The website Women Writers, Women’s Books has featured an article I wrote about the process of writing Scrap: Salvaging a Family. Here is a quote:
At least two, if not three, versions of this traditional chapter memoir were completed. By me apparently. But it didn’t feel as if I wrote them. Because I felt strongly that I wanted the distillation of image and experience. Creating chapters meant writing filler language. That felt inauthentic to me.
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In Scrap I wrote about the playhouse my father built for me. In 2020, Twist in Time magazine published my story, “The Changing House,” about the little house. Their website is down, so I suspect the magazine is defunct. The first half of the story is about building the playhouse, which is very similar to the story in Scrap. But the second half of the story follows the little house on its path as long as I knew it.
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The kids couldn’t wait to play inside the playhouse. Near the ceiling, the rafters formed long wooden pockets where we stored secret agent supplies like decoder rings and invisibility raincoats and private notes listing the boys we liked. Eventually, those things became irretrievable as the wasps set up nests.
We discovered that during the summer, the little house was too hot. We’d haul the child-sized table and chairs out onto the grass. In the winter, the air was as frigid inside as it was outside, but the snow and ice couldn’t get in, so we’d sit in our snow pants and stocking caps and play Candyland. Our fingers froze as we pushed our tokens, but then we’d pull our hands back up into the sleeves of our jackets until it was our turn again.
Eventually, we lost interest in the playhouse and started walking up to the plaza to buy candy and try on lipsticks. The house still stood at the back lot line, an ignored remnant of my childhood, until one fall when we discovered a new use for the little building.
We held sleepovers on Friday nights in the house, away from Mom’s prying eyes. One Friday, my next-door neighbor invited her brother’s friends. Before the boys showed up, we swigged the Grand Marnier I’d pinched from Dad’s bar in the basement. For a few minutes, my neighbor’s brother and I made out on top of my sleeping bag, but the boys didn’t stay long. After they mumbled their goodbyes, we practiced making each other pass out by squeezing our diaphragms. The tender skin on my upper lip burned from the neighbor boy’s stubble. That was one of the last nights we spent in the playhouse.
When we moved away from my favorite neighborhood, Dad strapped the house onto a flatbed truck and hauled it to our newly-purchased rundown summer cottage. My mother christened my playhouse, “The Changing House,” bestowing on it a new identity. Inside we stored stretched out bathing suits, Styrofoam floaties, and boat cushions. Daddy long legs set up residence in there, too, wrapping everything in webs so that when we wanted to use something, we had to make sure our hands were dry enough to wipe them clean or the silk would adhere to our skin until we ran, screaming and shaking our hands, off the dock and plunged into the lake.
One night when I came in from a moonlight swim, I caught my twelve-year-old brother in the little house making out with the fourteen-year-old neighbor girl. Apparently, she didn’t mind that he looked nine, while she could be mistaken for sixteen. My brother grinned when I opened the door on them.
Years later, my father moved the little house—now entirely brindle brown, the crescent moon long ago painted over–across the street, into the woods, where he used it as a storage shed. My brother built my parents a lovely home on the site of the old cottage. After my father’s death, my mother sold the lake property. Last time I drove by, the little house was gone. I imagine the new owners carted it to the junkyard where somebody scavenged it for usable parts.
Tour Schedule:
March 21: Joy Neal Kidney (review)
March 23: Liz Gauffreau, (review)
March 24: Marie Ann Bailey, (review)
March 25: John W. Howell, (excerpt)
March 30: Miriam Hurdle, (companion story)
March 31: Review Tales (review)
April 2: the bookworm (review)
April 9: Ashley’s Books, Cozy Home Delight (review)
April 13: What’s That Book About (guest post)
April 15: Tabi Thoughts(review)
April 23: Lavender Orchids (review)
April 27: The Reading Bud (review)
May 4: Chelsea’s Books (review)
May 4: Smorgasbord (excerpt)
May 6: Brotman Blog (review)
May 7: The Reading Bud (interview)
May 14: True Book Addict (guest post)
May 19: True Book Addict (review)
May 21: The Book Connection (review)
Follow the tour with the hashtag #ScrapSalvagingFamily
Last Wednesday my Uncle Frank passed away. A month or so before, he had suddenly found it difficult to walk, so he asked a neighbor to take him to the ER. Before that moment, he seemed in remarkably good physical and mental health for someone 90 years old. Although they didn’t know what was wrong, they admitted my uncle to the hospital where he fluctuated between lucidity and not. They had him on a strong dose of morphine because the pain in his back and legs was so bad.
