs. Rite of passage maybe.

Some activities were entirely innocent, like sliding down the stairs on all the sleeping bags rolled out or jumping down to the basement landing onto a pile of pillows and quilts. The kids did that while I worked in the kitchen.

We had a dog, too. Cokie. I guess you'd call her our dog. She came with the house. None of us expected that when we moved in, but there she was.

I'm sure they remember the chickens, the goats, the steers. No one wanted to gather the eggs or feed the chickens either. No one really wanted to watch as the men parked their truck in the pasture and shot those three young steers to death. Yet we all did watch. No one much wanted to feed the goats, and milking was never a favorite pastime. No one much wanted to load the dishwasher or put groceries away, either. Big family. Lots of things to do.

No one ever wanted to clean their room.

The boys grumbled about mowing the lawn or chopping wood and hauling it up from the pasture. Everyone grumbled about weeding the garden. But we were trying to be self-sufficient there, and the children understood that. Their grumbling was more obligatory than heart-felt. I think.

The kids would rake the front yard leaves into piles for jumping and for burying one another. They'd dash into the house to slip on their bathing suits and run through the water when we flood irrigated in the summer. They'd hook the hose up and slide down wetted strips of black plastic. Better than the city pool, I thought.

Only a house, but a good house for us, a good home.