I Remember a Fence and a Tricycle, But Not Much Else

Someone once asked me to tell them about my childhood home.

I stared at them blankly.

It was a few moments before I answered, “I don’t think I had one.”

So is the life of a transient child. And my oldest memory is not of a house, but of a fence. It was the wooden split rail fence in front of the school my siblings attended. We were stair-step children, four of us in five years. Between the months of September and December our ages lined up, each a year apart. Our birth months also fell chronologically, so in December my sister, the oldest, would take a step away from the rest of us, adding a year. Marshal soon followed, stepping up to the age Bettina had vacated, then Jon stepped up to Marshal’s abandoned age, then I stepped into Jon’s.

The fence was a unique one: it surrounded a building I got to see many times from the outside as my siblings one after another began their education years within its walls. With great anticipation, I looked forward to finally entering that building and claiming it for my own also. Shortly before my fifth birthday, I remember my mom and I walking the short distance from our home to the school. She sent me out on the playground as she talked to my teacher-to-be, and I headed toward the swings. Until then, I had a fear of heights and never swung beyond where my toes could safely touch the ground. That day though, I soured! Testing my fear, I went higher and higher until I made the chains slacken and jerk at the highest point of the arched path they carved in the air.

I can’t remember my teacher or the classroom, but I can recall Sesame Street being a big part of our half-day session. I painted a picture of a farmer with the too-big paintbrushes and my teacher cut it out to go in the farm scene we all contributed to for our class bulletin board. I ate library paste like all the other kids did and we all had graham crackers and milk at snack time. Once I even carried my pet rabbit Gumdrop to school in a laundry basket for show-and-tell.

I remember very little else about that school, and even less about the home we lived in the first five years of my life. I know it was one-story and had a curved driveway. The neighborhood could have been the set of Leave it to Beaver with its middle-income homes in sunny California. I can’t be sure, but I think it was Garden Grove. I don’t remember any of the rooms, but I remember I had a tricycle. I regularly flipped it over so we could play “ice-cream maker” – a preschool game where sand is poured over the inverted trike’s front wheel as you hand cranked the pedal and declared the spraying sand to be chocolate, strawberry or tutti-fruity.  

That trike was also the vehicle involved in the first major traffic accident of my life. I’d gotten a little big for the preschool sized toy, so often took to riding it scooter style with one knee on the seat and pushing on the ground with my free foot for propulsion. There was a cracked sidewalk square that stood up a little from the smooth path its companions afforded, and the front wheel – the same wheel that was such a fantastic ice cream maker – betrayed me. It stopped, but the rest of the trike and I didn’t. I crashed face first into the edge of neighbor’s flower box. It was a brick planter and the perfect surface for slicing a kindergartner’s head open. The neighbor lady rushed out, towel in hand, and carried my screaming bloody form back home. Mom promptly rushed me to the ER for 19 stitches under my chin.

But that’s where the story ends.

It turns out the house we lived in had been one of five my grandfather owned. Grandpa died before my first birthday, and all his assets went into my grandmother’s hands. One by one she sold off the houses and our home was sold out from under us.

From that point on, it was a new school each year and multiple homes in between.

It wasn’t until the end of our school years that us kids once again attended the same school for the same grade: we all graduated from South Sioux City Senior High School, 1600 miles away from where our educations began. During our time in South Sioux, we lived in three different houses and we moved away the day after I got my diploma.

Sigh.

Two schools that formed dismal bookends to the formative years of four young children. In between are the tomes of unrememberable houses, half-forgotten friendships and the underlying sense of instability.

When I met my husband and he told me he lived in the same house until the day he went off to college, I stared at him uncomprehending. Was such a thing even possible?

He and I were 12 years in our Kansas home. When we moved to Michigan, we spend only a few months in a rental home. Ernie and I both felt the urgency to get our three sons into our own home again. Our boys needed the stability I never had growing up. We’ve now been 15+ years in our current residency.

I don’t think most people realize what a gift it is to have a childhood home. Memories become infused in the walls and provide an anchor for our lives. It’s a foundation to build your life upon and a place to point out saying “Yes, this is where I started.”

I didn’t have such an anchor.

Thankfully, while that anchor is missing, I do have another. I may not have a childhood home I remember much of, but I have an eternal one that I know a lot about: it has streets of gold, and gates made of pearl. The tree of life stands in the middle of the eternal city, with its roots on either side of the river that flows from the throne of God. Jesus has promised me a home there and its one I will never, ever have to leave.

 I have an anchor. I have stability.

I have a home.

Praise God, praise God. I have my foundation.