Day Two Hundred and Twenty-Six

In celebration of the completion of Item #13, I am posting one of my essays from the class. The teacher, much to my delight, asked if he could include it in a packet of former student essays to be given to next year's freshmen writing class as part of their required reading. I said yes, and immediately changed all the names, just in case.

You'll soon understand that changing the names and a few details really is an exercise in futility to anyone who knew this family. They could not possibly be confused with anyone else. So I beg of you, the few who know who I'm writing about, be discreet. Thank you. I won't leave this one up indefinitely for that very reason, so read quick. :)

The other two essays probably will not be posted here, but I got very good comments on both of them from the class and the professor. The first essay, which is about a dear friend of the family who passed away five years ago, is full of happy (and a few sad) memories that are deeply personal to his family and to mine, and I have opted not to make that essay public. The third essay is a ruthless rewrite of an essay from my other blog, which I have neglected shamefully since starting this one. The professor was pleased enough with it that we are looking into trying to get it published (Item #46, incidentally), so I am going to hold off before posting it here so that it's not currently available online when I'm submitting it for publication.

And yes, I am VERY excited about that possibility.

Bee

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(Untitled as yet - I am not very good at titles.)

A city kid would take the long way to the Potters’ house – up our gravel driveway, along the rough shoulder of a busy rural road, down the Potters’ driveway, past the apple orchard, around the little red rental house, and across the long stretch of weedy grass that served as a lawn. It was easier, though, to just go through the hole in the fence. There were cows in the pasture between our houses, but nobody’d ever seen them even think about organizing a stampede. Only one of the horses bit, and she was only dangerous if you bothered her. The shortcut across the field was worth the risk of running through a fresh, fragrant cowpie.

The Potters’ door was always open, in every sense of the word. Locking doors in our corner of the sticks still seemed like a paranoid city-dweller’s habit, but with the sheer number of people running in and out of their house, the door barely had time to even close. In the nine years I lived next to them, they opened their home to eight children, adopted from six birth families. Their van’s license plate read “8ISENUF”, but it lied. There were always extra kids hanging around, and they were easily absorbed into the mob. My sister and I were once fed dinner, tucked into bed, and not noticed until Mrs. Potter counted heads at breakfast.

The house was huge, a rambling two-story farmhouse decorated in a garish 1970’s style that was faring badly under the impact of eight childhoods occurring all at once under its roof. Four boys had bounced baseballs off of the sparkly flocked ceiling, and it showed. Their mother despaired of ever keeping little fingerprints off of the mirrored hallway walls. The white shag carpet in the living room grew increasingly dingy and flat, especially at Christmas.

For most families, it was considered bad luck to keep the tree up past New Years’. For the Potters, it was bad luck to keep it up past Easter. The number of presents dictated the size of the tree, and by the time each kid got each sibling a present, they’d have needed a tree as tall as a house. Mr. Potter’s solution was simple: Cut down a tree as tall as the house, and hack off the top half for firewood. The business end of the tree was hauled into the living room, sprayed into submission with innumerable cans of fake snow, and surrounded with well over a hundred presents. Everyone had to give everyone else at least a small gift, except for Great-Aunt Ida, who only gave presents to the kids she liked.

With that many people sharing bathroom sinks and closet space, it was inevitable that somebody was going to bug somebody else. Tattling was forbidden, and the discipline system developed a certain ruthless elegance. If a child disobeyed, Mrs. Potter would simply say “One.” The kid’s eyes would widen, and then the interested onlookers would see nothing but a panicky blond blur as he flew to the kitchen to fetch a wooden spoon. Seconds later, panting, he’d hand his mother the utensil as she said “Six” or maybe “Eight”, and he’d bend over for the requisite number of whacks. Crying children, if they showed a flair for the melodramatic, were sent to The Platform. This was a long wooden pallet in the back field, where the howling wouldn’t disrupt dinner. On a good day, we might see three or four Potter kids hunched over on the edge of The Platform, bundled up against the rain or snow and wallowing in their collective misery.

In the early years, when all eight were still living at home, their family life was a loud, loving exercise in crowd control. An enormous dining room table with all the leaves permanently installed meant they didn’t have to eat in shifts, but sleeping arrangements required some creativity. Brandy, Amy and Jessica could all fit into the pink bedroom if they didn’t all try to get ready for school at once. Kevin and Kyle shared the blue room, and when Jim came, they got bunkbeds. Since Adam was the oldest, he got his own room, although he had to share closet space with Mrs. Potter’s fabulous collection of glittery, sparkly, bell-bottomed clothes that might come back into style some day, you never know. Great-Aunt Ida spitefully kicked the bucket one Christmas morning, and after a suitable mourning period - about 24 hours - Adam took over her room, just in time for the newly adopted Debbie to move into his old room and paint it purple. Jessica eventually set up camp in the attic over the garage, and Jim quietly drifted out to a cabin in the back field next to The Platform.

The front door stayed open, and as the kids got older and the house grew more crowded, they started leaving (although in Brandy’s case, it was out the window). Jim didn’t make it very far – we never could figure out how he managed to court a gorgeous local girl without ever saying more than three words at once, but he managed it and she moved into the cabin with him. Adam escaped into the United States Army, got married, earned a Ph.D., and moved very far away. Debbie went to Seattle to be a drug dealer. Jessica fell happily into a crowd of angry lesbians, and away they all went in a cloud of contented bitterness. Kevin headed down to the local recruiting office as soon as he graduated, and promptly found out just how badly you have to behave to be thrown out of the Marines. Kyle, the youngest, moved out on a regular basis at the invitation of the Thurston County Juvenile Court. Amy shook the mud off her shoes, earned a degree in vocal performance, and never looked back.

Somewhere in all of the comings and goings, Mr. Potter’s visits to the hunting lodge got longer and longer, and he finally left too. Jim’s wife left, and after a while, so did Jim. The house felt empty and quiet, so Mrs. Potter filled it again with a home daycare. When the State of Washington decided that Debbie’s kids knew a little more about drugs than they should, Mrs. Potter won custody of them. But when Kyle left for good, Mrs. Potter finally did too, taking with her the two grandchildren, a couple of daycare kids, their newly divorced dad, and the white satin bell-bottom pants.

The hole in the fence is still there, but the little house I lived in was torn down long ago, and there is no one left to brave the barbed wire to go next door and play. The cows and the horses are gone, and the field is quickly reverting to its original state as an evergreen forest. The paths are grown over and the lawn is a jungle. And for all I know, the front door is still open.