It's just a house.
A stately, white two-story built way back during Prohibition with an expansive, beautifully landscaped yard, complete with detached garage and carport.
It didn't look like that when I was a child. Many changes have been made over the years, but the "bones" of the place are alive and well.
I have photographs of my cousins and me when I was an infant, then later when I was two, before the divorce that pushed Mom and me to northwestern Pennsylvania to live with her parents.
When I was seven, we moved back so Mom could take a job nearby. We moved into the house with her sister, husband and three of their five children. Only one was younger than I and two had already left home.
My memories of life in that house are the fodder for nightmares to this day, seventy-four years later.
The cousin who still lives there recently invited me to visit and pick up some family memorabilia she'd found as she was packing to move to a more senior-friendly place a few miles away. I can relate, since our home is senior-friendly as well...no stairs to climb.
She assumed I would want one final look at the house before new owners claimed it. I didn't need a final look. I'll take the memory of that house with me to the Other Side, wherever that is. But I gave it that one final look anyway.
A lot had changed about it. Modernization of some areas made them unrecognizable. But no matter how much was different, it was still the house. And as I walked through the rooms, each one held a particular emotion dredged up from a child's perspective: fear.
My cousin and I don't recall those years the same. She was a well-loved daughter; my aunt and uncle good and kind people. Before I left after a brief "tour," she reminded me what a good man her father had been.
She called him "a kidder."
To myself, I called him someone who enjoyed frightening me, someone whose very tone of voice made me fear being in his house. I spent two years in his house...scared and wanting to be somewhere else.
My cousin wasn't in the house when he locked me on the screened porch during a nasty thunderstorm and laughed from the other side of the door as I begged to be let back into the house.
My cousin wasn't in the house when he turned out the hall lights and advanced up the staircase making growling noises toward the bedroom where I lay awake, terrified, waiting for my mother to come home from work.
My cousin wasn't around a lot of times when "the kidder" delighted in making sure I knew I didn't belong in that house.
So her memories and mine are not the same.
It took me some time on the ride home to process that fact. With no one alive to corroborate my memories, that's all they are. But "the kidder" made an indelible impression on that seven-year-old girl and, accurate or not, the memories linger and pop up at the weirdest times.
