Micro-Memory: The Spanish House

The first memory I have of a house is from February of 1971, when the one I lived in shook me awake at dawn.

I sat up in my bed and stared out one of my two bedroom doors into the kitchen. Our brown clay dishes, normally stacked neatly on the floral shelf paper, rattled and flew from cupboards, shattering on the linoleum floor. The second door in my bedroom opened to a hallway linking my room to my mom’s. I ran, heart and feet pounding, and jumped onto her bed. My brother leapt in a few seconds later, and we huddled under the covers, watching an orange, tulip-shaped lampshade sway above us. Despite the earthquakes, I loved that house.

Hemmed into a suburban Los Angeles neighborhood of 1950 ranch-style dwellings, our small, white stucco home stood out and looked miniature beneath towering pine trees that oozed sticky sap onto the sidewalk and chain link fence. The red barrel roof tiles protected nests of baby birds that chirped us awake on weekend mornings. Inside the house, arched doorways sheltered us, too.

I often ran my fingers over the fissures of the cool plaster walls, laugh lines carved amidst family dinners, board games, and Christmas mornings. The sound of my mom’s high heels on the hardwood sang down the hallway as she readied herself for work, and the glass faceted doorknob of our one bathroom, I imagined, was a diamond, forgotten by former royal tenants of our Spanish palazzo. In every room, multi-paned windows opened outward to our yard, a kingdom of citrus trees and passionflower bushes.

Hot Southern California summers heralded in the rumble of bees, while the scent of jasmine and sweet peas perfumed our yard. Stately Calla lilies flanked our two-step front porch, and an orange tree drooped with sunset-colored fruit. My brother and I preferred the sturdy limbs of the avocado tree for climbing, and it was under it that we camped one night, until a water beetle scuttled across my face and sent me screaming for safety inside the Spanish house. From the lemon tree in the center of the yard, my mom hung birthday piñatas. We whacked away until candy exploded like fireworks onto the grass, then ate cake decorated with red and blue frosting, which stained our teeth. 

When I was eight, the landlord told my mom we had to move. She wanted to tear down the house, she said, and build a bigger one for her family.

So, we boxed up the few brown dishes that hadn’t broken. I stuffed my dress-up clothes, dolls, and other childhood mementos into boxes, and we carried them across the street to a boring beige house owned by the same woman. It had plastic gold doorknobs that didn’t look like treasures, and our new backyard wasn’t large enough for trees.

One morning, shaking woke me again, but it wasn’t the earth moving on its own this time. From the picture window in our new living room, I watched as bulldozers rumbled over the yard and razed our Spanish house to the ground.

Gone were the piñata tree and our campsite, the laugh line covered walls and passionflower bush, and the diamond doorknob. The Calla lilies that stood guard over my childhood had been ripped out, too, and the baby birds had all flown away.