Riverside Drive

"But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It's small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you'd think they were holding their breath." Sandra Cisneros, from The House on Mango Street







Yellow House


A yellow house is always a part of the sun shine, dad had said one day, years later, and I think he was right. No matter from what direction, there was a mural of the sun against the side of the garage wall and it seemed to absorb the light of the day and shine it back into the house. When we walked back home, up over the old bridge, and came down toward it, the house shone bright on the corner as if it were plucked out of the Tuscan countryside. We might have spend time in those days dreaming of Italy without even knowing it. Everything that I write about the yellow house now is not the way I thought of it back then. The whole thing had to sink in. The suburbs where we came from, and lived for years, were wide and clean everywhere. My brother 'little' Charlie (the name came to him because he was number three, the youngest, my sister and I the oldest) had a back yard all to himself. It was Corey and I's job to watch him during the day and all we had to do was watch him for hours from the back deck while he ran across that big lawn and up the steps of the brick wall in the back. The yard continued to grow and it stretched all the way up into the bluffs where there were trails and what was called the Garland Meadow. Somedays we would bundle little Charlie up and walk up through the brambles up into the wide open field and just sit in the beige grass in spring. Nobody ever forgets the sound of wind through the crisp grass. The meadow came to remind me of the yellow house. It was like a yellow lake and off in the distance the ring of giant houses were quiet also. We knew there were other children in almost all of them, but we rarely saw them. The house across the street had its own basketball court as a basement and we only saw Chelsea, our neighbor, once a day, as she got into her dad's truck for another league practice. There in the suburbs, I will always remember, it always looked more beautiful from high above in the small little cove of pines that lined the back yards before the bluff.