1015 Pleasant Street, Walla Walla, Washington 99362
46.06265478666864, -118.31136536454669
My Old Home Place

" … some curious cross between Tom Sawyer and Swiss Family Robinson."

My fambly moved into TenFifteen Pleasant Street when I was five. It seemed more like a haunted mansion than a home then, cavernous and grand. The yard, almost an acre, seemed bigger than the whole neighborhood around SixFortyFour. The back fence abutted onto a neighbor's horse pasture which featured actual horses that would nuzzle us through the wire. An enormous pipe swing sat in a side yard, near a large brick barbeque. Trees covered the upper two-thirds of the lot: an apricot, a pear, and an enormous ancient crabapple. A matched pair of birches framed the front yard along with a gnarly ancient locust and a silver maple beside the driveway. Spirea anchored a wide porch that stretched clear across the front. A huge mock orange and numerous ancient lilacs framed the left of the property, along with a sharp spruce and a triangular rose garden with the sweetest Peace rose I've ever smelled. Iris beds graced the front and back yards. A Mulberry tree shaded a long pipe clothesline between the house and the large detached garage. This house would amplify my sense of living in a Walt Disney movie to some previously unimaginable Nth degree, complete with a Tom Sawyer Island in every way superior to the actual one in Disneyland, California.

This would become my birth Fambly's Old Home Place. Built in 1902 by a nurseyman, it was almost ramshackle by the time we moved in fifty-five years later. It needed a new roof and paint, and ten thousand improvements my five-year-old self couldn't have related to. All I knew was that I would get a room with my brother overlooking the backyard and horse pasture where I could see clear to the creek beyond and into the backside of the Junior High School, and clear to the corner of Pioneer Park. It was May of the sweetest Springtime imaginable the first day we visited. My siblings and I had been unaware that we would be moving because my folks maintained a strict silence whenever change was looming. I remembered learning we would be traveling to Southern California the morning I woke up in the backseat of the car, a hundred miles south of home. My mother explained that she didn't want to have to deal with wound-up kids anticipating adventure, so she'd kidnapped us in our sleep instead. This move was a similar surprise except this change would be permanent. I would never again see the inside of old SixFortyFour. I had been rudely transported into my fortunate future.

Looking back on it now, I can only conclude that I might have been the most fortunate five-year-old ever born. Suddenly, I lived in the biggest house on the block, and our block was enormous. Then, TenFifteen sat near the Southern edge of town. Fields framed the property front and back. Across the street, a three-story Mansard-roofed derelict sat behind a huge overgrown hedge on an apparently abandoned property. A pond sat behind that house, and a spring with a dented tin cup on a string and an old concrete pumphouse. A small clutch of woods hid the beginnings of a creek which emptied into another pond beside a concrete block home with a sign out front that proclaimed it Duck Haven. The field directly across from TenFifteen featured pheasants who would explode in the face of any kid crossing through the head-high green thistle and cow parsnip in spring. Someone had hung a long rope from a high limb of an enormous old Maple alongside the pond. With a good start, I could swing almost clear across the pond on that rope. That whole corner was the sort of attraction that made it a kid magnet. Innumerable adventures were sure to ensue there!

The house was heated with a coal furnace, the basement featuring a spooky coal room fed by an outside chute beneath the kitchen window. A single gravity-fed source heated the entire house, or tried to, through a huge Hot Spot in the floor between the dining and living rooms, and a tiny grate above set into the ceiling and floor in the upstairs hall, through which an infinitesimal volume of heated air might manage to squeeze through in winter. The back rooms downstairs had no heat vent at all and were usually kept closed off through the colder months. This included my folk’s bedroom and one we called The Music Room, which featured a door opening onto a second-story high porch overlooking the backyard. No pirate ship was ever better appointed. The upstairs was reached using Y-shaped stairs, where the right branch connected to a railed landing from which four rooms attached. The straight branch ended in a door leading into a tiny half-bath, the kid's bathroom for all the time I lived there. The upstairs was the kids' domain where we froze like Napolean's soldiers in Moscow through winters and sweltered like missionaries in Africa through the scorching summers, freezing or sweating ourselves to sleep while winter drafts or summer breezes tried to squeeze themselves through what might as well have been wide-open windows.

The kitchen became the center of that place, where we gathered for meals and also gravitated between them, too. My mom owned the kitchen along with the full-room pantry adjacent, which featured huge bins sunk into the wall to hold flour, and shelves that would eventually overflow with home-canned fruits and vegetables. The kitchen always seemed to be steaming. Something was always cooking. Then, the kitchen overlooked one end of the long front porch and also opened directly into the one full bathroom, through which my parents' room sat. The bathroom was tiny by even the most generous five-year-old's standards and featured a clawfoot tub, no shower. Beside the bathroom door, a tiny, apparently afterthought door led to a narrow stairway that led down into the dark and shadowy daylight basement. On the right side of that bathroom door, a narrow cabinet set just above wainscoting that hid an ancient drop-down ironing board. Beyond that, sat the pantry, and just beyond that, a door opened into what we called the laundry room which featured at first an old-fashioned wringer washer and no clothes drier. That room opened onto a small back porch with stairs front and back, the front set led down to a concrete pad which would later hold a basketball setup and the backside led down into the sloping backyard beyond the crabapple tree.

That first day, out surveying the lay of that considerable property, I figured I might have died and ended up in heaven. Alongside the front of the garage, an ancient, almost tumbling-down arbor held grapevines. I remember sampling a tiny green example of their fruit and being genuinely impressed at how tart and astringent it tasted on my tongue. Three houses stood across our long driveway, which stretched from the street back along the set-back house and then down a hill to turn into the garage. That driveway would make a decent sled hill when winter came. Those three small houses had been built by a retired plumber, a Mr. Krause, who'd built them for retirement income and who'd once owned TenFifteen before moving to a country place where he kept cows. We used to drive out there to buy five-gallon metal jugs of milk when we still lived at SixFortyFour, an adventure by anyone's standards. I suspect that Krause, which was how my folks referred to him, had tipped them off to the existence of the place. Those three houses would house a fine variety of neighbors, some of which would even have kids. We'd overrun the whole neighborhood on summer nights. I remember watching Sputnick pass overhead from the security of a corn patch back near the horse pasture fence one night. I grew up in a freakin' Walt Disney movie, some curious cross between Tom Sawyer and Swiss Family Robinson. I played the part of the fortunate kid.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz