A writing prompt: Where are you from?
I am from an old house in a Midwestern town, a house with a front and back stairway and peacock blue wool carpeting with walls painted to match. My mother, Nina Naomi, decaled a large flowering magnolia up the side wall of the open front stairway. Having grown up living in the flat over her parents' hardware store--three kids, an unemployed uncle and two parents--she was enchanted with the large old home. It was built in 1904, the same year as the St. Louis World's Fair. We were told this often. The house, it seemed, had a credential.
I decorated my room with purple satin throw pillows and tiny flowered wallpaper. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, very cold. No heat came out of the vent in my bedroom, and it was beyond our means to call in a professional for any repair. I shivered all winter, dressing in my parents' room where the vent worked. The walls were smudged with coal dust and with smoke from the fireplaces. We kept them burning on weekends to help warm the house. But when the ash cooled the birds flew in, perhaps themselves to escape the cold, baby birds, grown birds, always a trauma what to do with the birds. Then in summer swallows circled the house nightly and settled noisily along the brick insides of the chimneys. We'd watch them fly in but never saw them leave. It was a chaotic house, and the birds were part of that.
In summer a window fan worked hard to cool the nights, but daytimes were stuffy, shades drawn against the sun and floor fans circulating the heavy air. Then the wool carpeting took on a humid depth and the walls closed in. My brother and I lay about.
The kitchen was large and outdated even then, with clumsy carpentry work and hand-made plywood counters linoleumed in a 50's style. The table we ate on had black crisscrossed stripes on a white porcelain enameled top. The leaves slid under the table. We never used a cloth and mostly had casseroles of mix and match food groups for dinner. My mother would name them: Mama's Mississippi Beef Bone Stew, Grandma Viola's lima bean and tomato soup casserole, and so on. She would come into a cold kitchen after a full day's work and begin assembling. Canned cling peaches were a staple dessert. Burgers and dogs on the grill were a treat. We never ate fresh fish unless my grandfather caught it. Then it was fried in cornmeal, like I still do now when my husband has a good morning casting into the surf. For a night out we might go to Steak 'n Shake and eat in the car. I am from all of this.
Because my parents smoked and the single toilet had no exhaust fan and a stuck window, the closet-sized room smelled stale and sour, unpleasant even in recollection. Like a nursing home when urine-soaked sheets in laundry bins line the hallways, plus all the acrid chemical odors of the tobacco contaminants. My father would then overlay this with a spritz of air freshener as he left the room to me in the morning. The wash basin and clawfoot tub were in an adjacent room and smelled like my mother's makeup. That was fine. In the makeup cabinet was a jar of Vaseline that I would dab on my lips, eyebrows and eyelashes; the last swipe, when I was a little girl, went on my black patent Mary Jane's for shine. I am from this too.
And a yard with a tree house, tire swing, and beds of pink peonies nodding, with white spirea by the back door and Pfitzers by the front. Grass grew sparsely and dirt packed hard. My mother was not a gardener and never planted a thing. She spent summers studying, lying in the sun with tea and a cigarette, taking notes and learning enough to earn a Master's degree and then a Ph.D. My father built the tree house, then years later built another for our two children. He went to night school to earn a Bachelor's degree. My brother and I went to free Y camps or Bible School, summer school, or played in the neighborhood, ranging far. My mother was a teacher but my father, before night school paid off, had one of those jobs that was from time to time humiliating.
My mother said she was the product of PFB, which she said stood for a Poor Family Background. I don't know where she got that because there are many meanings of PFB that I found--from Please Find Below to a chronic inflammatory disorder--but not that one. She didn't say it in a disparaging way, but rather like she expected to be contradicted (which she wasn't) or like it was better than the opposite.
I am from a time when much was good, and much was not and as a child I didn't think about the latter. We were poor enough not to think of white privilege--a term decades from use--with no consciousness raised until after the 60's bled out. Then began the work-in-progress.
This is the heart of where I'm from and I could write and write about it. The landscape, the people and the traditions that make us who we are.
Thanking you for reading, Nina Naomi
