Operation: Iowa III (Part 4)

Flora, IL, April 21, 2005, 5:00 PM CDT - I spent this part of my travels, after actually locating this place, taking pictures of the house where I spent many a childhood summer; My grandparents' house. Every summer, for a couple weeks, the entire Milner clan (Eastern branch) would trek westward and spend some time with my dad's parents. It was a highlight of the summer. There were many reasons for this: the Concorde grapes growing relentlessly in the back yard; the fact that we were allowed to have Wonder Bread, instead of Roman Meal; getting to see Grandmother, who loved owls and told stories that no one could top; getting up with Granddaddy in the early morning, unfolding the flag (properly folded the night before) and ringing the bell that sat next to the flag pole. But mostly it was just a chance to run around and be a kid at a different place.

I found Granddaddy's house, with some help from my Aunt Marilyn, and found a place that was fresher in my memory than in reality - a rare occurrence indeed. The last time I was there was in August 1984. A large part of the family had congregated there that summer as my grandmother was ailing. I barely had any memory of the place, but as I was driving there, and indeed through the whole town of Flora, which had blossomed to some degree, I felt that odd feeling of revisiting someplace very familiar but very distant in time.

A wash of memories flowed as I stepped out of the car of what was then just RR1 Flora, but is now known as 322 Hemlock.

As soon as you park in the gravel parking spot down near the road, you see the walkway up the back of the house, which leads to a door into the kitchen. This path, and that door, were the primary traffic inlets and outlets for the house... no one who was family ever used the front door. The first thing those of us who were there in the 1970's and 1980's, and indeed the first thing I noticed as I walked up this walkway, was how ramshackle the place had become. The blinds in what used to be our grandparents' bedroom were sitting on the windows all askew, if at all. There were rusty gardening implements strewn about in the yard, and an old bed frame propped up against the house. This reality defied the memory I had. And was this back porch here before? I could quite remember...

I walked up to the door and rang the bell. I looked around this new-ish porch (new to me, at least, I believed) waiting for someone to answer. I spotted a few toys in the yard, including a fire-engine red Radio Flyer. A woman looked at me suspiciously as she opened the door to the otherwise completely shuttered house. There were at least two little urchins crowding behind her legs. I explained who I was and why I was there, and wondered if it would be alright with her if I wandered around and took pictures. She said, "Just outside, right?" "Of course," said I. She assented, I thanked her, and she quickly shut the door. I don't imagine she gets many visitors of any variety there, so one Easterner asking to take pictures justifiably weirded her out, I'm sure.

I did a 180-degree turn and snapped off this photo. This was perhaps the most familiar site to me, as it was the thing we saw as we walked out of the kitchen door. This was The Back Yard - Social Central for the Milner house in Flora. In 1984, there was a swing between those two large trees (trees that now had twenty extra rings in their trunks), and the yard was a little greener (if infested with moles), but this was essentially how I remembered it, and was a good way to get my bearings. Note the Radio Flyer just to the right of the telephone pole.

In the Walter Family Tree book published by my aunt, Rebecca Curry, there's a photo of me and my brother along with her three kids from that 1984 gathering, and we're sitting on a swing that was located between those two large trees from the last photo. That swing is now gone. In its place is a shorter version, set a bit further away from the house. Directly behind the swing in this photo is the large mansion of some doctor or dentist. In 1984, that area was part of a large pasture where horses roamed. At some point in the past 20 years, it's been parceled off.

If you look closely at that picture of the swing, directly to the left of it in the photo, you can see a growth of grass slightly taller than the surrounding lawn. That's what this is a picture of. From 1970 (at least) until 1986, when Granddaddy moved out of this house, the bell and flagpole stood here. It really was a ritual for him: to go out every morning with an American flag, unfurl it and clip it to the pole's line, raise the flag, then ring the bell. Truth be told, I can't remember if ringing the bell was a daily thing, but I was there for its ringing on more than one occasion. At any rate, the same procedure was repeated in reverse every evening - the flag would come down, folded and stowed until the sun came up again. There was a light there, at the base of the flagpole, or maybe on the pole (you can see some electrical detrius in the photo). A couple of times he even let me help (instead of Grandmother, who usually performed the task), getting a chance to use my mad flag-folding skillz from Cub Scouts.

The missing flagpole and bell were the first artifacts that were gone from this place. Everything else I'd seen up to this point was just different or amended or had other signs of 20 years of change. Here, the change was that they were gone. That hit me as one might expect.

A mere turn of the head gives you this view, which is of the shed where the mower and other mechanical sundries had been kept. I didn't try to see what might be in there now.

Immediately in front of the shed, from the camera's p.o.v., you can see the remains of the Concorde grape vines. They were mainstays of my grandparents' house, and I loved sneaking a few from the vines early in the morning. Fresh-picked, dew-moist Concorde grapes... it just doesn't get better than that.

Anyway, the vines are largely gone, though by choice or neglect I can't say. But here again was an artifact of my past that was more gone than different.

Here's what you see as you look at the back of the house. This is not what we saw back in the day. Without seeing pictures of how it may have looked 20+ years ago, I'm almost positive that there were just a set of steps that came out of the kitchen door and dumped you onto the little sidewalk, then onto the lawn. None of that deck nonsense that's there now. I mean, I guess it's a lovely deck, and if it works for the suspicious inhabitants, then more power to them.

Another artifact that's gone after 20 years is the windmill. Just to the left of the clothesline stand (that white pole that's just hangin' out in the middle of the picture there in the lawn) there used to stand a windmill. Not a tall one... no more than 6 feet high or so (I remember the first summer I was able to grab the blades reaching up on my tiptoes... it was a grand day indeed). Also, the entire lawn just looks more... beat up, I guess, than I remember.

The propane tank in the foreground in this shot was at the house as long as I can remember. It was in a early photo of the house and homestead that was hanging on the wall in the living room (taken from a helicopter). The tank was there all through my visits there. It's still there.

Just beyond it, you can see a path of stones leading off into what appears to be nowhere. (The stones, going the other way, went to the kitchen door... you can see them in the previous photo.) The stones were the path one took to get from the main house to Aunt Ruby's trailer.

Aunt Ruby was the very living definition of a spitfire. Her attachment to our family was never terribly clear to me (no one named Ruby has ever appeared in my research, at least), but she was certainly, at least as far as I could tell at the time, warmly welcomed into the family. (On a sidenote, it was illuminating talking with my Aunt Marilyn while I was in Flora. She talked about the scandals within the family oh so many years ago as if I knew them, as if I hadn't been sheltered from them. In fact, Marilyn often apologized for talking as if I knew what she were talking about, because she kept thinking she was talking to Dad... apparently the resemblance is uncanny.)

I have several keywords attached to Aunt Ruby: Old Brown, the fudge that tasted like I imagine miracles taste, if they were food; Jed, her rubber plant, and one of her more frequent conversation buddies; there are others. At any rate, Aunt Ruby and her trailer, Jed and all, are gone now, but the stone pathway remains.

In the background, you can more clearly see the driveway of the house that sits in the former horse pasture. The house is out of the picture to the left.

This is Wagon Hill. Or Lincoln's Hill. Or the Hill of Terror. One summer, Lincoln and I thought it might be fun if we took a wagon that was in the garage and rode it down this hill. This hill is on the front side of the house. (Picture of front of the house.) The slope of the hill looks deceptively gentle from this shot, but keep in mind, we'd decided to go down this hill in a vehicle with questionable steering capabilities, and no braking system to speak of.

Lincoln went down first. The result was his carving a careening path down the hillside, nearly tipping the wagon over on several occasions to dodge the large trees in his path (and in the effort looking not much unlike a cartoon vehicle as it bounced and tilted and swerved). Lincoln eventually dumped out right before getting to the gully and thick underbrush at the bottom of the hill. The whole adventure was, it seemed, the funniest thing my dad and granddad had ever seen in their lifetimes.

(I apologize for the crappy nature of the panorama shot here... my camera nor my Photoshop skills were quite up to the task.)

After about 20 minutes of roaming around this stranger's property, I decided it was time to go. As I was getting in the car, I stopped and noticed something.

There was a light pole down at the end of the driveway. It was one of those old streetlight types that came on at dusk and turned off at dawn and had a bluish hue to the light. On it, Grandaddy had put those aluminum letters down the length of the pole spelling out his (and my) last name, presumably to give passers-by some sort of clue of who lived here or where they were on the street.

Well, after twenty years, they (sort of) survived.

It was a suitable end to the first time, and likely the last time, I visit there on my own.