4-10-19 ICE II

Long ago, in the back lot of my childhood memories, there were houses the size of little cottages, where people lived all the year-long, content with what they could afford. The first house I lived in was one of these. It had been built by my mother and her then-husband, Cy Davis. It was perhaps 1,000 square feet of thrift, just a simple rectangle of unexciting pale brick with two front windows and a small front porch. It still stands today, on Elm Street in Shelley, Idaho, close to the canal.

The Elm Street house, when it was brand new.

My husband, sisters and I drove past it a few years ago, on the way home from a fishing trip, or a visit to Aunt Becky or Aunt Mae. I thought how amazing it was that our family of 9 lived in that teeny-tiny space. It hadn’t seemed small to me at all, when I lived there. But my sister tells me my crib was in the sewing closet, or someplace like that. And the older kids’ beds were in the basement, without any walls between them, and they fell asleep to the rhythm of the washing machine agitating them into their dreams. 

We had houses like that in Pittsburgh, the place I remember best, since we moved there when I was barely five years old. Memories any earlier than five usually spring out of photographs. 

In the winter, tiny little houses built with very little money usually facilitated the very best icicles. They crept into existence somewhere in the deepest part of winter, when snow had piled on rooftops, then melted, and froze again at night. Water from the melted snow dripped from the roof’s edge and created magical icicles, sometimes so large and long that they met the shrubs on the way down, or sometimes even the ground itself. They looked like crystal vampire fangs, or like pointed jewels dangling like a choker around the neck of the house. 

Many an after-school adventure included a broken-off icicle, retrieved from a low hanging rooftop. We sucked on them like Popsicles while we played. Sometimes I wrote my name in the crusty snow with the pencil-like tip of a two-foot-long icicle, pretending I was a teacher using one of those long chalk extenders they used to write from a distance on the furthest edges of the chalkboard. We tried to see how long we could capture them before they broke into pieces.

At Christmastime those low hanging icicles awoke with sparkle each evening when the Christmas lights were plugged in. Large, egg shaped Christmas lights in the primary colors, their cords wound with woven fibers and not at all insulated from the danger of water meeting electricity. (Really, we should all be dead by now!) The crystallized water took hold of that colored light and threw it back to us in all sorts of magical wonder. I can close my eyes right now and see it, all that color spewing from the house, like Northern Lights had made their way down to Western Pennsylvania. Ice changes everything. Not so good under the tires of the car, or the soles of rubber boots, but fairy-like magical when one is dressed up warm and safe and there is some source of light behind it.

It took growing logical for me to discover that those wonderful little houses with the long sparkly icicles were the ones made with inferior insulation, where the poorer lot of us lived. All the heat our parents could afford went up through the roof and melted the snow. But the child in me celebrates what came of so little. Stuffy old, judgmental grown-ups see poor people living in inferior living conditions. It’s the child, through the eyes of wonder, who instead sees the magic of icicles.