"Unsettled" Chapter 3

The Places That We Pick

[Here’s a recap of events so far: My Dad went “squirrel hunting” and spent the day scouting out some unsettled land he wanted to buy as a homestead. He had begun a similar process in Port Huron back in 1960, but then his job at Bell moved us to the Detroit area. Mom and Dad sold their dream house quicker than expected and had to buy a house in a hurry. It was just “for a while,” because Dad had no desire to live in the city, but “whiles” by nature tend to pass when no one’s looking at the clock. Full seven years “whiled by” from the time we moved to Roseville to the time Dad found the land, and it would be another seven years before we lived in the house we built there. This story is about those latter seven years, that unsettled time in our lives when we still resided in the suburbs but spent every weekend, every school break, and nearly all of Dad’s “vacation time” working with him at “the property,” as we called the land until it became our home.]

Why were these unsettling years? What boy doesn‘t dream of having his own “forest“ to run wild in? When asked on a Monday at school “Wudja do this weekend?” what boy would not be proud to say, “We felled some trees to make some logs to build our barn”? This kind of work was so cool to talk about that most of our friends began coming out to work with us, and between all the hours of work with Dad there was equally as much time for play. He made sure of that, for watching us boys from his perch on the tractor seat or high in the log rafters of the barn reminded him that his dream was real, that the decision to live someday in the country, in the woods, had indeed been a good one. We boys loved the place that Dad had picked to build our home. But when I say these years were unsettling, I’m not talking about us boys, I’m speaking more of Mother.

Something happened to Mom in Roseville that Dad had not anticipated. Something happened with each passing year in those narrow streets and yards so close that housewives spending days alone could talk while hanging laundry on the line. Something happened summer afternoons on the cool cement stoop of our porch with the sidewalk just a wave away and where people passing always spoke and where children from blocks around would while away the afternoons with Mrs. K, the lady who always had time to visit… something happened.

Mom fell in love with that neighborhood where nearly everything and everyone was close. She loved that Mr. Nebola picked the place outside her kitchen window to plant his Morning Glories.
Each summer a different color draped the chain link fence between our back yards. Beneath the leaves a thousand spiral fingers wrapped 'round the wire. These clinging vines were his not ours--that is the stems attached to earth on his side of the fence, and it was his care they received--but the blooms themselves were faithful only to the sun and always opened biggest on our side [the east side] of the fence. Mom loved that she could see them from her kitchen window.

She loved that a cup of sugar or a half-a-loaf of bread or two teaspoons of vanilla were just a neighbor away in a pinch or a few blocks away at the grocery store if she planned ahead. Mom was usually in a pinch but the neighbors didn’t mind, and her friends did the same with her.

It was through borrowed pinches of time that the neighbor ladies got to know each other. [Hard as it is to believe today, in the Sixties, in the suburbs, nearly every house had inside a housewife home alone.] Mom loved that when she shook a rug from the front porch, she’d see others doing the same from just a yoo-hoo away. More than any place she’d lived since Forest and Riverview, the house where she was born, the house she'd left the day she married, Mom felt at home in Roseville, and she loved it.

Ironically, it was the nearness of everything that bothered Dad. What he disliked about our neighborhood was not the neighbors but the tight squeeze of unshared space. Lot lines were so precise that “edgers,” bladed wheels at the end of a long wooden handle, served as border patrol, trimming encroaching blades of grass from the concrete lines of “yours and mine.” Back yards were even more distinct with a four-foot chain link fence around a lawn ten-paces square. The very closeness that let Mom visit from her bedroom window to her friend’s kitchen window was the very closeness that frustrated Dad. The more closed-in he felt, the more often he told himself that this was not the kind of place he'd pick to raise his family.

For Mom, the dream they'd shared for all those years had a softer focus before the land was purchased. There had been a time when she wanted to live in the country just a much as Dad did, but something happened in the seven years of neighborhood living. She kept it deep inside.

The thought of a bigger house, made just the way she wanted with kids and someday grandkids running all around--that thought made her smile. But the out-in-the-country part, the not-a-neighbor-in-sight part, the surrounded-by trees part… these thoughts made her fearful. And each time they came to mind her eyes took her someplace far away as her fingers searched for imperfections on her skin. Up and down the back of her arm (or down her leg if she was sitting), whenever she slipped deep in thought, she seemed unaware that her hand was acting on its own.

Then with a shake of her head she’d say as if she were standing beside herself, “Don’t worry about it, Bev, When the time comes, it’ll be fine.” And with a shallow breath of confidence, she’d go about her day not knowing that the place her fingernail had picked was bleeding.
.