THEY CALL IT NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY OR STORY THEOLOGY

These are recent photos of the house where I grew up, 1939 to 1961, and returned for emergency shelter twice, once in 1973 and again in 1991. My mother came here as a bride in 1937. The mortgage payment was $35 a month. She said that the house was what tipped the scales to persuade her to marry. I think my father knew that, though he bought the house to help his brother, who had a job selling re-possessed houses for a bank. It was beautifully made, an investment by a hardware business whose owners had built a much bigger house across the street.

All the doorknobs were glass and the windows had retractable screens that rolled up into the top frame like shades. Built-in cabinets. The sunporch is on the north side and had French doors to separate it from the rest of the house. My mother died in that room in 1998, at her request.

Her bedroom had always been upstairs on that north end but in the end she couldn’t go up stairs. There were two bedrooms upstairs and we kids shared the south one. There was one bathroom upstairs, but she always had plans to build a bed/bath suite out the back. Never did it. My father balked.

Christmas in this house was the first one I knew. I flew back from college but never from Browning. My mother didn’t go all out for decorations, but she always had a nice tree and enjoyed doing it with flair. At one point she made candles because my dad’s co-op (Pacific Supply, ag wholesale) was selling the wax and she did demonstrations. She made snowballs, casting two halves in a bowl, whipping the wax with a fork to make snow, throwing on glitter, lots of glitter. We had a mantel clock with a curve that she converted into a roof with Santa in a sled. There was an embossed aluminum foil angel wrapped around a candle in a coffee can. More glitter. We never put the tinsel on the tree carefully enough, strand by strand, as she thought it should be.

It was hard to buy for her, but one year she got an electric coffee percolator and thought that was just about the best ever. She perked her morning coffee right at the table. She wanted it HOT. Her bedroom was not heated, the door was always locked, and she hid our presents there. But the locks worked with skeleton keys and someone had given us a box of them, so we tested until we found one that worked. When I was nearly too old for dolls, I yearned for a life-sized crying baby doll, its lifelike plastic face all contorted. She tried to talk me out of it, but in the end she bought it. Looking for our presents when everyone was gone, I found it, unwrapped and stuffed into a paper bag with its muslin body unclothed. What would have been magic became guilt. It’s in a box out in the bunkhouse right now. I can’t quite bear to abandon those dolls.

To my father’s family Christmas was always books, generic reading glasses, and fountain pens. The big healthy prairie-raised brothers and tight-knit family were in my mother’s opinion another characteristic in favor of marriage, since they could back each other up. That was before WWII, which somehow scattered everyone. We had to go to prescription glasses, and fountain pens barely hung on, but books have stayed. I still have some of our childhood books, mostly Christmas presents.

This time of year is rainy in Portland, more chilly than cold, with surprise snowstorms. If it gets to single-digit cold, things freeze up and crack open. This house was always cozy. Our fireplace was in use most of the time if only to burn trash. If it wasn’t, there was a white-painted plywood screen to stick over the hole. It had a map glued onto it, but I don’t remember what it was a map of. Mostly I remember the sounds, rain tapping or wind teasing, the pipes shuddering when the water went on or off, the trickling of gutters, the individual sounds of door latches -- some creaked, some snapped, some jingled. The most chilling sound was the flap on the mail slot in the front door which shrieked like a banshee when the wind hit it just right.

When we moved in the neighborhood was European immigrant craftsmen. No kids around. Then wartime and the two apartment buildings on the corners had single women with kids living in them. After the war there was a kind of pause, then a lot of people moved up in society, meaning out of the middle of the city. The Vanport flood displaced Southern blacks up into our part of town. Things slid for a while, then I was gone for decades, and when I finally came back in 1991, my mother was living between a terrifying woman who had lived there since she was a child but who had gone insane from drugs and whose feral daughter was FAS. The original dignified black parents were dead. On the other side was a man who rented driveway space to camp trailers housing addicts. Now and then one of them turned up dead in a trailer or under the bushes in some nearby yard.

Once a teenager crawled up on that sunporch roof and in through that north bedroom window. My mother wasn’t home at the time but she got the shudders about it for a long time. Then my brother was hurt and moved in or she might have sold out. When I came to visit, I slept in my van at the curb and was just drifting off when a shotgun exploded a hundred feet from my head. Then a lot of other shooting and gunning of motors. No cops ever showed up. It was Crips and Bloods playing guns. Often we heard gunfire in the evening and my mother and brother would turn off the lights and sit on the floor.

But now it’s all turned around. We sold the house to a symphony conductor and then there was a new baby born to two lawyers. It’s close enough to downtown Portland to walk -- an easy bike trip. The street briefly went gay, then bleached to white again, but mostly young -- I guess. I haven’t been back. My cousin seems to think things are getting better. The main cross-street a half-block away is a major art street now, hispanic in flavor. The proud black woman who ran a coffee shop with a sideyard that had a flowerbed shaped like Africa is still there, I think. And it was brilliant to get rid of the grass in front of my mother’s house. She’d love the way it is now.

Here she is with her hanging basket for the season.

My cousin took the house photo last summer. She lives at the top of the hill that the street runs up. It’s on enough of a slant to push a car to get it to start and if it weren’t for a jog at Killingsworth, you could coast on down to the Columbia River. This cousin and I only found each other recently and I didn’t live there anymore when she moved in. Our great-grandmothers were two of five sisters in Scotland who emigrated at the beginning of the 19th century. Some day I’ll write a novelized version of their five fates, which were quite different. The narrative will be as much about place as events.