The House

Our house was set in the working class district of Longview (531 15th Street to be exact). The city was set up so that housing was available for all levels of workers. The socioeconomic structure of the city was plainly viewed. Every resident in Longview knew where they stood in the pecking order by the address where they lived. As a child we could figure out our economic status without a word from the adult world that surrounded us. My parents’ house was in the working class area, better than some and worse than others, maybe on the cusp of being right in the middle. (Is that possible, the cusp of the middle?)

The house, not originally but by the time I was old enough to remember, was a two-story affair built when most of the original houses were built (around 1923) as a home for the mill workers. It seemed like a huge home to me when I was little. It was a cedar-shingled house that changed colors over the years of our occupancy. For the majority of the time that I can remember it was gray with white trim on the windows. The front of the house had four white, square, wooden pillars on the expansive front porch. This porch was always the directional indicator for anyone looking for our residence. "Just come down the street, it's the one with all the bikes on the front porch."Each house was set back from the front street with a fairly good-sized front lawn, a sidewalk and a parking strip of lawn that supported enormous maple trees. These lovely trees were, much as the town, both a blessing and a curse. In the summer they created a tunnel effect by spreading their leafy arms across the streets. This effect was particularly beautiful and created a cooling effect on warm summer days. They also dripped a sticky substance on the parked cars that they hung over, dropped copious quantities of leaves that we were responsible for raking up, and sent roots out to erupt the sidewalks making walking-and worse yet for the kids, roller skating,-a particularly dangerous activity. I think my love of the arboreal life came from lying on my bed upstairs and staring out of the window into the center of these beautiful trees. They were later to be replaced by little blossoming cherry trees, much less work for the natives and much less beauty as far as I was concerned, but a necessary change after the great storm of 1962, but more about that later.

The Yellow Paint Job

The summer after I moved out of home to Portland Mom decided that she wanted to have the house painted. Her idea was that we would change the house from charcoal gray to yellow with white trim, and that I could come home from Portland and help Dad with the job. Dad thought that was almost as good as his idea, which was that I would do all the painting. I had a few concerns about this project, but not as many as I was to eventually have. The first weekend I had off I took the Greyhound from Portland to Longview and arrived home with expectations that I would have the job at least half done by Sunday evening and I get free food and lodging. The food and lodging were certainly mine to have but the "free" part was not exactly accurate (it seems as though we always pay in one way or another). I came home nonetheless and Mother had a gallon of yellow paint waiting for me. Her thought was that she might not have exactly the color that she wanted, so maybe I should just paint the back part of the house and we could let it dry to see if the color was perfect the next day. Saturday morning was spent with the first can of paint and another trip to the paint store for a lighter color of yellow. Saturday evening was spent painting another large section of the back of the house, and Sunday was spent repainting the first section a lighter yellow yet.

Front of House

The next weekend I was back in Longview again and the days went by similarly with the exception that my week-long vacation holiday was arriving soon with no expectation that Mother was even near getting the color had in mind for the house. After two "lost" weekends, I think she was clearly getting the idea that if she wasn't careful she would loose the only free labor she had and by the third weekend she found the perfect yellow color for her project. Dad and I spent the next week working on the job up but not before I was at my wit’s end and the house wasn’t nearly completed. To Dad’s chagrin he was stuck with finishing thepaint job, and I was extremely happy to go back to my mundane job at the public library in Portland.

Side yard