801 Eleventh Street

We pulled through town and turned off the main thoroughfare, crossing the railroad tracks as we’ve always done and driving up the hill.

As it has for well over a century, the little old house sat there stoically as life moved on around it.  Surrounded by streets on all three sides, it is its own little island fortress in the heart of a small town in Arkansas. Mena was incorporated in 1896, and the little old house witnessed the vast majority of the town’s ebbing and flowing as it soldiered on through times of prosperity and decline.

And as it has for many years now, the little old house made our hearts stop, pulling lumps into our throats and bringing tears to threaten the corners of our eyes as we saw it sitting there so forlornly.

Mom and I crept around the now-vacant house, driving a familiar triangle around it as we stared at it quietly together, each of us looking for the details of all the moments we remember there through so many years.  As we looked at the house, we saw the people who belonged inside it and the furniture where it was supposed to stand, and all the charming effects of everyday life strewn throughout the yard.

I feel certain we were both mentally replaying a movie in our minds with all those cozy, happy times accented in golden tones of light and warmth in the background, in sharp contrast to the reality of the cold and emptiness we saw before us through the windows.

It seemed to me as though all the people we loved were waving and laughing at me for standing outside, and the house pulled me to step inside and see that everything was still just right on the other side of the door.

Just outside the back door – where there should have been a picnic table welcoming us to sit a spell – was a giant pile of the inner pieces of the little old house. Cabinets and drawers and laminate flooring were piled high, and it seemed like the house was laying on an operating table waiting for a surgeon to repair and replace its essential innards.  Our hearts sank as we saw the pieces of everyday life with all their imperfections heading for the landfill.

We parked (just like we always did) in the yard, near where Grandpa’s “shop” and the old pickup truck always sat. We were hesitant and glanced around the old neighborhood like fugitives. The house across the street – the original home of the piano that now stands in my own home – appeared empty and dilapidated. Just behind us, old Claude’s home no longer had astroturf and a glider on the front porch, and it did not look as though its current residents would welcome the entire neighborhood to take cover together in the storm cellar as we always did when a tornado threatened.

We mustered our strength, looked furtively around and got out of the car.

Slowly and as carefully as if we were traversing a cemetery, we walked across the yard, starting naturally at the back porch. Here was the main door for welcoming friends and family, but gone were the cheery table and little yellow radio crackling away each morning with the coffee and the banter.

The back door was ajar. That seemed natural, as though the little old house was welcoming us one last time.

We looked at each other and again glanced around the neighborhood.  It seemed resigned.  There were people moving around in their yards, but nobody paid any attention to us.  We went inside.

The giant old bathtub from the single bathroom in the house was turned on its side in the dining room, but the wood floors and the dark wood detail of the ceiling were intact. We were heartened that the gutting of the home didn’t seem ruthless, as though it were bound to be torn down – it felt slow and steady, as though it might be destined for a new life. Flooring scraps were piled where the old cast iron stove had been.

The heavy door with its glass yellowed from the smoke that wafted from hand-rolled cigarettes stuffed with Prince Albert tobacco was missing.  That door divided the front of the house – where so many cousins would pile into bedrooms and onto the fold-out couch – from the back of the house where the grown-ups would laugh and visit late into the night.

One by one they would turn in for bed and come past us there on the couch, and sometimes we would pretend to be sleeping, but often we didn’t bother. “No snoring,” Grandpa would say with false sternness as he walked past us into the bedroom. Following our family’s script, we’d giggle and reply that HE was the one who snored, anticipating his response: “I stay awake all night to make sure I don’t snore.”

In the bedroom, the wood floors were still painted red – a nod to the Arkansas roots of The Painted House.  Mom remembered painting them – there certainly wasn’t money to refinish the floors. Salvaged remnants from throughout the house lay on the side porch where Grandmother had stashed piles of National Geographic magazines and their enclosed maps.  Today, a stack of them dating back to 1929 sits on a built-in shelf in my old home.

The wooden floor was exposed in the back bedroom where I’d sometimes sleep in the stifling heat of summer with the open windows making the trains seem like they were passing right next to me.  Grandpa walked to the southeast corner of the yard near the street sign with regularity to watch the trains pass.

As we circled back to the door we’d found ajar, we heard a train coming through town.

We circled one last time: here was the place beneath the window where Grandpa cultivated grape vines, and here was the corner where Grandmother’s roses grew from their base near the Arkansas native stone up above the back door.

On the front porch where the mail was delivered and neighbors brought the excess of their gardens and so much sitting and visiting took place through the years, the paint was peeling, but stubborn vines rooted in decades past were still fighting the good fight.

On the chimney, the large native stone shaped like the state of Arkansas was still clearly visible, painted by Grandpa so many years ago.  The rounded corner of the house with the peaked roof which had once been the well house still stood strong.

We looked at the pile of debris in the yard once more, hoping to see the old dough board, a long lost toy or some other recognizable remnant of the house from the days we remembered.  We drove away in silence, knowing it might very well be the last time we would set foot inside that good old house and still emptily wishing we had some last piece of it.

As I sat down to write a word or two about that house, I dug out pictures I’d taken there some twenty years ago when I was eighteen, newly-graduated from high school and preparing to move across the country to tend to my roots and plant new ones by attending college in Arkansas. I was recently smitten with taking photos of everything I encountered, and more intensely aware of the special places from my past.

In one of the photos of the corner of the house near the back door Mom and I found ajar, I spotted an old birdhouse against the peeling paint.  My heart quickened as I reached for my own old photos of that spot when Grandmother’s roses curled over the doorway one May day in 1995.

I spotted that same old birdhouse on the corner, and it made me smile from the inside out. Maybe the little old house will stand a little longer in the small town in Arkansas.