neighbors

when we lived in south carolina, we lived in a really lovely brick house with blue shutters in a neighborhood called irongate on a cul de sac called annandale court. i loved that house. it had a nice living room in the front with a big window and huge, white built-in bookshelves. my mom painted the walls a pale yellow and we would spend sunny days on the yellow floral sofa reading books and just talking. there was a big rocking chair that my mom would sit in and i would climb up into her lap and she would rub my back really softly until i fell asleep. this is still one of the most comforting things to me and the best way to make me fall asleep.

when i think of the kitchen in that house, i immediately think of my maternal grandmother, who i called granny. she was fancy. well...she thought she was fancy. she saw herself as this southern belle who must always be surrounded by fine things and have her hair perfectly done and nails immaculate. she never had money, but somehow she always looked and acted like she did. she loved flowers but could never afford them, so she made beautiful silk flowers by hand and arranged them in large vases all over her home. she had crystal dishes on tables in each room filled with lemon candies. she was always serious and very particular about everything. she would come to visit us about twice a year and we had a special robe and slippers for her when she came and we always made sure to only serve her absolutely burnt toast for breakfast every morning along with black coffee, which was all she would ever eat before lunchtime. even though she was never the warm, cartoon version of a grandmother, she was an excellent baker and i remember many times in our little brick house in south carolina, standing on a kitchen chair, watching my grandmother make her legendary poundcake. she was one of those old, stern ladies who believed that children should be seen and not heard so i never really got a chance to be close to her, but i appreciated how she always got what she wanted, no matter what. and she somehow made a dollar strech into ten dollars without anyone ever noticing.

we had some unusual neighbors in south carolina. next door to us were the wybarks. yes. wybark. pronounced like why-bark. the father of the family was in the military and never at home, so i don't remember much about him. i don't remember much about the mother, either, except that she ignored her children most of the time and when she wasn't ignoring them, she was standing on their front porch, yelling their names and trying to figure out where they were. there were two children in the wybark family- jessica, who was about my brother's age (around 7 or 8), and daniel, who was closer to my age (5). jessica had the most atrocious, sort, boyish haircut ever that she had given herself with some scissors they had lying around the house. daniel was extremely hyperactive and could often be seen running around our cul de sac in his sister's hot pink one-piece bathing suit. both of the children would walk into neighbors' houses unannounced and uninvited. it wasn't unusual to walk into our kitchen to see daniel, dressed in jessica's bathing suit in front of our open refrigerator, drinking orange juice directly out of the carton. both of the wybark children had a weird fascination with electrical things. they had these little battery-powered 4-wheelers that they were constantly pluggin into the outlet in their basement to recharge the batteries (daniel pronounced batteries like "berries"). they had a really nice pool in their backyard that my brother and i weren't allowed to swim in because they always had a radio plugged in and placed inches from the edge of the pool. needless to say, we avoided these weirdos as much as possible.

there was a single mom that lived in the house behind ours and she had a son named adam o'vera (i can't remember his mom's name). my mom really wanted my brother and i to make friends, so she dragged us to adam o'vera's (we called him adam o.) house to hang out with him. my brother and i hated adam o. he was a snobby mama's boy with black hair that his mother combed down flat to his head with hair gel. she had set up an indian style teepee on their back deck for him to play in, but he never really went outside because he hated to get dirty. he was obsessed with legos and had this crazy fixation on keeping all of them meticulously organized in these big, clear plastic tubs with white lids. he would assemble giant battleships and airplanes out of legos and had them displayed in his bedroom like trophies. once when my brother was trying to play a card game with adam o. i opened one of the boxes of legos and started to play with them. adam o. looked over and noticed i was touching his precious toys and lost it. he ran over, snatched the legos out of my hand and told me i was never allowed to come back to his house again. i remember thinking, "fine with me..."

we only lived in south carolina for two years. my mom cried nearly every day we lived there, so my dad got a job in alabama to appease her. my dad has told me before that taking this job was his last big effort to save their marriage. he loved his job in south carolina, was successful, and made more money than he could make anywhere in alabama with what he was doing (sales). but he did it for my mom and for the sake of our family. even though my dad made this big saccrifice for my mom, she was still disappointed because we weren't moving to birmingham, her home town. we moved to montgomery, about an hour and a half drive south of birmingham. it just wasn't good enough for her.

moving from charleston was sort of sad for me. i really liked our house and my dance class and especially my best friend libby. i remember when libby and her family came over to our house to say goodbye the night before we moved back to alabama. i stood in our driveway and watched them drive away in their big, blue minivan with fake wood paneling on the sides. i saw libby's teary face pressed against the window in the backseat and steve waving from the driver's seat. i never saw them again.