The Thing I Never Told You
I never told you about the cramped and noisy circumstances of my childhood. You know I spent most of my younger years living in a 900 square foot house with three small bedrooms, a galley kitchen, a compact living-dining room and one tiny bathroom. The house belonged to my grandparents; my mother, sister, and I shared one of the bedrooms. Another bedroom accommodated my invalid aunt, her wheelchair, and port-a-pot, and a bed where my granddaddy slept. The third bedroom, a closet sized space held a bed for my grandmother. There was a host of other family in and out of the house most days, sometimes sleeping over and other times stopping by only for a meal and boisterous conversation.
My granddaddy wore a hearing aid, sometimes. Everyone who spoke with him shouted hoping to be heard. The one television, in the center of the house, steadily blasted background noise all day long, but if not the TV, then notes from someone banging on an old piano roared throughout. Oftentimes the person whacking away at the piano keys, decided to sing along with the notes emitting a shrieking sound, which always sent me scampering away with my hands covering my ears.
The invalid aunt suffered from severe brain damage having been extracted…
We had a clothes rack in the corner for extra closet space, one twin bed for my mother and one full size bed for my sister and I to share. The space in between was less than a foot wide leaving just enough room for me to crawl under the bed for a moment of solitude in the midst of the persistent chaos. The only quiet time in the house was after everyone was in bed fast asleep. This is when my mom would begin her deafening snoring that lasted until morning. If my mom was awake and not at work, she left the house claiming her nerves were shot from all of the commotion; if she stayed home she added to the racket by painfully crying about her unhappy…