Just Listed

By

Karen W. Waggoner

I dared myself to do something new last summer when our family gathered in Indiana for the first time in many, many years. Though I felt a great wave of apprehension about my plans, I took my sophisticated and urbane sons and grandchildren on a visit to my rural past, places and memories along the central portion of U.S. 40 where the landscape is as flat as my ironing board and equally predictable. When we left the motel parking lot and piled into the suburban, the bank thermometer registered 96 degrees, which didn't add much to my comfort level. I was pretty sure they'd prefer a day in the pool, but I reminded them of their agreement with my idea and bought them an enormous breakfast of country ham, biscuits, gravy, eggs and potatoes to sweeten the deal.

We toured the large Knightstown cemetery first, aided by genealogy charts my husband prepared for us. The visit was a great hit with both my sons and their children. After we noted the names and dates on those graves I could locate, my parents and grandparents, the crew spread out under the blazing sun to scan the remaining gravesites looking for the names of relatives on their charts. I wandered near my parents' graves remembering the people I found there. My mother's friend Pauline, my father's cousin Robert, and dozens of their contemporaries, people whom I recalled vaguely from childhood. I found even the graves of my grandmother's friends, the stalwart farm women who let me pass the napkins at church women's meetings and who inevitably commented on how much I looked like my father. Some of these memories I did not share with the others, believing they would not identify much with all these people, long gone from the earth they tended and the farmhouses they made their homes.

At least half the reason I wanted to live in a small town in the Ozarks is because the place reminded me so much of the Indiana hamlet where I was born. Charlottesville is a bump on the National Road west of Knightstown and our next destination. I began to talk to my family just as soon as we approached the railroad tracks that marked the south end of town. Charlottesville didn't and doesn't yet have a doctor or dentist, no longer has a school or post office, and the bank and general store are long gone; however, in memory I inhabit the town in the forties and fifties when there were still enough folks to support a towering grain elevator by the railroad tracks, three churches, a gas station, and both a post office and general store.

I attended school there until I was all of nine years old and had a crush on a sturdy blonde farmer, age ten. I lived in one of my maternal grandmother's rental houses, a somewhat shabby white wood box with a front porch. Next door lived the eccentric and fascinating Lois Zimmerman, an English teacher and the preacher at the local Friends' church. Because I didn't attend the church, I never knew whether or not the alto sweetness of Lois's voice dominated the austere and quiet interior of the church. To this day I don't understand why the Friends needed a preacher since their meetings were supposed to be silent. Lois was a friendly loner, bosom buddies with my mother but always retreated to her little home alone at the end of the day. I probably learned to read aloud from Lois who captured the imagination of a small girl with good stories like The Bears of Blue River.

Up the street from our house lived Margaret Smith, also an English teacher, who owned more books than I could count. Margaret's voice was deeper than alto; she was a booming, cheerfully articulate bass. She wore her thin grey hair in braids wrapped around her head and scandalized the townsfolk by living openly with Willard, an almost-silent mouse of a man half her size. I think they eventually married, but not before Willard's presence was accepted by the most conservative of Methodists. Margaret wasn't buddies with anyone except my mother's mother whom I suspect she tolerated because she felt sorry for anyone caught in a loveless marriage. Margaret too, despite Willard, lived a solitary life and traveled alone until she was of great age. She first recommended the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, and I've made it my favorite too.

There were other characters in town, but I focused my narration on the branch of the family north of the highway where there were two more north/south streets and one that ran across both. My paternal grandparents occupied one of the two houses on the cross street which located them conveniently behind the post office, restaurant, and general store, a strip that once comprised the "business district" of Charlottesvile. The corner house west of them was the telephone exchange, another one of my maternal grandmother's rental houses, a four-room cottage where the oak switchboard dominated the front room. The Jessup sisters, Mamie and Ida (always pronounced Idee) regulated telephone communication into and out of Charlottesville. They were sure to know everyone and everyone's business, which was handy because there was no newspaperand they took their responsibility seriously.

My Grandma and Grandpa Walker were their neighbors and owned the vacant lot on the east side. That open space was where they raised an enormous garden every summer and where my grandfather grew prize dahlias with blossoms the size of his straw boater. It was a homely place, just as beautiful now in my mind as it was ordinary then: a parlor centered around a kerosene heater, a dining room with a tinny piano, a little pantry filled with Grandma's pretty dishes, a grand, big kitchen with a potbellied wood stove, and two small bedrooms with real featherbeds. At some point in time Grandpa had tacked on a bathroom at the back of the house. It always seemed to tilt outward as if it weren't quite sure it belonged where it was.

It was our last stop in Charlottesville. Its steep gables were the same; its wraparound porch unchanged; even the doors and windows seemed to be as I remembered until I saw a stack of fluttering handbills beside the closed front door. JUST LISTED one read. 27 E. North Street, Charlottesville, offered at $104,900, reduced to $99,900. My memories careened around in my head until they came to rest on the fact that my grandparents never saw $100,000 in their entire lives. I would guess that my grandmother, selling the house to supplement her tiny widow's income in 1960, probablygained all of $5,000. Even then, the house might have been mortgaged, leaving her with just enough money to go to the Methodist Home where she lived out the rest of her life.

My monologue to my grandchildren had halted when I read the sale flier, and now they looked to me to resume the narration of my life, but I could not continue because the remainder of the sheet of paper in my hand showed photographs of the "refurbished" interior. Gone were the small cozy rooms and shabby rugs and flowered wallpaper and lace curtains. In their place were large open spaces, wall to wall carpet, and bland white walls. The big kitchen with its sunny, multipaned windows, rocking chairs, and Hoosier cabinet had become a characterless expanse of mass-produced oak cabinets, not very different from the ones in my own kitchen. Out back, the outhouse was gone along with the grape arbor, the pawpaws, and all of Grandpa's dahlias. I regained the power of speech only when I found two spreading mulberry trees, one on either side of the new patio, both of which had to be the grandbabies of the old tree that dominated the back yard of my childhood. "Thank God for trees," I said.

We didn't stay long to look around, and I couldn't tell you exactly why the experience remains with me for I decided to obliterate my copy of the JUST LISTED bulletin in my little office shredder. The new version of the house will never be the truth my imagination shows me, and I wouldn't pay a dime to own it as it is today. Memory not only reproduces the look and feel of the house but also the click of marbles on a wooden Chinese checkerboard because my grandmother didn't approve of card games. I hear Lois Zimmerman's dramatic voice, remember Margaret Smith's laughter, and I can smell Grandma's fried chicken. $99,900 wouldn't begin to buy a memory, and though my children and grandchildren were politely attentive all day long, I know it lives best in my mind, not theirs.