Heath Street Stories

Each of the eight crackerboxes built on Heath Street had exactly the same floor plan. Only the pastel colors on the cedar-sided shingles were different. The little houses rose like wildflowers from meadows of thistle, poppies, daisies and Queen Anne's lace where grasshoppers jumped like popping corn when the sun warmed their hind legs to dancing fettle. The tract was located decently upwind of Weyerhauser’s pulp mill belching enough dirty-sock fumes to spoil the illusion of suburban bliss.

The houses were three bedroom, one bath – nine-hundred square feet in all. They were so modern that a little unorthodox inconvenience was to be expected: when we sat on the toilet, our knees scraped the bathroom wall, and my parents had to stand with one foot in the bathtub to open and close the door. There were no more Saturday night scrubs with my brother and me trotting out bare-bottomed to soak in the washtub set in front of the cabin hearth. Up-to-date living required ordinary embarrassment when flashing our behinds as we scampered down the hall.

Nudity had never been an object of much discussion at the cabin. We took the natural human state more or less for granted and rated it about as titillating as unbuttered bread. But suddenly there was a bathroom door with a shiny lock which spelled privacy, and we discovered an ill-fitting modesty surrounding our hygienic habits. Where once we had scampered about freely with our fannies no offense to anyone, now Mama was careful to remind us to lock ourselves in whenever we used the new defalcatorium designed to quash just such innocent naiveté as young children acquire quite nicely on their own.

The kitchen, an alcove just off the front entrance, was covered in old-blood maroon tile that my father said was exactly the color of raw liver. We had never seen such outrageous décor. The sink gleamed like a piece of gunnery hardware with its chrome faucet and high-tech, clear plastic handles – clearly ornaments from the future. Even the water flowing from the faucet’s swan-like neck sounded new and modern. It made a soft swoooosh when we turned it on. No dribbles and splats here. Wasn't progress marvelous?

We had a brand new Kelvinator refrigerator with a silver crescent on the door which cleverly disguised the handle. There was a comforting, crunching sound as the door smooched its cushiony seal, and just thinking of an excuse to open it and watch the blue plastic interior light up was a thrill at first. How had they thought of such a wonderful invention? Only in the good old US of A! There was even a see-through, dimpled compartment with an indentation for butter and pull-out glass-topped bins for the vegetables and meat. Twelve little hollows for eggs were molded in the door. Amazing! Where had people ever kept eggs before this marvel arrived in their kitchens? How primitive the old icebox seemed.

Up at the cabin, every week the delivery man came in a rattle-trap Dodge truck, schlepped a block of ice up the back steps and wrestled it into the icebox on the back porch. Nothing ever got cold in the icebox. In winter we kept homemade ice cream and meat frozen by storing it in a used coffee can and burying it in a snow bank. In summer, we took our lemonade down to the river and partially submerged it in an icy pool along with the butter, cream and anything else needing to be chilled. As a matter of fact, I think the icebox was most useful as safe storage for Mama's bread money which she kept in an old Calumet can on the top shelf.