Where I Began

I was born in a house my father built himself, on a stretch of road that had no name until the year I turned twelve. There were four of us children, then five, then six, and we slept two and three to a bed with our feet pointed at the stove.

My mother kept a garden that fed us through every winter I can remember. She had a way of standing at the back door in the evening, wiping her hands on her apron, looking out at the rows as if she were counting them. I think now she was only resting. There was never a moment in that house when there wasn't something that needed doing.

We were not poor in the way people mean it now. We were poor in the way everyone we knew was poor, which is to say we did not think about it much. I had one good dress and one pair of shoes I was not allowed to wear in the mud, and a brother who could make a whistle out of anything.

The thing I remember most is the sound. The house was never quiet. Somebody was always singing, or arguing, or running the pump, or calling a name across the yard. When I left home at nineteen, the silence of my own first apartment frightened me more than anything. I slept with the radio on for a year.

My father said very little, but he noticed everything. He could tell which of us had been crying just by the way we came to the table. He never asked. He would put an extra piece of bread on your plate and look at you a second longer than usual, and somehow that was enough.