Be It Ever So Humble, It's Home

For less than a hundred dollars, my husband and I rented a furnished home southeast of downtown Ogden, Utah in the fall of 1967. I was pregnant with our first child. He had accepted employment at the Utah State Industrial School and was also working on his Master's Degree. A spacious place for the two of us, this home had a finished half basement bedroom and bath that his brother and a cousin used when they were between apartments, college semesters, or marriages. I heard our elderly neighbor's voice one day, getting louder and quite animated. Looking out my kitchen window, I could see her standing in the driveway talking with our landlord. I listened a little closer and heard her informing him about all the "goin's on" in his house, men coming and going at all hours and she just didn't think that was right, considering that I was pregnant! "I just thought you should know," she said. The landlord never said a word about it, to me. I suspect she had been his neighbor when he lived in the house and had kept him informed about his neighbors, then, too. I found a way to let him know who the "traffic" in and out of his house was, just a couple of family members who needed a temporary place to sleep now and then.

This home on Porter Avenue wasn't far from a home where the South family had once lived. Now one of those children was absorbed and busy 24/7, establishing a special education program at the school and attending classes at U of U in Salt Lake. I didn't know a soul in Ogden and had made no effort to meet people. My pregnancy was difficult and I was without a car during the day and into evening. From birth, my first child was a baby who didn't sleep so I did a lot of walking, often with him in a stroller. By the time he was a toddler, I ventured out to go to church to meet some people. This child also wasn't a quiet sort who could be entertained and coaxed to be quiet at appropriate times, not even with Cheerios, so when the meeting began and the music started, he was just so tickled that he stood up on the bench and sang right out, loud, making up some words as he went, all the while leading the music right along with the chorister but not necessarily stopping when and where she did! He caused quite a commotion in a short time. I was a young mother, sleep deprived, with absolutely no experience, and was easily embarrassed. When a well-meaning member suggested that I should wait until he was older to bring him again, I did just that but never went back to that ward. 

When this home was sold, we moved a little further south, to Brinker Street into a newly built, four-plex apartment. It was a great place with a spacious kitchen and more cupboard and bedroom closet space than I'd ever seen before. Here, I decided to hire myself out as a seamstress. With a fabric store within walking distance just off the main street, through a gully and dry ditch, then across an open field, walking there with my kid in a stoller became a way for me to cope with spending almost all 24 hours of every day alone with a very active toddler. Willows still grew along the ditch so we'd stop in the shade there, going and coming.

The stairs inside the apartment, leading to the lower level, were a problem. It was an open stairwell without a door. Coming in that back door, you either stepped up one step directly into the kitchen or stepped down a flight of stairs to reach the laundry and storage area assigned to our apartment. My toddler had already taken a tumble, like a Saturday morning cartoon character, bouncing off each step to the next, just a smidgen beyond my reach, all the way down.  On this morning, I was sorting laundry when I heard a racket behind me. Thinking it was my child who'd followed me, head first, down those steps yet again, I whirled around and started for the door, hoping to get to the bottom of those stairs before he did. But instead of my kid, I came face to face with the young woman who lived in that apartment. There she stood, just outside her open doorway, stark naked! It was summertime and very hot. She had just finished scrubbing her kitchen floor and was putting her mop and bucket in the utility room. That was the noise I'd heard. What does one say when you meet someone for the first time under those circumstances?

Another morning, I had just put my biggest pot on the stove, filled to the brim with tomatoes, to stew. The big butcher knife I had used to cut them up was still on the counter.  "I'll just run down and put a batch of clothes in the washer while this water gets hot," since my child was entertained and content for the moment, or so I thought. I had barely gotten the laundry going when I heard rattling on those darn stairs and rushed to the door. I'd left it open a bit. Now it was closed. The rattling I'd heard was not a child falling down the stairs. No, it was my child playing with the lock, the kind you slide across to engage. Just as I put my hand on the doorknob, he made the right connection, sliding the bold into place. I talked to him through the door, trying to coax him to push the shiny knob back the other way. He tired of that game quickly and went back upstairs. Oh grief! The top lock was not on the back door. It was early morning but I'd already been in and out taking garbage. And the pot must be boiling by now. That knife! He wouldn't be able to reach it unless he spied it and pushed a chair up to the counter. The couple in that apartment--yes, the naked mop lady--usually worked nights and slept all day. I knocked. No answer. Knocked again, with a little more urgency. Still no answer. I checked the window to see if I could possibly go out that way. What was I thinking? I took a couple of runs from the washer across the room, throwing myself at the locked door, thinking maybe I could rattle it enough to dislodge that bold so I could force it open. Wow! That hurt! I abandoned that idea, luckily before I broke any bones, and went back to pounding on my neighbor's door and yelling until I finally woke her up. The minute she opened her door a crack, her eyes still half closed, I pushed past her, dashed through her apartment, not stopping to explain, and ran out around the building and in through my unlocked back door. Everything was okay. My curious toddler hadn't escaped out the back door. If he had, the busy street, the gully and willows and field were within sight and he'd been there many times with me. That was my fear, that he'd try to go to the place I took him to play on some hot days. The pot was just beginning to bubble a little around the edges. And the knife wasn't where he could have reached it. Whew! And my neighbor? I guess we were even, on the strange meeting's score. 

Fearless and curious about everything, my little boy heard kids laughing and playing while I was hanging clothes out to dry. It was a bright, sunny, summer day. He had new red Keds on his feet and had been running back and forth from the apartment front door, then across the parking pavement at the back of the complex, to the clothes lines. He wasn't yet three but already had about a million allergies and his nose was running so I turned my back on him only the few seconds it took me to take a couple or three steps up to reach a Kleenex from the table just inside the door. When I turned back around, he was gone! He had heard the kids voices again but couldn't see them so he followed the sound, putting those tiny, rubber soled toes in each space of the chain link fence, all the way to the top and over, into the adjoining yard. Panicked and pregnant, I had quite a walk, going around the block, searching and calling his name before I found him, still in that back yard just across our fence, happily playing away.

The father in one of the other units was hauled off to jail for selling porno movies. You just never know what goes on behind closed doors. The rest of us who lived there were about to find out. His teenage sons, left to their own devices, hooked up a hose and had a water fight inside their apartment, flooding it while punching holes in the walls and tearing down the inside doors. This was pretty unexpected behavior and activity in this lovely apartment building in a nice neighborhood. When our new baby was about a month old, we moved back to Salt Lake City. It was the end of a five-year cycle, something that would seem to repeat itself.