Hailey’s Pantry

Please, remember me…

happily– by the rose bush laughing…

I was drifting away the other day when I found myself, for the first time in decades, in my cousin’s pantry. How some memories can lie dormant without exercise for so long is beyond me, considering I haven’t made an effort to think about that odd brick house, nestled between the tree littered field and the town’s outer suburban line, in a very long time. These are memories from my early youth, and are fragmented in that beautiful, other-worldly kind of way, but before I describe them, I should first provide a back story, to express simply just how far gone these places are today.

When I was an only child, while my parents were still young adults, I spent a significant time alone with my father. I was often in his care during the day, while my mother slept off her hospital night job, as he drove quietly from project to project, social visit to social visit, and it was in these places, as well as the basement of the old catholic school with my grandmother, that I developed an independent and solitary nature. My father would generally leave me to my own devices, so as to encourage me to do the same for him, I imagine– cutting down trees off that dead end dirt road for the wood stove; him out in the forest with the loud chainsaw, me sitting in the back of the old white pickup truck with the saw’s blade guard, pretending to cut my own logs; surrounded by the smell of wet woods, squirt soda, exhaust, and sawdust.

If I wasn’t tagging along while he quietly worked some dirty masculine landscape, I was exploring one of my uncles properties while he sat contently at their kitchen or sitting room tables, chatting and drinking beer, rejecting my pleas to go home on the premise that he just opened another one, and had to finish it. At one such place, his oldest brother’s house, I had a playmate to keep me entertained; my cousin Hailey, who was born on April fools day, only a few months later than myself.

Her father, my uncle, was a brick layer, and as such built himself a rather eccentric yet simple home almost entirely out of smooth red bricks. It abided on the outskirts of town, on a quiet flat street of patchwork black-top, lined with tall elm trees, and bordered by gardens and greenhouses. Behind the house was a large empty field of golden grass, with the periodic pine tree and young sapling, which had a long two-track trail cutting straight through it, and into the woodsy hills of the northern counties behind it. Near the rim of the woods resided a natural spring, and low point in the land, affectionately referred to by us kids as the muck pit, marked oddly by a pristinely white and out of place Mishi claw-foot tub, half sunk in the mud. Gazing at this out-of-place object is one of the many fragments from that era that I can recall…before the divorces, family feuds, and tragic endings that would eventually overshadow the giggling children in the morning heat; darting and laughing among the hanging laundry.

The pit was sunken and dark, even in bright daylight, and the sheer whiteness of the cast iron porcelain tub, like bleached bones, seemed to scream within the sense of sight, as loud as such a sense could. The mud wasn’t the consistent brown-pudding texture you would imagine, but rather a wet black patchwork of dead fallen leaves, curling and wrapping around the base of the tub, and seeping into its bowels. How it had come to be there, a relic from as early as the turn of the century, I would never discover.

Another fragment is being on the sidewalk with a handful of quarters, walking and chattering towards the squat unkempt convenience store with the word ICE vaguely marked in faded paint above the door, as blood ran down my leg in sheets. My uncle’s garage was under construction, and after walking along the foundation rim absently for quite some time, I lost my footing and slipped. My foot missed the brick by an inch and plunged, causing the coarse cinder block edge to shred the entire inside of my right leg from my ankle to my pelvis, and when presented with the ultimatum of either causing a scene and getting treatment and attention, or chasing after my cousin who was on her way to the convenience store for a slush puppy, I chose the latter, learning for the first time that pain could be mentally pushed aside, or negated all together with the proper mental control.

And then there’s the pantry. Unlike my house, which only had cupboards that contained food, my cousin had an entire room dedicated to delicious edibles that I could only fantasize about; fruit roll-ups, chocolate chip granola bars, and lucky charms cereal, to name a few. The sweetest thing my mother ever bought me was plain sugar to put on my shredded wheat if I so desired, so as a child her pantry took on a sort of magical quality for me– a regular palace of food that actually tasted good, compared to the stock provisions that I was accustomed.

But now the house is gone. So is the field behind it. So are the gardens and greenhouses. Hailey grew up and became a school teacher, and the Mishi tub was either buried or hauled away to make room for a housing development. The old convenience store still stands, though, and ICE can still be discerned above the door. Yet that smell of the pantry, and the sound of my bare feet on the hardwood floor, still linger in my mind as though it happened yesterday, in a wash of bright yellow light and innocent laughter..