Everyone needs a place to hide from mean ol' roosters

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June 27, 2009

By Karen Middleton The News Courier Sat Jun 27, 2009, 05:24 PM CDT

We’ve all heard about haunted houses. But a house haunts me.

It stood on a Michigan farm, a folk Victorian so common in the Midwest. It’s gabled peaks beckon me still like open arms.

Huge old maples lined each side of the lower drive and hollyhocks gone to seed in riotous pinks and reds towered over the sides of the path leading to the barn and brick chicken house.

It was my grandparents’ farm and some of the happiest days of my childhood were spent there.

Sometimes violence intruded on this Eden, such as when Grandma Wright’s mean rooster or a swarm of riled-up honeybees chased us into the house.

But most of my memories of the house are good. For instance, have you ever made a doll out of toothpicks and hollyhocks? The blooms form her picture hat and ruffled skirt, the buds her head and arms.

Have you ever picked purple grapes from an arbor, sucked out the center’s slippery pulp and sipped the juice from the skins?

And I had the greatest grandma ever. She was a pack rat and stashed years of accumulated bric-a-brac in her upstairs rooms. Anything we wanted to do up there was all right with her. We spent many Sunday afternoons banging around and rearranging the antique furniture — dare I say “junk?” — and parading the hall in old prom gowns.

When it was time for dinner she’d holler up the stairway and we’d come down for biscuits swimming in thick yellow chicken gravy. I remember suggesting to grandma that she add the mean old rooster to the Sunday menu, but she said he was too tough to chew.

Today, decades later, and I’m not going to tell you how many, I still dream about that farm and especially the house with its gingerbread trim. Some of the prized possessions in my home today once graced that house — a portrait of my grandfather’s sisters, a high-backed wicker rocking chair and a spindle-backed dining room set.

When I was younger, I daydreamed of buying back that farm some day and returning those items to their rightful setting. But then, the new owner, who had replaced the wood-burning furnace with gas heat, came home one day, turned on the hot water, causing a spark that ignited a gas leak and blew up the house. All that remained was the cellar’s black charred stone walls.

His heirs sold the farm. The next time I drove by, a vinyl-sided doublewide stood where the farmhouse once stood.

So now, the house exists only in my memories and in my dreams. I go there in the dark of an Alabama night when my slumbering mind paints detailed pictures, dipping into colorful pots of lifetime experiences. It’s usually when I am troubled or facing a life changing decision that my dreams carry me back to that Michigan farmhouse.

Maybe it’s the psyche’s way of protecting the inner child from harsh reality, but I prefer to think it’s a big-hearted woman in a bib apron reaching across time and space to open her door before the mean roosters can catch me.

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