M.A.S.H.

Came across an abandoned house or two while searching in the country for my dad's old farmstead where he grew up. Unf, his farmhouse had been torn down, but the grainery and pig feeder remain. Home life sure stirs up memories, especially for those of us confined in ours right now.

I'm behind, but answering questions I derived from Pinterest to kick my writing butt. Feels weird to keep talking about me, but I'm definitely not a HOW TO blogger and I'm trying to hone my storyteller voice, and I'm finding myself with more time these days to open up the memory banks.

We lived in several rundown mice-infested small-town boxes before moving into the home my carpenter grandpa built for our family. My mother loved that home. When the bank finally decided to take rightful ownership, we moved back with the mice.

Mice have haunted me since I was a baby. One old house in one small town burned almost to the ground one chilly night while a young family of five slept peacefully, until the toddler awoke to pee, and Mom smelled smoke.

Rodents gnawed through the stove wires causing an electrical fire. My supposed friends who left remnants of their night in my playpen each morning sent a young couple and three babies out a broken window onto a second floor eave, waiting for neighbors down the gravel roads who played firemen too.

The next home I remember from pictures, both in my head and in print. I ended up at that house one night after the bar while back visiting my hometown, within the last 10 years. It was creepy. When I entered the bathroom upstairs, my head flashed to a 3-year-old me who drank fingernail polish remover immediately after my mom told me not to. She called poison control on the green rotary phone, hung up and followed directions to make me drink a glass of milk, then on we went up the stairs to the bathroom where she stuck her finger down my throat to flush the toxic liquid that looked like pop. I also babysat there when I was barely a teen.

The house that Grandpa built conjures both good memories, from the unfinished basement seemingly built for roller skating parties to the crawl space hideout under the stairs begging for sliding on with pleather cushions, can’t forget the laundry chute nor the backyard a field of hay bales turned horses, and bad memories. Phone cord stretched across the living room wall into the bathroom where cries echoed in the receiver. Before time could run out, we were moving out, into an old home where my mom lived in high school.

Her memories filled the walls with answered dreams of a teen finally moving into town from the farm, where she could more easily hang with friends and walk downtown. My memories served the feeling of freedom also, but at the result of a divorce and young-teen downtime without much parental supervision. Party house it became.

Add my dad’s extra-small box-size party house into the mix once he moved out of his Peterbilt and hotel rooms, into a couple shanties on a sketchy corner that became my refuge through high school, both to escape the sheep farm of my mom’s new boyfriend but admittedly to party in the bigger town. I grew bored of my surroundings, never felt settled, decided to expand my people. Town drew me in then, but country taunts me now.

The farm is where I love to return, take my kids, spend a few days that might include climbing the tallest ladder of my life to the roof of the shop holding a ten-foot pole with an ice cream bucket on the end to somehow transfer to the chimney pipe to keep out the bird shit, or taming baby kittens creeping from the hay bale holes in the old red barn, waiting patiently while swinging on the tire attached by a rope to the rafters.

Sheep farm was more welding business and shop by the time my family arrived when I was 16 not without first experiencing at least once, a baby lamb’s after birth after shoving an arm inside to save the life. Shearing days haunt my hungover high school memories, dropping 6 feet into a suspended gunny sack waiting for cockleburs and shit stuck to the clumps of wool dropping down on my head while stomping my feet til the mound reached the top to do it all over again.

I hated the farm when I was a teenager, although driving gravel roads to school did present an adventure every day. Sometimes funny, sometimes not, but sometimes humor only appears in reflection.

Fields and cropland surround the farm, with a church across the bumpy oil road, neighboring farmhouses within a few mile radius. In the summertime, we sit on the porch and drink coffee and talk and watch the “traffic” go by - couple cars, maybe a hay hauler, a Ford or Chevy or GMC pick up, maybe a minivan, tractor of some sort, a Harley, the mailman who waves hi while one of the grand kids runs down and up the deep ditch to greet him.

Bonfires light up the playground of endless fun, where old-school park equipment from town found a new home after their original place washed away with a raging river. There’s no lack of laughter and stories and swinging and s’mores and moonshine and firewood and open skies that blast stars into your eyes. Sunsets copy rainbows above a seamless skyline sprinkled with darkened dots of hay bales and combines. Pleasant can try to describe what it’s like until you’ve tried.

My mother decorates the century-old farmhouse with items from the weekly auction sale house down the road, resurrected from the dust, deliverance she concedes.

It’s all down-home goodness from the cream-of-something casserole to the whip cream jello pie.

We visit my dad also, who still lives in town, but in a double wide trailer on the opposite side of town from his old shanties, now with a large back yard facing but a distance from the highway, where we watch cars, trucks and motorcycles rev steadily. He’s worked hard on the place over the years and has cool neighbors who happen to be related.

He hosts backyard gatherings with lawn chairs and Bud Lights, always a grill or a smoker smoldering in the background. Pork loin his most famous go-to, but his smoked chicken lately takes the front seat. Hamburgers and hot dogs don’t get as much attention and usually show up crispy, because the show is about the other meat. And sometimes that’s all it is: meat, sauce, bun, chips, beer, go!

Kids swing high enough to get lost in the tree branches above.

His home known for popcorn eating and movie watching shakes when surround sound sets the tone of a movie loud enough for theater. And so proud is he.

His trailer sits in a cul-de-sac with a crab apple tree dropping un-apologetically.

Front porch creaks while we swing and swig and laugh, always laughing at my daddy’s.