Technicolor Memories and the Living Rainbow

My childhood home was a dream for anyone ten years old or younger. My parents built the home in a tiny, dusty town a three hour’s drive from the nearest large city. We had a diner, a grocery store, and two service stations – across the road from each other – and not much else. I hadn’t experienced fast food or shopping malls until we moved and I was nearly a teenager; perfect timing, don’t you think?

My parents built the house specifically with my brother and I in mind – if we were kept entertained, we’d be out of their way. The playroom in the basement was carpeted with multicolored squares to create a patchwork rainbow. There was a “hidden” room under the stairs that became our secret lair. The walls, with a stark white base, were encouraged to be made our own; several masterpieces and brilliant prose have surely long since been painted over. The best part of the house, however, was the backyard.

Painstakingly each spring, my mom and dad would plant the gardens. All around the perimeter were beautiful blooming flowers, teeming with ladybugs and dragonflies. Two apple trees sat in the middle, perfectly executed as a “home base” when playing tag, or makeshift goal posts. Raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb stained the corners red – along with every child’s face on our block. Near the back was a vegetable garden that produced every color of the rainbow: tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, peas, cabbage, carrots, onions, cucumbers, corn, and potatoes. It was all we ate in the summer and likely why I have such an aversion to frozen vegetables now. Once you’ve pulled a carrot and rinsed off the dirt with the garden hose, you can never settle for something shrink wrapped.

The inaugural gardening day usually took place in late April. Dad begrudgingly pulled down his cap and set to work – his job was the worst; he was in charge of bug and leaf removal. Mom brought out all her baby plants and flowers and dug new homes for them in the freshly fertilized soil. I watched from the sidelines, wondering how dead grass and gray dirt would ever become the garden I was accustomed to.

Before I knew it, the backyard was alive again and with the sun came the anticipation of apple pies and carrot cake to eat and bumblebees and butterflies to catch. I remember stuffing unlucky bugs into old yogurt cups to keep as pets, only to have my brother set them free in the evening. And my parents, sitting on their garden swing, illuminated by the watchful eye of the outdoor porch light, taking it all in, enjoying the fruits of their labor, sometimes literally.

As summer rounds the corner and dusk brings the scents of barbeque and the sounds of tag, I wonder if the people who moved into our old house twenty years ago maintained the backyard as my parents did. I wonder if they had children to play amongst the greens and yellows and reds as we had. And I wonder if I could still catch a butterfly.