The House With The Red Door.

A Story by Bad Poetry

The house with the red door. The house with the tepee made out of logs in the back yard. The house with the flowers that had countless hours of tending and were treated like they were somebody’s own children. The house with the laundry basket at the end of the hall, filled to brim with clothes that the family who had lived there had worn the day before. The house with the hole in the basement that had a monster living in it, and if you ever went near it you would get grabbed by a monster and pulled in to the Earth’s core. The house that had a wine shelf under the stairs that held the Christmas presents at Christmas time. The house that had a bed in the middle of a room and a boy who didn’t want to take his nap. That same boy, whose earliest memories were from the house with the red door.

I don’t remember the first time I walked into the house, but I do remember all the memories. I don’t remember building a tepee in the backyard I guess it had always just been there. I never used to go in there because of all of the stories I had heard about Native Americans scalping people. If I went into the tepee I would be transported back in time. As I grew older so did the tepee: when I first got bigger shoes the tepee got mushrooms on its logs. Every winter the tepee would be bashed by snow and ice. It still stood strong through all of the tough times with the house with the red door.

Every time my mom would come home from work she would ask me and my sister how school was and what we wanted for dinner. Then she would go upstairs to change from her wrinkled gray clothes into the more colorful section of her closet. She would go outside and tend to her kids. My mom had created a painting out of primrose, peonies, and pansies. In back yard she pieced together a mosaic of foxglove, fuchsia ferns, and Fairybells. Every day even if it was raining my mom would go out to talk to her kids. She would ask them how their day was and if they wanted a drink of water. Sometimes she would make a change move on plant to a different section of her garden. You have to understand that my mom had her two gardens divided into sections of perennials and annuals. Then by height and flowering season, and to make a change was easy as switching presidential candidates. Adding a new member to this fragile ecosystem could be horrible mistake: this new member could totally take over this delicate balance, the balance which was the house with the red door.

Every night after I had changed into my pajamas I took the clothes I had worn that to the end of the hall. At the end of the hall there was a basket that held all of the dirty clothes. Every three days when the basket was full my mom would take it down stairs and put into hanging baskets that had all the sorted colors. See, back when I was young we didn’t have all purpose detergent that let people wash all of their colors at once. The hanging basket had always proven a challenge to me. I couldn’t reach up to the clean clothes so whenever I needed a pair of clean shorts I would just have to take them from the dirty clothes pile. This habit has been woven into my life today although I am no longer at the house with the red door.

In the basement of our house there was a two foot hole in the ground that held the washing machine waste as it got pumped to the sewer. If I ever went near it my dad said a monster would come up and pull me to the Earth’s core. At the time I was a well-read adolescent and I knew that the Earth’s core would bake me like a chocolate chip cookie. Actually I learned that from Magic School Bus. Anyway, I still never go near the hole that was in the bottom of the house with the red door.

Underneath the stairs there was a wine shelf that held my parents splendid collection of aged wines. Before Christmas I would go present hunting. Every kid does it; it is a part of the whimsical journey of finding out that Santa isn’t real. The week before Christmas I went out to find my haul of gifts and low and behold there was one present all wrapped up. I didn’t want to break the paper because my parents would know I found a present, so I took a picture of the box. On Christmas morning I looked at all of my presents and none had matched the picture of the one gift I had found. I looked over at the monstrosity that I call my sister and she was holding her last present and it had matched the picture I had taken. As she ripped open the gift it turned out to be a Barbie doll, her very first one. Glad I didn’t open that one I said to myself. Looking back I probably should have opened it I could have shoved it down that hole in the basement. Then the Barbie era, which had taken over the whole house with the red door, would have never started.

The day I was told we were going to move was the best and the worst days of my life. My parents sat me down and told me that we were going to switch schools the following year. I cried I don’t think it was losing my friends, losing the blossoming relationship I had with this extremely cute girl that was actually interested in me…Surprise!, or the fact that I wasn’t going to do the anatomy of animals section that we got to do in fifth grade. Well as the summer went by we started to pack box by box, memory by memory. The last of July I was putting the second to last box in the truck, always save the heaviest box for someone else I learned that early on. I started to wonder what my life would be like if I could stay. As the truck drove away from the house with the red door I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to.

We rented a house in downtown Empire as our new house was being built. The house had a yellow door and a metal spiral staircase that was very problematic to clean. After our new house was built we moved in. We have yet to build a tree house in our backyard. We have a laundry chute now that we can just shove our clothes down. There is no hole in the basement but there is one in the garage. My parents have just started to rebuild their momentous wine collection. I have yet to find where the Christmas presents are.

It was a difficult time for me not finding where I belonged at this cold and dark school. As I walked down this foreign hallway I felt like a car driving down the highway just going with the flow of traffic. Having a destination but just waiting to get there. I used to know every person’s name at my old school, a grade of six people. At Glen Lake I still only know the names of the people directly below, above, and in my grade. Then I meet this group of social awkward kids, the misfits, like the TV show nobody fit into the normal community. Finally I found where I belonged. I could be myself around them. I finally found the skin that I fit in. After two years of waiting I had finally turned off on to exit 52 on the highway, and reached my destination.