~~~> Denise and I after a long day of fishing. Secret Fort in the background, Bougainvillea, and garage to left. ~~~<
(473 words, 3 minutes read time)
As my parents’ family grew so did their house requirements. Until the one day they discovered a special forever home on Casa Linda Drive. Of course, this story is not about that home or of those memories. Here we hope to revive two houses where our family began.
This story takes place before the trend for assassinations. When fond memories lay still, tossed in a jumble of candy-coated Halloween wrappers left discarded in the dust behind our childhood beds. It was back then, during our still unloosed innocence.
This composite of early homes recalls one with its front and back lawns of mixed-seed and weed yards linked by a straight driveway beginning at the street passing the back doorstep (on the right) and terminating at the garage door. A garage that never once held a car but contained every possession my parents owned that wouldn’t fit, or didn’t belong, in the house.
Beside the garage door is a trellis supporting a deeply rooted Bougainvillea. It grew mostly wild and unchecked from the edge of the door and covered most of the length of the right side of the garage, not to mention a fair portion of the roof. Whenever I played nearby this vicious purple monster would slash at me with concealed thorns!
I believe this may be the same house where Uncle Bobby once taught Denise Ballet. That’s what she thought she was learning. More likely he was teaching simplified Kempo Karate.
Behind the garage was an abandoned tool shed. It lay mostly out of sight, but within earshot of Mom who was always working in the house. We immediately transformed the shed into our secret fort! Dirt floor, spiderwebs, rusted nails and all. It was constructed of grape-stake fence slabs, corners nailed together. A roof of the same construction. The front featured an access door, and there was a wooden ladder built into the far side.
That ladder gave access to the fort’s roof. The fort’s roof gave access to the garage roof. The roofs were both strictly off limit, but I didn’t mind that. Even when I was five and my sister only four, she was the cautious one.
One summer day I fetched the towel I had napped on two weeks before in kindergarten, tied it on as a cape. It was a day to fly like Superman! Only I ended up tiptoeing on the ground, hanging from a grape stake, Denise shaking her head and calling for my mother to help me down.
Before summer’s end in 1963, I also borrowed a bedsheet from the dirty clothes hamper and attempted to parachute from the garage roof a few times. using a borrowed bed sheet. After configuring the sheet different ways I managed not to break any bones but to tuck and roll well enough to manage now until seventy never having worn a cast.
>~~~~~8647~~~~~<
-dalton
7-21-26
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