13. Marbles

My house is 104 years old. I used to think it was 105, but the land was bought in 1904 and the house built in 1905. So my title search/abstract that Mary gave us when we moved in is for the land, not necessarily the house. The folks who owned it first, the Zieglers, owned it for only two years--I can only assume they were the buildesr.

Since then, three families. I've lived here 11 years.. The other two families, the Woltjens and the Kimpler-Murphy-Chapman clan (the Widow Kimpler became the Widow Chapman became the Widow Murphy and then she died, leaving the house to her daughter Mary), take up the remaining 91 years. I know very little about them, and what I do know isn't very complimentary. Mrs. Murphy ran the place as a boarding house. We still have deadbolts (or the holes from the removed deadbolts) on the bedroom doors. There was a makeshift kitchen in the second floor back bedroom (now part of the bathroom). The butler's pantry was ravaged and left as a 3/4 bath with the worst fixtures I've ever seen in any house. When Mrs. Murphy died, and Mary inherited the house, she let her indigent brother live in the basement. She didn't do anything really bad to the house, really. She had the kitchen redone in 1980; our bedroom and the living and dining rooms were given new ceilings around that time. None of it is really that great, though, and every time we change something, I think about how there's one fewer reminder of the Chapman-Murphy mistakes. Like when I finally painted over our hideous bedroom wallpaper.

There's not much left from the former residents these days. A heating oil tank in the basement is hardly sentimental. We haven't mustered the energy to rehab that butler's pantry bathroom, and so we just shut the door for now. That's about it.

But every spring I kneel down in the garden or in the yard, and out pops a marble. Way in back where I grow tomatoes. Under the back porch as I pull up the Virginia creeper vine. When I helped my grandmother plant daffodils. When I put in my two peonies. Front and back yards, one or two each year.

Mary Chapman, I must remember, was born and raised here along with her brothers. They weren't always indigent alcoholics. The Pelikanos family lived two doors down. I'm sure they had a bunch of kids. Are the marbles from the 60s, played with by my father's contemporaries, or are they from the 20's, shot across a dirt playing field by boys my grandfather's age now? I don't know how to appraise marbles like I might a quilt. But I liked this little literal souvenir, and so I kept them in a jar in my kitchen window.

My mom noticed them at some point and thought I was collecting them with some purpose. She picked some up at an antique mall. Now, I have a problem with collections. I love little things. So I didn't suppress this. Only about a third of my marbles are from my yard, but I know which ones are, for the most part.

I held the belief that these were unique to my experience somehow. There are marbles in my yard. This is special. Then I helped my sister move from a two-family flat on Tholozan, and as I was getting directions to the new place, one foot in the car, I looked down. A little orange and white marble, not new, was wedged between the dirt and the curb, exposed by a table leg that had scraped against the ground.

It made me want to take a giant rake to south city and find all the remnants of childhood underneath the daylilies and juniper bushes.