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Another one from the vault – about my granddad and growing up in Springfield, Illinois…
The Property
My Grandfather Wyeth had been a mailman in Waterloo, Iowa, an unremarkable, medium size city known primarily for its John Deere factory and Rath Meat Packing Company. His name was Jerome but I had heard his imperious wife, my grandmother, call him Romie She was a big-boned, tall woman, her ample bosom puffed out like a plump old hen and she fussed and clucked just about as much. Romie was slight and dapper. His hair was pure white hair and cut like Will Rogers, at least in the pictures of the famous cowboy that I’d seen. Grandma and Grandpa Wyeth would drive down in their big black LaSalle town car to visit us on Carpenter Street in Springfield, Illinois. Our city was only slightly bigger than Waterloo but a bit more remarkable because it was the state capital and the home of Abraham Lincoln.
It was Romey who introduced me and my two brothers to The Property. It started with a march through our long back yard, past the rose arbor and the peony bushes and the apple tree, past the trash barrel and down a slight drop to the black cinder alley. Like the Pied Piper, he’d lead us on trailing behind him, all the while telling tales about the places we would pass; like the one of an Indian being hung in a concrete block garage. He’d point out a rusted iron chain that hung outside a broken window as evidence of the event. A flat stone behind a neighbor’s outbuilding showed the distinct print of a dinosour’s foot.
The alley came to a stop at the old Diller mansion which sat on it’s own square block and was cut off from us by overgrown bushes and runt trees. Here and there, through the overgrowth, was a fence or stone wall. It seemed impenetrable and spooky. Grandpa led us on, still following like the charmed villagers of Hamlin, along the crumbling stone wall and rusted wrought iron gate at the back of property. We peered through the vines that wrapped around the ironwork to see a muddy pond with a stone bridge leading to a small island in the murk. Surely we had heard of the small boy who had drowned in the pond? It seems his parents had told him not to swim there and he did anyway and something in the water had tugged at his ankle and down he went, never to surface again. And that was why it was overgrown and abandoned and why we never saw the grief-stricken parents who were old now, older than Grandpa and who lived all alone in the big house, except for a mean colored lady who was their maid. Over the tangle we could see the forbidding sign nailed to the trunk of a towering shag-bark hickory tree. It said in bold and certain letters, PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT. Grandpa read it out loud and shook his head but said nothing and we made our way along the wall until it stopped and a low chain link fence began. We were behind the carriage house but it was set back a bit and between it and the fence was a large plot of surprise lilies, row upon row of them.. My mother called these flowers “naked ladies” because their bright pink blooms sprouted up on perfectly naked stems. The leaves came out in the spring, then they died back and by mid-summer the flowers came up all on their own. My grandfather would just say, “Surprise! Surprise!” as we passed, tickled at his own joke. It was by the naked ladies one time that we found a complete set of the Book of Knowledge. They seemed to have been flung from a box as they were relatively intact but damp and the spines splayed. These too we lugged home back down the alley and dried out on our back porch. They wound up on our book shelves in the family room but never completely lost their moldy, damp smell.
Grandpa had projects in mind for us went we went on these forays. Around the corner from the back of The Property was busy Walnut Street, the street that would take you eventually to Capitol Airport. With many warnings to not go near the street, Grandpa would start picking up fallen haw apples from the trees that grew over the fence. Soon we’d be helping him and throwing them into a brown paper A & P grocery bag so we could make haw jewelry when we got home. He taught us how to string them together and make necklaces and bracelets that we’d wear for days, until the haws rotted and turned brown and fell off the string. The front of the property was unexciting except for the cement sidewalk that had two rusty looking indentations in the pavement. That’s where lightning struck, Grandpa told us told us and we agreed., just two days ago during that thunderstorm. Certainly we had seen the bolt to the west. Of course, we had heard the rattling thunder that night and didn’t even have time to count to five. Yes, this surely was where it hit.
From the untrimmed privet hedge we could see the vast overgrown garden and terraced hillside where magnolia trees grew. Grandpa told us that the Dillers had travelled the world over and brought back all these exotic plants to have here on The Property. Why those magnolias had come all the way from China to this city so they could plant them in there beautiful garden and show them off to Abraham Lincoln when he had come to visit. Strict chronology was not important in Grandpa’s stories.
And there was a wine cellar full of the finest wines ever produced in the world and it was under that garden over there, the one behind the climbing roses. No, we couldn’t see it but it was there and you had to pass through a long tunnel from under the house. They had done it that way in case there was ever a fire, those wonderful wines would be saved for future presidents of the United States. Saying this, it seemed Grandpa would get swept into his own story and sometimes his eyes would glisten at the grandeur of it all.
Even though those signs said PRIVATE PROPERTY, he said he was going to take his right up to the house. This turned out to be the Grandpa’s last visit to us in Springfield. He said we were old enough to have a healthy respect for what belonged to others and we needed to develop a sense of history. I think he wanted to get closer and we just wanted to get in there and see what was so private that we needed to be kept out. He led us, my two brothers and I and this time two neighborhood girls, up the circular drive way, up to the dark and large front door. He ran his hand through his white Will Rogers’ hair and straightened himself, waved us behind him and rang the bell. It seemed forever before a large, black woman, at least as old as Grandpa, answered the door. Grandpa had to look up to her, kind of like he did to Grandma, and she frowned at first and then just looked puzzled.
These are good kids and they’re real curious and they’d be pleased as punch if you’d let them play here once in a while.
Jez as long as they don’t touch Mrs Diller’s flowers. Then she looked over at us kids, gave us the up and down, shook her head slightly and slowly closed the door.
That was it. We were in. But the house was dark, the paint peeling, orange-flowered trumpet vine climbing up the drainpipe, threatening to pull it down. We stepped back to look up at the cupola that sat atop a third story.
I hear a young man hung himself up there over a girl who wouldn’t marry him, Grandpa said. She was from the South and he was in the Union Army when they bivouacked here during the Civil War.
All I could think of was a lot of people had died here and I’d better be real careful. This time we got closer to the pond and we fashioned long sticks to poke into the cracks of the stone walls. Grandpa showed how to get a garter snake to crawl onto the end of the stick. And how to catch crawdads in glass jar. Triumphant, we’d march back down through the alley to show our finds to my mother and play with the crawdads until they died or were abandoned on the cement slab outside our back porch. I’d hear Grandpa telling Grandma how he took us on a nice walk around the neighborhood. Then he’d lie down on the couch in the living room and nap while my dad worked on the car parked on Carpenter Street and my mom and grandma sat on the front porch and drank iced tea.
After that one time when Grandpa took us up to the door and we got introduced, so to speak, to the maid, we felt as if THE PROPERTY was our property and we never, no matter how tempting, ever touched Mrs Diller’s flowers.
Barbara Wyeth
The Property
My Grandfather Wyeth had been a mailman in Waterloo, Iowa, an unremarkable, medium size city known primarily for its John Deere factory and Rath Meat Packing Company. His name was Jerome but I had heard his imperious wife, my grandmother, call him Romie She was a big-boned, tall woman, her ample bosom puffed out like a plump old hen and she fussed and clucked just about as much. Romie was slight and dapper. His hair was pure white hair and cut like Will Rogers, at least in the pictures of the famous cowboy that I’d seen. Grandma and Grandpa Wyeth would drive down in their big black LaSalle town car to visit us on Carpenter Street in Springfield, Illinois. Our city was only slightly bigger than Waterloo but a bit more remarkable because it was the state capital and the home of Abraham Lincoln.
It was Romey who introduced me and my two brothers to The Property. It started with a march through our long back yard, past the rose arbor and the peony bushes and the apple tree, past the trash barrel and down a slight drop to the black cinder alley. Like the Pied Piper, he’d lead us on trailing behind him, all the while telling tales about the places we would pass; like the one of an Indian being hung in a concrete block garage. He’d point out a rusted iron chain that hung outside a broken window as evidence of the event. A flat stone behind a neighbor’s outbuilding showed the distinct print of a dinosour’s foot.
The alley came to a stop at the old Diller mansion which sat on it’s own square block and was cut off from us by overgrown bushes and runt trees. Here and there, through the overgrowth, was a fence or stone wall. It seemed impenetrable and spooky. Grandpa led us on, still following like the charmed villagers of Hamlin, along the crumbling stone wall and rusted wrought iron gate at the back of property. We peered through the vines that wrapped around the ironwork to see a muddy pond with a stone bridge leading to a small island in the murk. Surely we had heard of the small boy who had drowned in the pond? It seems his parents had told him not to swim there and he did anyway and something in the water had tugged at his ankle and down he went, never to surface again. And that was why it was overgrown and abandoned and why we never saw the grief-stricken parents who were old now, older than Grandpa and who lived all alone in the big house, except for a mean colored lady who was their maid. Over the tangle we could see the forbidding sign nailed to the trunk of a towering shag-bark hickory tree. It said in bold and certain letters, PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT. Grandpa read it out loud and shook his head but said nothing and we made our way along the wall until it stopped and a low chain link fence began. We were behind the carriage house but it was set back a bit and between it and the fence was a large plot of surprise lilies, row upon row of them.. My mother called these flowers “naked ladies” because their bright pink blooms sprouted up on perfectly naked stems. The leaves came out in the spring, then they died back and by mid-summer the flowers came up all on their own. My grandfather would just say, “Surprise! Surprise!” as we passed, tickled at his own joke. It was by the naked ladies one time that we found a complete set of the Book of Knowledge. They seemed to have been flung from a box as they were relatively intact but damp and the spines splayed. These too we lugged home back down the alley and dried out on our back porch. They wound up on our book shelves in the family room but never completely lost their moldy, damp smell.
Grandpa had projects in mind for us went we went on these forays. Around the corner from the back of The Property was busy Walnut Street, the street that would take you eventually to Capitol Airport. With many warnings to not go near the street, Grandpa would start picking up fallen haw apples from the trees that grew over the fence. Soon we’d be helping him and throwing them into a brown paper A & P grocery bag so we could make haw jewelry when we got home. He taught us how to string them together and make necklaces and bracelets that we’d wear for days, until the haws rotted and turned brown and fell off the string. The front of the property was unexciting except for the cement sidewalk that had two rusty looking indentations in the pavement. That’s where lightning struck, Grandpa told us told us and we agreed., just two days ago during that thunderstorm. Certainly we had seen the bolt to the west. Of course, we had heard the rattling thunder that night and didn’t even have time to count to five. Yes, this surely was where it hit.
From the untrimmed privet hedge we could see the vast overgrown garden and terraced hillside where magnolia trees grew. Grandpa told us that the Dillers had travelled the world over and brought back all these exotic plants to have here on The Property. Why those magnolias had come all the way from China to this city so they could plant them in there beautiful garden and show them off to Abraham Lincoln when he had come to visit. Strict chronology was not important in Grandpa’s stories.
And there was a wine cellar full of the finest wines ever produced in the world and it was under that garden over there, the one behind the climbing roses. No, we couldn’t see it but it was there and you had to pass through a long tunnel from under the house. They had done it that way in case there was ever a fire, those wonderful wines would be saved for future presidents of the United States. Saying this, it seemed Grandpa would get swept into his own story and sometimes his eyes would glisten at the grandeur of it all.
Even though those signs said PRIVATE PROPERTY, he said he was going to take his right up to the house. This turned out to be the Grandpa’s last visit to us in Springfield. He said we were old enough to have a healthy respect for what belonged to others and we needed to develop a sense of history. I think he wanted to get closer and we just wanted to get in there and see what was so private that we needed to be kept out. He led us, my two brothers and I and this time two neighborhood girls, up the circular drive way, up to the dark and large front door. He ran his hand through his white Will Rogers’ hair and straightened himself, waved us behind him and rang the bell. It seemed forever before a large, black woman, at least as old as Grandpa, answered the door. Grandpa had to look up to her, kind of like he did to Grandma, and she frowned at first and then just looked puzzled.
These are good kids and they’re real curious and they’d be pleased as punch if you’d let them play here once in a while.
Jez as long as they don’t touch Mrs Diller’s flowers. Then she looked over at us kids, gave us the up and down, shook her head slightly and slowly closed the door.
That was it. We were in. But the house was dark, the paint peeling, orange-flowered trumpet vine climbing up the drainpipe, threatening to pull it down. We stepped back to look up at the cupola that sat atop a third story.
I hear a young man hung himself up there over a girl who wouldn’t marry him, Grandpa said. She was from the South and he was in the Union Army when they bivouacked here during the Civil War.
All I could think of was a lot of people had died here and I’d better be real careful. This time we got closer to the pond and we fashioned long sticks to poke into the cracks of the stone walls. Grandpa showed how to get a garter snake to crawl onto the end of the stick. And how to catch crawdads in glass jar. Triumphant, we’d march back down through the alley to show our finds to my mother and play with the crawdads until they died or were abandoned on the cement slab outside our back porch. I’d hear Grandpa telling Grandma how he took us on a nice walk around the neighborhood. Then he’d lie down on the couch in the living room and nap while my dad worked on the car parked on Carpenter Street and my mom and grandma sat on the front porch and drank iced tea.
After that one time when Grandpa took us up to the door and we got introduced, so to speak, to the maid, we felt as if THE PROPERTY was our property and we never, no matter how tempting, ever touched Mrs Diller’s flowers.
Barbara Wyeth
