Poor Pitiful Pearl

Essay of place

 

 

It might have been that walnut tree beside the house, or it could have been the wonderful smells of my grandparent’s house that made going there so wonderful.  It was a ranch house in Soledad California.  It sat off highway 101 about one hundred and fifty yards from that major highway.  As you drove past you could see the little grey ranch house sitting there behind a field of poppies.  This was the place that my cousin and I loved to visit.  We would go there for every major holiday and then again in the summer my grandmother would keep us for weeks.

My grandmother had kept all of my aunt’s toys and dolls.  It was probably a blessing because we needed stuff to keep us occupied.  My aunt was only 13 years older than we were.  There was the original Barbie, and one special doll that happened to be both my aunts and my grandmother’s favorite.  Her name was Pitiful Pearl.  I don’t know why she let us play with it if it was her favorite, but she did.  That’s when Pitiful Pearl met her doom.  She lost her head.

As you drove up to the ranch the driveway was long.  Long enough that sometimes my grandmother would let sit on her lap and drive.  That was so much fun!  She would always park though as the car went into a carport that was attached to the house.  The house was lined with a railroad tie fence that had old wagon wheels at each patrician.  My grandmother being a master gardener had flowers growing all along that fence and around the house.  There were roses, pansies, honeysuckle bushes, rhubarb, and many more.  You could really smell the roses and the honeysuckle when you opened the windows to the house.

My cousin and I would play in that walnut tree every day.  We would have loved to have built a fort but my grandparents forbid that.  Too messy they’d say.  We would climb as high as we could looking for grandma in the kitchen window, yelling “grandma!  Hey grandma, look at us!”  “Be careful you girls” she’d yell back.  “Can you see pitiful pearls head anywhere from up there?”  Giggling we would jump down and from there we would go exploring the back yard which was full of crab grass and more flowers.  They had a big bush that separated the back yard from another field in the back.  We would sometimes play in those bushes, hide and seek or whatever kids do.  Pick the honeysuckles and suck the sweetness from its flowers, pick grandmas pansies and play he loves me he loves me not.  Pretty much completely terrorize the place.  Grandma wasn’t kidding about pitiful pearls head.  She was really sad about that dolls head being lost.

One day we decided to go down to the back field and explore what succulent vegetable was down there to pick and eat.  It was carrots. Yum!  Being the gross little children we were we plucked those carrots right out of the field, brushed them off and ate them.  There were fields as far as you could see down there.  Every kind of vegetable you could imagine.  Now that I think back, why wouldn’t there be?  It was the biggest farm in California, the major supplier of vegetables.

When we made our way back up to the yard, we stopped to play on a picnic table that was tipped sideways because they were drying it out from the rain.  We climbed to the top of it, staring out into the fields.  I screamed a little as I slipped off the top.  Then Jamie screamed.  We thought it was a great idea to have a scream off.  Who could scream the loudest?  So we screamed and screamed and to our surprise grandma came running.  “Stop that screaming, I thought something had happened to you girls” then she went back to her work.  Thinking this was cool, we screamed again.  Grandma came out and began to tell us a story about a little boy who cried wolf.  After finding out about that little boy being eaten by a wolf, we never played that game again.

On another visit to grandmas her neighbor Josie came over.  Josie was a Mexican lady, he husband worked in the fields.  She used to make the best Mexican food and bring it over to my grandma’s.  We loved when she came over.  Jamie and I sat there eating the food, listening to adult conversation until we got bored and went out to play.  We played out by grandpa’s bee hives for a while; chewed on some of the bees wax, played in the poppy field and of course that walnut tree.  Then we began to play the hide and seek game.  It was always so pleasurable there because there were so many places to hide.  Jamie hid in the walnut tree, and then I hid around the fence on Josie’s side.  Jamie went behind the travel trailer then I went out into those bushes that separated the backyard from the fields.  While I was sitting there all crouched down and hiding there was something in all the fallen leaves of that bush.  I swept them away to see what it was.  Oh my golly!  It was pitiful pearls head!  Grandma was going to be so happy, happy to see her head and happy with us for finding her.  I came out of hiding early and called to Jamie.  “Look what I found!”  We went running into the house with pitiful pearls head.  “Look grandma, look what we found!”  Oh was she ever happy.  We all went into the room where she kept pitiful pearls body.  She slipped the head back on and Pearl was complete again.

All those days on the ranch were fun for us.  There was so much adventure to be had out there.  Later after retirement my grandparents moved farther down 101.  You had to pass the old ranch to get there.  You can’t help yourself to look left just to see it.  It doesn’t have the poppies in the field out front anymore and the driveway isn’t as long as I remember but as you look closer, you can still see all those memories too.