Yes, you CAN go back home! As long as it's still standing and someone's there to let you in.....

It was about this time last year that we packed the minivan with Christmas presents and made the 33+ hour drive to Tucson, Arizona, staying one day ahead of a storm that blanketed the trail behind us in ice and snow, right down to the beaches of Corpus Christi, Texas the morning we passed through eerily republican Bush country. Skye took the John Kerry bumper sticker off our car before driving through the red states and I thought it was a breach in our marriage until we set foot in Texas, and I realized it was a matter of survival. There's a lot of nothing from one end of Texas to the other and no one to witness "nothing" happen to that family of four in the minivan with the out-of-state plates and the Kerry bumper sticker.

On the way home we did a lot of sightseeing in Arizona and New Mexico, but as you can imagine by the time we got to Oklahoma we were barn sick horses just making a b-line for home. Well, actually for the St. Louis Arch and then home. Half way through Oklahoma on the second day of the trip back from Granny’s 70 degree desert oasis, it was time to switch drivers. Only I didn’t want to switch. I was behind the wheel and I'd finished my book the day before. But finally two exits after Skye made his desperate plea to switch I succumbed and pulled over at an exit for Burns Flat.

I couldn’t believe it! I used to live in Burns Flat in 1968! We pulled into a gas station and right away I got on my cell phone to call my Dad.

“Guess where I am!” I announced, flying past any propers when my father answered the phone.
He laughed and went for the bait. “I don’t know. Where?”
“Burns Flat!!”
“You’re kidding me!”
“Nope! We pulled off an exit to switch drivers and the sign said Burns Flat! You think our old house is still there?”
“I don’t know. They could have leveled all the homes or sold them as low income housing. Go inside the gas station and ask someone who looks older than you if they know what happened to the base?”

I hung up and walked inside. I asked the cashier who was clearly older than me, “Are you older than me?”
She looked at me funny. I said “Are you older than me? Because if you are than you probably remember Clinton Sherman Air Force Base and you might be able to tell me where Swanea Street is. I used to live there in 1968.”
She said “Sure I know where it is. My father built all those houses.”
We talked old times for a bit until we realized that there was a line forming of customers waiting to check out. When the tank was filled and the kids’ bladders were emptied we headed over the hill into town. The formal entry into the base was gone but the buildings were still there. They were sold as low income housing after the base closed in 1968. In fact, my father told me, ours was the last family to leave the base because we were on our way to Izmir, Turkey next and we were held back for a bit.

We found Sawnea street and I called home again. This time my mother answered. I said, “I think I found our house. Do you remember what number it was?”
“It had three digits. That’s all I remember.”
“Was it 315?”
“That rings a bell.”
I described all the houses and she thought I was in the right place so I hung up and rang the bell.
A lovely woman named Dolores Peacock and her great grand daughter, Elizabeth, were home. I explained to her why I was at her door, how far we had come, and with a desperate, pleading expression asked if it would be possible to look around outside and maybe just see the kitchen.

She hesitantly escorted us into the kitchen, apologizing about the mess. What mess? I was too busy in my time warp to notice. The rock garden off the front porch was as I remembered it, but without all the cool rocks my mother had in it. The doorknob, the hallway, the kitchen were exactly the same. At first I barely recognized the place but the longer I stood there and moved about in different spots in the kitchen memories came back, as if by standing in specific locations they beamed down.

I pointed to her copper jello molds on the wall and shouted “My mother hung her copper jello molds there too!” I pointed to the drawer on the right of the oven and said, “This was our junk drawer.” She opened it up to show me that it was her junk drawer too. I pointed to the counter above it, “This is where I learned to make toast.” She waved toward her toaster, which was on the left of her oven, and joked that she would have to move it to the right side. I stood in front of the sink and looked out the window toward the Bosley’s house and imagined my mother standing there watching all the kids play in the driveways between the two houses. Then I went to the far corner of the kitchen and there was the laundry room, large enough to fit a washer and dryer. I gasped and squealed as if my brother’s bed was still there and he was in it. But it wasn’t. I said “Would you believe that that used to be my brother’s bedroom?!!” The great granddaughter was amazed. The great grandmother was incredulous. I said “My father hung a board over the washer and dryer. He mounted it to the wall,” I said, indicating with my hands where it had attached. “He put a mattress on it and called it a bed.”

I looked at the great granddaughter, who was enjoying the company that bounded into her house that day and interrupted her homeschooling. “I don’t know where he put his clothes,” I told her. The great granddaughter smiled and ran outside with my two boys, the youngest being the age I was when I lived there.

The more the stories began flowing as I looked around the yard the more Dolores Peacock began to grow uncomfortable. What sort of demon had she let into her home! I pointed to the place on the side of the garage where I used to eat dirt; the place on the sidewalk where I tricked Karen Bosley into eating mud by telling her it was brownie mix; I stood in the driveway where I'd bit Nora Schmidt's finger for playing with my dollhouse while I was in time-out and the bedroom window I climbed out of to get to Nora. I pointed to the curb where I’d learned to ride my first bike, which I’d stolen from a few lawns down. My father paid for the bike when the owner of it recognized it on our front lawn and offered to sell it. But still, even after the cash exchanged hands and the turquoise Schwinn was no longer “borrowed”, I knew it was ill-gotten, and I did feel a tad guilty about it. For a little while. Then I went on to the next story of how I used to ride my Schwinn around and around and around the block every morning in my pajamas.

Dolores Peacock wanted to cover her great granddaughter’s ears. I could tell. But she continued to be polite and wave as we climbed back into our minivan and pulled away from the curb, not before taking oodles of photos of our house, the Conlon’s, the Bosley’s, the Schmidt’s, and the Parish’s.