Aunt Susie's house

The photo today is of my Aunt Susie's house. It looks pretty wretched in this photo, but at the time it was taken, my aunt had been a widow for a long time. And people in the country just don't worry about pretty landscaping the way city folks do. Why bother, when the chickens and other animals will just ruin it anyway?

The long porch is where we sat on many, many hot days. There was no air conditioning (though she did get a room unit for her bedroom in later years). Three doors lead from the porch into the house, which seems odd, but no one seemed concerned about it then. The door to the left goes to the living room. The center door goes to a bedroom. The door to the right goes into the room at the end of the porch, which was usually my cousin Mary's bedroom.

For most of my childhood, there was an outdoor toilet, but as time passed, a corner bedroom in the back was turned into a bathroom. (I may be mistaken, but I think that's the room in which Uncle Jack died.) Rooms seemed oddly interchangeable. The living room and tiny kitchen were always the same, but the dining room changed from a room to the right of the kitchen to one to the left of the kitchen. I loved that latter room. It had possibly once been a porch, but it became a sunlit room with windows on two sides, and I ate many happy meals there. Ummm, cornbread, black-eyed peas, okra, tomatoes.... We were often vegetarians without knowing it!

Aunt Susie's bedroom in later years was the one sandwiched between the bathroom and Mary's bedroom. The room that had at one time been the dining room became a catch-all room, with a giant chest freezer in it. Often Aunt Susie did her sewing there, but as time passed and her old eyes needed light, her sewing machine migrated to the dining room with all the windows.

A little porch was added onto the back of the house, right off the kitchen, and since that porch faced Aunt Susie's sons' houses (two of them, John D. and Ricky), she sat there often and petted the various animals that lived with her. (They never lived inside the house, but they lived around the house, in the old barn, in the old garage, and under the house, too.)

Mary told me that since the family regarded the old house as too far gone to fix up, they planned to tear it down. I don't know if they did that or not, but I have asked Mary to save something for me, even if all it is is a doorknob. I loved that house, and when I have happy dreams, they often take place there. This photo seems desolate, but that's not how the house really was. It was a bustling friendly happy place, and I miss those golden childhood days that I spent there.