We are finally in the process of selling my childhood home. It has been a chore, but one of those chores folks have to deal with all the time when their parents have both died.
We commissioned an estate sale company to sell off all of their/our belongings last month and now that the house is completely empty it is for sale as well. My wife, Danny, says it has a lot of potential. We’ll see what the market says.
She and I were talking about it for some reason last week and Danny asked me what “the funky little porch” was supposed to be for. I commenced explaining to her that the house, which my parents bought and moved my two brothers and myself into in 1970, is kind of oddly built. The front is sort of the back, or the side, or whatever you want it to be.
What we call the backyard is really on the side of the house, and there is no door from inside the house to the fenced in backyard. To get there one has to go out the carport door and then back into the storage room and go out that way.
We used the carport door for the front door most of the time because it went straight into the kitchen. That funky little porch thing Danny was asking about could be considered the real front door or the real back door...I think. The little porch, also adjacent to the carport, is more like a great big step up to the door which opens into a hallway that t-bones into another hallway at one of the bedroom doors. Left takes a person to the other bedrooms and bath, right leads directly into the living room/dining room that has windows for viewing the back/side yard, and the third outside door that leads out to what also could be the front or backyard depending on one’s preference. We called it the side yard, because the real side yard was already our backyard.
Now, is that all pretty clear. No! Yes! Probably not. Okay.
Anyway, all of that description was just to identify where the “funky little porch” in question is. So, again, the question in question is what was that funky little porch for anyway.
The answer from me to my wife that day last week was, well, I really don’t know!
I do know, I told her, that it made a real good haunted house one time way back when.
It was Halloween, and it was in the 1970s, and it must have been early ‘70s because I was too young to drive that year, but graduated high school in 1979, so it would not have been the late ‘70s.
My younger brother, Richard, and I, decided that rather than go trick-o-treating and getting candy filled with razor blades we would set up our own haunted house and do the tricking and treating ourselves.
We got a roll of Visqueen plastic sheeting — which I thought was Bisqueen with a “B” until Monday when I tried to looking up the spelling — to use for the exterior walls of our haunted house. You could do anything with “Bisqueen” in the 1970s. Haunted houses, tree houses, swimming pools....anything!
We put that up around the little funky porch and then got some toilet paper boxes from the A&P, where my mom and dad worked, to construct a coffin. You could do anything with toilet paper boxes from the A&P in the 1970s. Coffins, playhouses that burned really good when we were tired of playing in them, homes for baby kittens, puppies, and rabbits that they could not climb (or jump) out of and even chicken houses at Easter for pink and blue baby chicks. Turtles fit in them too. Anything!
We got our coffin made and I served as Dracula lying in the coffin, and there were two windows that opened into the kitchen, or perhaps more accurately, from kitchen out to the funky little porch, and we opened one of those and positioned Rich in it. We made him look really spooky, like a zombie before zombies were cool, and when visitors to our haunted house first stepped into the “Bisqueen” darkness he flopped out of the kitchen window and grabbed them. Then when they stepped up on the funky little porch/step thing and viewed me in my coffin I popped up and grabbed them too.
It was a whole heck of a lot of fun.
But it really got good when a couple of my parents running buddies, Billy and Ruby Houston, bless their souls, stopped by to see what was going on for Halloween, and probably to drink a Tom Collins in a tall, skinny glass, served from a fancy little tray. Ruby was always a little bit on the nervous side, but she brushed those nerves aside that night and stepped into the darkness.
Richard flopped out and she screeeaaammmed, but she didn’t run away. She stepped up on that porch and leaned in to see who, or what, was in the cardboard coffin and when I grabbed her, she really screeeaaammmed!
Then — and I can still hear her soft, trembly voice today — she blurted out, “I think I just peed.”
And, she had!
And, that is what I told Danny last week was about the only thing I could remember that funky little porch being good for growing up at 106 Stennis St. in Newton, Mississippi.
It made a great haunted house one Halloween in the 1970s and it was the place where Ruby peed.
Happy Halloween, everyone. Try not to pee on yourself if you get spooked.
