A Home

This room was the playroom. There was a chalkboard right here against the wall. I used to pretend I was a teacher and write math problems on the board. I would use the square root sign before I knew what it was because it made me feel smart and older. The chalk was always that crappy kind that didn’t write well. Probably the RoseArt brand instead of Crayola. Or maybe it was old chalk. Or maybe it’d gotten wet at some point, chewed on by my younger cousins. Or maybe it was the chalkboard itself. It was a little too slick and the chalk could never get enough friction to write well.

There was an old Barbie Doll house that must’ve been from the early seventies. But it was the early eighties at that point, so it wasn’t that old. I didn’t really ever like to play Barbies because I didn’t like the inevitable soap opera stories that resulted from playing with dolls with boobs. So I usually just stuck to teaching.

There was one of those pretend, plastic ovens in the corner over there. It was the same one that my aunts coaxed my uncle into when he was about four. Then they taped the door shut. ‘Round and ‘round the oven with Scotch tape, snickering the whole time, I bet. I never liked the plastic oven because I always helped my mama bake real food. I turned the plastic knob to set the temperature on the plastic oven one time. The oven didn’t get hot, and the knob was plastic. An oven can’t be plastic. It would melt.

There was a pool table in the middle of the playroom. My uncles would play pool when I was trying to be a teacher, and they were always too loud. Not good students. Unruly. I usually would give up and go outside when they came into the room.

In this room here, the family room, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, the sun lands riiiight… here. Comes in from the windows on the west. Kind of makes a glare when you’re trying to watch TV, but it makes the room nice and warm in the winter. There were two overstuffed leather couches right here that I would sink down in and never be able to get out of. My feet didn’t touch the floor and I could never get enough leverage. There were two paintings on that wall there. Huge red flowers in brown vases. And right there, standing behind the couch by the stained glass chandelier, my father hugged my pregnant aunt as she said, This one will never know her. By “this one,” she meant the baby in her belly. By “her,” she meant my great-grandmother Mamie who died when I was five.

The sounds. The sounds of aluminum chairs echoing in the carport, of splashing in the swimming pool, of jokes being told and football being discussed. And the smell of the house. It’s still there sometimes, in my nose and my memories. The smell of Mamie’s baking yeast rolls, Grandmommie’s perfume, and the chalk that was always on my hands.