To an Air Force brat there is no such thing as home. We didn’t move from place to place, we transferred. We didn’t live in a town, we were stationed. We didn’t have a home, we had housing. Home was a myth that I read about in children’s stories, where alien words like roots, ancestors, and lifelong were used. I had crossed the length of America six times before I was five years old. By that age I had lived in Las Vegas, Nevada (twice); Absecon, New Jersey; Houston, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and somewhere in Connecticut.
In the late 1950’s, when I was seven, we were stationed just outside Amarillo, Texas. Base housing was full and we were consigned to live off base; in an actual town. To a place where a kid could ask, “What does you dad do?” It was the first town I had ever lived in. The house we leased was the first home I had ever known. It was made of hundred year old bricks and echoes. The three story, 6 bedroom, two bath mansion included a full basement, a formal dining room, a formal morning room, and a few steps away…a 3 bedroom carriage house. Every room had polished hardwood floors and built in on at least one wall were glass-doored, dark mahogany cabinets or bookcases. The kitchen, utilitarian white, was large enough to host a table, long enough to feed a dozen servants. We didn’t need imagination to know about the existence of this kitchen table. We had Charlie.
Charlie came with the lease. He was the retired butler whose retirement plan included rent-free occupancy of the carriage house for as long as he lived. Charlie was a former slave who had lived at the mansion from the age of 10 when he was to be a footman to the old lady who now lived in an old folk’s home. Back then, his father, a former slave, was the butler.
Charlie was in his 80’s when we leased him. Charlie was considered a live-in gardener who was permitted to do as he wished with the gardens on the half acre property. Mother told me never to bother Charlie. But to a seven year old, who had three whole months of summer before school started, it was inevitable that Charlie and I would become fast friends.
The enchanted gardens were lush and green and overgrown. Before I was there a week, Charlie asked me if I had seen the faeries that lived in the dense bushes that surrounded the base of the house. He showed me the secret way into the bower of green that was just “Leigh” size. My sister and brother, six and nine years older than me, were too big to fit. To this day, it is a mystery how flowering Shamrocks, sky blue Periwinkle, bell-like Lilly of the Valley, and smiling Pansies found there way under that bower to decorate the leafy “rooms” of my imagination. Charlie said the faery put them there…just for me.
If the gardens were enchantment, the house was a dichotomy of fantasy and horror. In the basement, a cold, black, damp cavern, lived the washer, the dryer and an army of cockroaches. The best courage I ever mustered on my brother’s dare to descend those ominous stairs was to open the door to the dank unknown and see in the streaming sunlight the dead and dying soldiers. Then I ran…hearing my brother’s laughter trailing behind me all the way out of the house to where it couldn’t find me in the sanctuary that was my magical garden.
The long summer days stretched into timelessness, playing in my magical garden while Charlie whistled old hymns and tending the roses. September announced its red-gold arrival in the leaves on the huge maple trees that lined both sides of the street. Two great occasions occurred in September, my birthday and the return of school. With my birthday came a new pair of roller skates and the means to investigate beyond the boundary of the half acre that was my world. It would prove to be quite a challenge to navigate the broken sidewalks on skates. Maple trees have no regard for concrete. Or a little girl’s knees.
Two months before the school year ended, we were reassigned to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. My parents were excited to go back to place that they called home. I was pretty flexible about leaving, since my life to this point held change as its primary tenant. The excitement and anticipation of living in a new town, meeting new people, finding new adventures was enough to keep me smiling up to the day we were pulling out of the driveway. And I had to say good bye to Charlie.
He met me with a bag filled with chocolate candy bars. He took my face in his hands and kissed both my cheeks. I looked into his tearful eyes and began to cry too. He told me to be good. He told me to grow strong. He told me to look for the faery flowers wherever I went…that magic would bind us forever. Days later the new adventure began and the past was left behind.
Years later, on one of our countless journeys from “here to there”, Mother, Father and I drove through Amarillo and past the old mansion. We found the courage to knock on the door. The house belonged to a young family. The old lady finally sold the place after Charlie died. We were invited in to visit a moment. I noticed walking up the brick steps to the porch how the dense bush surrounding the house was trimmed back and the underbrush cleared. No smiling Pansy greeted me. The house was much the same, smaller of course. The echoes were gone. The new wall to wall carpeting helped that. The rooms were brighter with all the white paint covering the mahogany cabinets and bookcases.
It is not true, that one can never go home again. I dream often of the mansion, without carpet and white paint. I dream of the Leigh who lived there. And Charlie...who gave me a gift that binds us still. I always look beneath the dense foliage for a floral faery gift. And I usually find it.
End