How floor plans can trigger memories

I take verbal stroll through my childhood home

Last week I wrote about memories prompted by artifacts and music. This week, I write about the first house I remember living in, a prompt inspired by a recent article in the New York Times by Phoebe Chen about how recalling a floor plan can help you explore your childhood. I write my way from the street, in the front door, and through each of the rooms. Despite these memories being few and more than fifty years old, the exercise proved so fruitful, this piece will be split into parts.

“Like most writers, I am afraid that the wrong words will sap the radiance from my most elusive memories — largely uneventful moments that nonetheless remain charged with luminous feeling . . . the right words will pin down those memories best left swimming just beyond coherence.”  – Phoebe Chen

The last time I peeked in the window of 201 South 9^th Street, there was a toilet in the living room, a white porcelain toilet bowl, tank attached, sitting in the middle of the debris. This spot would have been approximately where our family coffee table used to sit back in the day. This is how entropy works. It’s depressing.

The house that had reached this state of decay was the second of four houses my family lived in Monmouth, Illinois. It was the second of three houses we would rent in that tiny college town in the west-central part of the state, the fourth house being the one my parents would purchase in 1976 and in which they would live for the next forty-seven years.

We moved into the house on South 9^th Street in 1969 when I was five. It was a white, Greek-Revival-style house (pictured here in about 2006). I learned from historian, Jeff Rankin, that the house had been moved from another location in Monmouth around 1930. Its original construction dates from the late 19th Century, in the 1850s.

Curb appeal:

A concrete slab on the boulevard served as a landing pad if you parked in front of the house. It was tall enough it could have served as a dismount location if you came by horse. That stretch of 9^th Street had no real curb then or now. And there was an old maple tree to the right of the slab, a tree already ancient in the 1960s, but still leafy. When I last saw it, like the house itself, the tree looked shabby as if everything on that lot had been decaying in unison.

The front yard rose slightly above street level, but not much. It's amazing how high six inches may seem to a 5-year-old but to an adult may seem nothing at all. And it's not erosion that shrinks such things, but the exaggeration of the years divided further by the size of the original beholder. That slightly raised lawn would have been the place where I ran catching fireflies the evening my mother and father disappeared for a few hours inexplicably. I found out years later it was a medical emergency that took them away, though they spared us the explanation at the time.

The front porch was concrete with red brick accents and surrounded by bushes instead. There was no porch railing. The house itself was nothing special. But fifty years ago, with a fresh paint job, I imagine it didn't look so bad. Anyway, it was home.

The front door:

The front storm door had glass panes. I had my photo taken in front of it once, wearing Lederhosen. It opened into a long hallway, space for umbrellas in a bucket on the right-hand side, and the stairway straight ahead running up to the second floor.

In the foyer, there was a coat rack, but no closet that I recall. We had one of those metal garment racks on the right-hand side alongside the stairs. I know it was metal and stainless steel because, at some point, I broke off a piece of a metal hook that was part of it, put it in my mouth, and swallowed it. Long before I became a father, this event made me understand the depths to which a father's love can go. I was taken to the doctor who told my parents it would probably pass through my system in a couple of days. But just to be sure, my father would go through my feces daily to confirm. Diligently, he combed through my poop with a fork in a small metal bowl. The metal passed through as anticipated. No harm done. But I don't think I put anything in my mouth that I shouldn't have for some time to come.

The living room:

To the left was the living room. It seemed spacious in my 5-year-old mind, but again from the outside as a grown-up, the house is tiny so it could not have been too large. Large enough though for a sofa and a few armchairs. I remember the sofa (the davenport we called it, which was the last name of my kindergarten teacher as well.) It was of an ugly brown and orange pattern of some unpleasant sheer fabric, just like the two matching chairs. The armchairs had a square ottoman of the same fabric, and this furniture accompanied us through at least one more move. I believe the sofa was reupholstered at some point with a brown corduroy fabric which much improved it.

We had a cleaning lady named Mrs. Melvin, who seemed ancient already in 1970 so I wonder how old she'd be if still alive. (For fun, the math. If she was 70 then, she'd be 123!) Mrs. Melvin would run the vacuum as part of her duties, and for a tiny old lady, I was impressed by how she could lift the edge of the davenport to run the vacuum underneath.

The fireplace room:

Connected to the living room was a room at the back of the house, a fireplace room or parlor, and maybe we kept a few books in there as well or my father’s records. But mostly incidental tables and another chair. The fireplace functioned at the time and there were the tools and broom that accompanied the family through the next few houses.

It was in this room that my sister and I often had our photos taken. One year, a photo was taken of me in a brown corduroy suit.

Perhaps it was for a school concert. I get the sense, just a general one without recalling any specifics, that this was the room where the serious discussions took place. Not the dining room, which we'll get to in a moment, or the kitchen, where there was no table or chairs if I recall.

The kitchen:

On the other side of the back of the house was the kitchen. There was a breakfast nook at the end of the hallway leading from the front door. (My mom reminds me of this and mentions we didn’t use it.) And this little connecting room led both to the kitchen and the dining room, which took up the rest of the main floor. There was a very small “powder room” under the stairs. (My mother also reminded me of this, and confirmed that though it had a toilet, it was extremely tiny.) A toilet in that space accounts for the lack of a downstairs coat closet.

It was a walk-in kitchen. I don't recall if the sink faced the backyard window or the side of the house, where there was also a window. Either way, it would have been a tight squeeze for my mother who did most of the cooking at that time. There would have been cupboards of course (my mother says they were a yellow-gold color), and an oven, and a fridge. This makes me think the fridge and stove were on the inside wall and the sink under the window faced the backyard.

The back yard:

It would have been from the kitchen window my mother would have heard my cries in 1969 when I had an accident on the swing set in the backyard. I had been trying some acrobatic trick from the swing set sidebar, perhaps something I'd seen in the circus, falling forward, hanging on, and then swinging all the way back around on the bar. It didn't work the first time I tried it. I plunged headfirst into the ground. But I was four and determined. So, I tried again. The second time, I plunged into the ground, and my top teeth plunged through my upper lip on the right-hand side. It required 32 stitches and left a scar that was corrected by plastic surgery only later when I was in junior high.

The rest of the backyard is unclear in my memory, but I recall it was unlevel. A lawnmowing nightmare, I would imagine. A hodgepodge of nooks, crannies, and bushes. I think there was an old pond that had been converted into a sandpit at the bottom of a hill. Another hill at the side of the house was enough to sled down in winter. This would have been the hill down which my grandfather, my mother’s father bellyflopped with us the winter before learning of the pancreatic cancer which would kill him in May of 1970. We would have still lived in that house when he died, but I have no memories at all associated with that.

And there was a raised area beside the garage with another big bush where I got stung by a bumblebee after trying to catch it in my bare hands. My middle finger swelled up so much that it got stuck, and extended in an obscene gesture I could not stop making for a day or so.

In the side yard, there was another huge maple tree, now just a stump as if it had been burned to the ground in a war (damn that entropy!) But back then, it created a shady area by the sidewalk where I used to play with my cars and diggers.

The dining room:

The dining room, which was on the right side of the front of the house, was square with a row of bay windows in the front, but it always seemed a little dark. I recall it as being brown, but I don’t know why. It was the room where we would have celebrated my birthdays, and eaten dinner, but I don't recall the dinners. Just the birthdays, and even then, only vaguely. There must have been a buffet for storing dishes and putting things on. And maybe there was a closet because, on the other side of the dining room, the interior wall would have been the stairway, it would have made sense there could have been a closet underneath it accessible only from the dining room side.

The basement:

There was a basement as well, accessible both by an inside stairway going down from the back door exit, and from the garage. But the garage was mostly unused and piled with junk. I don't think I went to the basement much. Not that it was scary, it was just a big unknown.

If you’re still with me, stay tuned. Next time we’ll venture upstairs.