A Wanderer and a Vagabond am I. I am seed, scattered by the Sower on rocky soil—without root—who will wither and die. I spent my early childhood leaving playmates on Army post after Army post according to my father’s duty assignment, and even once we settled I never lived at the same address for as long as five years until I moved to the Kansas City metro in ’02. A half century of unmoored drifting.
So when I think of Home I think of my Grampa Nunn’s brick rancher in Riverton, Kansas. Unincorporated Riverton sits in Cherokee County, tucked in that corner of the Jayhawk state abutting Missouri and Oklahoma. When I was growing up there was not much there other than a Dairy Creme ice cream stand, a gas station at the flashing light where Highway 69 bisected legendary Route 66, and the Empire District Electric plant where Grampa worked.
My grandfather built four houses from foundation to shingles literally with his own hands. The house was sturdy as Gibraltar, walls of warm, magenta, kiln-cooked bricks set row upon row in mortar he troweled in place and squished between overlapping bricks that will doubtless survive the Apocalypse.
It was a cozy house, compact, not sprawling, but large enough for his family and to host grandchildren. Past the sturdy front door, inviting wooden floorboards welcomed visitors into the living room, where a fire roared within the hearth. At Christmas stockings really were hung by the chimney with care.
Grampa had built a bookcase into one living room wall. Its well-stocked shelves were testament to the paramount importance my grandfather bestowed on books and education. Against an adjacent wall an upright piano stood beneath a kitschy landscape. The living room opened onto a dining room, the hub of family life.
Grandma had the walls decorated with simple, tea room artwork, souvenir spoons and plates from their travels, a portrait of my uncle in his West Point regalia.
Grampa and Grandma had a fairly large back yard, bordered at the back with a barbed-wire fence, past which lay several acres of bucolic pasture. Grampa had a barn where he kept hay and sundry tools, some stalls and feeding trough for livestock. Livestock. He had a fat red Guernsey cow named Sally who calved every year, so there were usually two cows or more wandering the pasture. For a time he had a horse called Danny
Near the pasture gate they kept a 50 gallon drum for burning trash. Beyond the gate, past the barn, was a man-made pond. Behind it a creek ran across the property. In the summer, Grampa took my sisters and me back there, bamboo poles in hand, to catch the catfish swimming along the creek’s muddy bottom.
The last addition to Grampa’s house was a cozy den attached to the back, sitting above the storm cellar (this is Kansas, after all) where they stored canned produce from the garden. The den was separated from the main house by a sliding glass door. The wall to one side of that door was bricked to a height of 4′, above which was just the exposed wallboard. Grampa dreamt that he would die when he finished his house. So he never finished it.
Between 1968 and 1978 my family made regular trips from southeastern Virginia to southeastern Kansas. These drives were either in summer or at Yuletide. In the days before car-seats or minivans we packed six children and maybe two adults into our Buick station wagon, secured our luggage on top of the car, and set forth. It was usually a three-day drive. Each way.
One early trip Dad attacked the more direct route: west over the Blue Ridge mountains, thence across Kentucky and Missouri, to the corner of Kansas where Riverton lay. It was a grueling trip fraught with delays. There may have been a lot of construction along the way. I wasn’t particularly watching with an eye to chronicling our trek. Mostly I read, stared out the windows, and asked “Are we there yet?” with a frequency that became family legend.
In subsequent years we headed northwest from Hampton Roads to Breezewood, West Virginia, and spent the night in one of their many hotels before crossing into Pennsylvania, picking up the PA Turnpike, and making our way across the farmlands of Indiana and Illinois to the Mississippi. We traversed Missouri diagonally from St. Louis to Joplin, whence we entered Kansas. Over the years the landscape gained a comforting familiarity.
I remember surveying the scenery and imagining tactical troop movements across the hills and fields. Other times I’d join my sisters scanning license plates of passing cars to see how many of the states we could spot. Or scanning billboards & road signs as we played “the Alphabet Game” of spotting the letters sequentially in a race to Z. Other times I’d lean over the back of the front seat and ask, “Are we there yet?”
(We made an emergency dash back west after Grampa had his stroke. Though they hid it from us, I think the adults believed we were saying goodbye to him. He’d survive nearly four more decades, but no one knew it then. At the time Mother dabbled at breeding miniature schnauzers, more for the love of the breed than out of any hope of turning a profit, and her bitch had a new litter of puppies which circumstances dictated we transport with us. At rest stops five children between the ages of 5 and 10 would each shepherd a puppy outside to “do its business” before Mom and Dad took turns shepherding children into the restrooms to do the same. The sight of us probably gave many a weary traveler their day’s highlight. Or at least something to talk about.)
Because our visits always occurred over Summer or Winter school vacations, they were times of leisure and recreation for the children. Mother’s sister was six years my senior—closer to my age than Mom’s—and more like my big sister than an aunt. Marie had a collection of jigsaw puzzles and board games which provided endless hours of amusement for us. She would fetch one from the closet and clear off a table to hold the game board. Two or three of my sisters and I joined Marie around the table, sometimes with a visitor or another relative, but mostly it was just our cadre. We usually sat around the glass-topped kitchen table as my mother and her mother bustled through the modest kitchen preparing meals or desserts. We had a veritable Milton Bradley catalog from which to choose: Risk, Monopoly, Chinese checkers, Clue, Careers, Life. We played for blood. It was great fun.
But perhaps the most fun came from Marie’s Civil War playset. She had a complete set of molded plastic soldiers in blue and gray, with period arms and uniforms. Of course—much like the green plastic soldiers boys my age played with—these were monochrome. Their flesh was also blue and gray! The set came with appropriate accoutrement. There were molded plastic split-rail fence sections, an artillery-ravaged porch with portico, and sand-bag berms. But the favorite looked like a horseshoe-shaped stone bunker consisting of three pieces. The base contained a spring-loaded mechanism like a mousetrap which you set and placed two interlocking sections of stonework. At the appropriate time, one player touched the trigger and set the pieces flying skyward, along with whatever soldiers were placed on it. (Our informal “rules of war” declared that when the player who chose that piece set it up in her opponent’s lines, the opponent had to place some soldiers on it.)
We spent hours arranging our tiny soldiers in ranks and files facing each other, then took turns making the p’feeeeew bullet sound with our mouths as we traced a line of fire from musket to foe that would have made the Warren Commission proud. Last man standing—which was usually the first player to take a turn—won the battle. It gave me a pretty warped view of warfare, and left me wondering how the consistently out-gunned and out-manned Robert E. Lee managed to crush numerically superior armies for so long.
It was a while before I realized that armies don’t “take turns” in real life, any more than people play fair—that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—and all of those other hard lessons of adolescence and early adulthood.
Sometimes I think back to those days of my winsome youth, when my parents sheltered me from cares of the world and all the joy and freedom in the world nestled in those Kansas acres between Grampa’s house and the catfish creek out back. I’ve been back a few times as an adult. The rural Kansas of my memories has been sullied by shops and housing developments and highway projects that I don’t see as much of an improvement. Entropy has had her way with the house. It’s been a decade and more since Grampa was able to keep his garden, and it’s overgrown. The pasture has gone to seed. Vines have tangled the fish pond and turtles killed any fish that remained. I doubt there’s been a cat in the creek for ages. It’s just not the same.
Home for me is inaccessible, a faded photograph trapped in amber memories.
At least I have the memories.
makingchickensalad 