As I lay outstretched on the grass in our backyard, I take a deep breath in and smell the lilac trees that separate our property from my aunt’s. They were planted by my late Nana in the ’60s and still come back every year, smelling of her.
As I close my eyes and feel the soft grass squish into the tough ground beneath me, I can feel the spirit of my Nana blooming from the soil that she and my Papa nurtured long before my parents did. With my eyes closed I can see her walking barefoot through the grass calling to me, “Lara! Ah, there’s my pet.”
As I open my eyes, I see the top of the cedar tree that should’ve died twenty years ago, but still holds on. The top of if reminds me of the vulture tree scene from The Jungle Book, yet the middle and bottom remain relatively healthy; definitely sparse, but still healthy.
As I sit up, I see the cedar next to it that still has remnants of our failed tree fort. Instinctively I grab my foot and hold onto the bottom, feeling the phantom pain of where the large nail sliced through the bottom of my foot. My dad made my eldest brother take it down after that horrible day and I still feel to blame.
As I stand and walk towards the back of the property, I hear the faint buzzing that puts a smile on my face. I pass our old ’91 Explorer and the buzzing grows as I get closer and closer. As I round my dad’s old ’77 f150 gathering dust with weeds growing through the hood, I see the hive about 15 feet up from the base of a large cedar. What seems like thousands of bees are flying around above my head and I can’t help but feel in awe. This hive has been on our property for about 20 years. Our neighbour was a bee-keeper so at one time he tried to bring the hive over to his property, but the bees just kept coming back. Staring at the hive, I am amazed by how much things have changed in the last ten years. I can’t help but be reminded of the time I single-handedly tried to destroy another hive on our property, causing my little brother to get stung countless times because he ran right, while I escaped the swarm by running left. But now, looking at this hive, I feel a huge level of protection. I want these bees to prosper because there aren’t enough bees these days and we need them way more than they need us.
A yellow glare distracts me and I look to the left of the beehive realizing it was the sun reflecting off the Jitney (my Papa’s creation). My papa invented it to take out tree stumps and it still runs to this day, even though it has taken up permanent residence behind our shop. Looking at it, most would see it as an eye-sore, but all I see is the sweat and hard work that my Papa put in into building it. It is also a representation of my papa’s gift of turning a dream into a reality and just his initiative to always build something he needed.
As I walk back to our house, I pass our shop. Each window is new because every original window was broken from a time when my brothers and I went through a delinquent phase and didn’t realize the necessity of windows beyond the fact that they make cool noises when they are smashed. It is the shop that my Papa built for his bulldozing business over 50 years ago and now it is my dad’s shop for his excavating business.
As I pass the shop and our house comes into view, I see the roof that my great-grandfather helped build and a house that my dad built. My dad built the rancher part when he married my mom and then they added the addition after my second-oldest brother was born.
As I enter the mud-room, I am reminded that it used to be the garage and the fact that my brothers and I helped my dad add walls and fill it in. Standing in the mud room I can still see the garage that it used to be. The fact that all the concrete and plaster has been covered and it is now a beautiful tiled mud room is reminiscent of terrible memories that have been masked in my mind as well. When I was 4 or 5 years old, my family and I were coming home from a relative’s house and I fell asleep in the very back of our car. Like normal my dad had parked our ’91 Ford Explorer into the garage and locked the garage doors, thinking that my mom had carried me up because he didn’t see me in the car. But my mom had thought that my dad had carried me up. Needless to say, I was left in the Explorer and when I woke up freezing (because it was the middle of winter), I was terrified. I got out of the Explorer and remember just banging on the garage door, hoping that my parents would hear me. I was too short to reach the garage door opener, so it wasn’t long before I realized that I would be stuck in the garage all night. So, I rounded up some tarps and coats and anything that I could use for warmth in the garage and went back to the Explorer and buried myself underneath them. I then proceeded to cry myself to sleep. I then woke up to my dad hugging me and my mom crying for their mistake.
As I walk through the rest of my house, there is nothing spectacular about it, yet it is spectacular to me. The walls are loaded with pictures of my entire family and there isn’t any system to them, they were just hung at the times that pictures where taken and then more and more were added; baby pictures, little kid pictures, tween pictures, teenage pictures, and adult pictures. Literally and figuratively, my brothers and I have grown up on/within these walls.
My home is filled with some of my happiest memories as well some of my most terrifying and most hurtful memories. Home for me is about memory. It is a place where I can look at something and have a reference/story that goes with it. It is a place where I am comfortable, yet has places within it that are uncomfortable because of the events that happened there. To me, home is not where the heart is, home is where the memories are (or rather, home is where the head is). And fortunately for us, we can make memories wherever we are. Most of mine just happen to be scattered on one piece of property that I continue to grow up on.
Works Cited
91 Ford Explorer SUV. n.d. Web. 12 June 2014. <http://www.edmunds.com/ford/explorer/1991/?sub=suv>.
“vultures from jungle book.” 12 Nov. 2006. YouTube. Web. 12 June 2014
thank you for your story Lara 🙂
Hi Lara,
I loved your story : ) Your recollections about your childhood adventures reminded me a bit of my own childhood, growing up in nature, adventurous and fearless. I liked the jungle book reference ; )
I found it interesting that your recollections were so tied to childhood, and too a location-all the other stories I’ve read so far(including my own) seem to revolve at least partly around childhood memories and events, the places we grew up and either left behind or never left. I suppose it makes sense, given the average age of most university students, that our ideas about home would be tied to a physical location, mostly our childhood homes. Some of us seem to still feel at home there, and some of us seem to still be looking for home(myself included). Mostly, we all seem to consider home a place within Canada, rather than the whole country itself. We’re defining micro-cosmically, not macro-cosmically. I wonder if that would be different if the mean average age in this class was twenty or thirty years older?