It’s midsummer and the baking heat and the way asphalt smells after an afternoon rain tugs me back to my childhood and the hot days I spent with my siblings and cousins in the small Eastern Colorado town where my mother grew up.
The house at Bijou and Grant has a big porch that harbored deep shade even on the hottest summer day and we dared each other to climb the pine tree towering over the driveway.
Fascination and mystery hovered around every corner in my grandparents’ house. Who was the woman in the picture tacked on the garage back wall? What did my grandfather do with the frozen pheasants stacked in plastic bags in a big basement freezer, their bright feathers muted by a layer of frost?
The wooden rocking horse and bean bag game that once entertained my mother and aunt were stored in a little second-floor room that smelled like musty rose petals. The big closet in my aunt’s childhood room was dark and deep and we dared each other to crawl all the way to the back.
Even small details in the house captivated my imagination. The tooth powder in the downstairs medicine cabinet and the telephone number that combined a name and numbers were touchstones from a world that existed before I was born.
My grandparents’ house was where it dawned on me that grownups were complex people with different sides to their personalities. My grandmother laughed and hugged us in her kitchen. But the living and dining rooms were an elegant forbidding domain where we obeyed her rules about no playing around the china cabinet or sitting on the fancy sofa next to the front door.
We were fascinated by her vanity table with its cut-glass perfume bottles and delicate brushes. The fun woman covered in flour in the kitchen was transformed into a queen or movie star when she sat down in front of the vanity’s triple-pane mirror.
The basement was my grandfather’s domain. A slender quiet man, he spent part of his day in a world that, in my young mind, defined men. Guns stood in a rack behind a locked glass door. Cigarette smoke mixed with the smell of sawdust in his boiler room workshop lined with table saws, wood routers and drill presses.
When my grandparents died, my brother got my grandfather’s roll top desk. My sister got the candy dish kids weren’t allowed to dip their hands into at Christmas and I got the Philco radio with its dial band ready to tune into Brazil, Brussels and Berlin.
A half century later, I don’t even have to touch the dials to tune into midsummers spent in the house that helped shape my childhood.