On the River With Huck & Jim

This little house isn't anymore. It wasn't really a house even when we called it so. It sat behind my grandmother's house, just up the road from ours, in what had been an orchard once. we grandchildren took it over and made it ours. No one objected. In it we kept old toys and small furnishings and the mysterious and abandoned objects of earlier generations: things like a stereopticon, and oil lamps, and a trunk of old party dresses. There might be an old push-mower in the corner, a rusted scythe hanging on the wall, and various rakes and the like in it, mixed with our things, but we could ignore these neglected practical things so long as we might sit on a broken wicker sofa and play with cards so old they'd gone soft, or race hard rubber cars on the dusty floor, or sit in a pile of musty old horse-blankets, a summer breeze coming in at the little windows and out through the open door, and read.

That was what I remember best doing in the little house, reading, by myself, with the smell of apples in pine baskets around me, and old horse-tack hanging on the walls above my head. Reading the OZ books again and again, reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with a supply of lemonade in a glass pitcher my grandmother brought me and warned me not to break or I'd not be welcome back. Treasure Island, with the Wyeth illustrations, in a copy once owned by my Uncle Dick, killed in the war, I found in my grandmother's house, and read here and again before my grandmother's fireplace, while we made popcorn in the pan with the long handle, over the fire.

Too, I fought "the battle of the round-house," within that single, dusty room.

And in this house that wasn't a house, that may once have been a cabin, I went first down the Mississippi with Huck & Jim.

As I say, this little building is long gone. The apple trees are wild and untended now, as is, I don't doubt, the grapevine that grew on the trellis above the "tip," just back at the edge of the woods. I used to hang out over certain destruction to get at those cool Concord grapes and carry them back -- if they lasted that long -- to eat while I read in that shed, that being, after all, all it really was even then.

I found this old photograph, one I took myself as a child, and I remembered that little place for the first time in many years; the dust in the sun, the strong smell of long vanished horses, the sweet smell of the grass, and the afternoons I spent safe in that close, keeping company with some of the first and best friends of my youth, of my life. As Twain said:

"It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened."

Such places are made, and lost, it seems, before we remember to look back at them.