Let me back track, I grew up in a rural country club environment, emphasis on the rural. When I say 'country club', don't let your mind run crazy with the golf club, the private meals, focus solely on the country part of it and you are basically right there.
But like any country club type deals, we had a lot of families that owned second homes in our neighborhood and up they would trek from the faraway city of San Francisco and its surrounding areas (well, its really only about an hour north, but for a smallish child that's a trek), for the summer months and weekends.
We called them the "weekenders". We were pretty creative with our nicknames, weren't we? True to form, we were called the "year-rounders". Oh, the depths of our creativity! See, we described someone as such, "Oh so and so, they are a weekender" meaning we only see them on certain weekends or lengths of time during the summer months, and otherwise their house is empty and so very very alone.
That said, for the smattering of kids that were like me, year-rounders, we had free roaming rights of the neighborhood. Thus, we are the ones that truly can say we grew up there. Yes, my friends from childhood that were, in fact, weekenders, or big city snobs as I jokingly called my friend, Matt, can say they spent their childhood in my neighborhood called, "The Vineyards" (which at the time there was no single person with a 'vineyard' and Sonoma County, at the time, was yet to truly become the booming wine industry it is today, so why someone decided that's what it should be called was a mystery that alluded discovery in my childhood). But its us 'year-rounders' who survived not just the flood of '86, and again, '95, and then once again for good measure, '97, who also suffered the boredom of trying desperately to fill up the time when there was just nothing to do, no one to talk to, until maybe that sporadic moment when something unusual happened like a friend appeared, or someone moved in that you'd never seen before, and you spent all sorts of time speculating on them and not actually talking to them. It wasn't the weekenders, like Matt, who came up in the summer and who was entertained by our silly country ways, found fishing, sailing, swimming, and endless hours of Speed (the game not the drug) fascinating. (Um, Matt, if you are reading this, sorry, dude, I don't mean to be picking on you, you are just a representation of that breed of human called "weekenders", we cool?). Most of our daily lives back then were spent watching tv shows like Punky Brewster, Night Court (for me especially), and Saved By The Bell. Our life was a tame, very quiet existence, where we spent most of it imagining what life was like in big wildness of the city. (Or was that just me?) We dreamed of a way out...
Sometimes throughout the year, there would be parties held at the clubhouse in the center of the neighborhood, smack dab next to the community lake (did I mention the lake?). The best of these was of course the Halloween Party. We got to roam pretty freely about the neighborhood in our costumes acquiring our loot of candy, without any fear of the kind of stuff one worries about today, and then afterwards down to the clubhouse for the fun of a very teeny haunted house, a friendly neighbor lady dressed up as a palm reader, bobbing for apples, oh the fun never stops.
Okay, now back to the mysterious house on the corner. It was one of the first houses built in the "Vineyards". It was, and is, a deep grey house set back into a wooded tree lined driveway. Trees grew up through both the front and back porch. What's more, furniture, books, a tv, a radio all were left as they had been when the owners had been there. The electricity was still connected, the phone still rang, off the hook. It still had a phone number you could call, and call we did. (Remember when I said there wasn't much to do?) As wee young folk, we'd peek in the windows, trying to out scare each other with the mysterious hauntings we would see. "Look, there's a ghost!" "Where?" "There." "Oh I see it."
Later on, in my pre-teen years, I told my friends a ghost story about a young girl who had lived there that had a heart shaped birthmark on her cheek. She fell in love with a guy that died under somewhat strange circumstances, some random war perhaps, and she just waited and waited for him in a tree on the front porch, wouldn't get down, did not eat or anything, grew more and more pale, the heart shaped birthmark increasing in its redness until one day, she fell to her death, like four feet. See, I'd say, here's the mark where her head crashed into the brick killing her instantly. Sometimes at night you could see her ghostly presence sitting there, singing and waiting, waiting and singing. The little neighbor boy down the street from my house (Bobby was his name, See Matt, you aren't the only one I am choosing to pick on) had nightmares because of it. And, even though I stole the story from a L.M. Montgomery novel I had read, I still thought I saw her from time to time when I walked home in the evening from a friend's house (most likely Corinne, see another friend I'm picking on, Matt!) or randomly walked through the neighborhood late at night empowered by the spirit of the moon.
We found out that the original family had built the house, raised their kids as "weekenders", and then when the kids had grown, had divorced. Thus, the house just sat full of all of its trappings and memories for us to speculate, ruminate, imagine.
In my early teens, it was rented out by a girl about my age, another weekend-only family, and I struck up a friendship with for the sole purpose of being able to go into that amazingly epic house with all its mystery attached. I'd invite her to come over on the Saturday evenings when she was in town, when I saw the thrill of the lights on, to get in good with her. We'd watch my current obsession of a movie, Wayne's World. (I watched that movie a gazillion times just on my own, in all fairness, until the video itself wore out. Yeah, I'm old enough that we only had videos for watching movies, so bite me!)
The house represented something untouchable, unattainable. Like the big city from which Matt hailed (ha ha) and the world beyond, it was something we had yet to see but were always reaching towards, seeking discovery.
Then one day, in early teenage years, we got our wish. One of our friends, a weekender, discovered that we could all slip through the doggy door at a side door and in we went. We excitedly and with an air of danger moved through the house, calling to one each other, when we found something interesting. One friend opened up a closet and joked, "All the skeletons fall out." I remember that specifically for some reason. Later on when the colder, bare months of winter would set in, the year-rounders would crawl inside, turn on the heater a bit, and make phone calls. (We were an inventive rebellious and perhaps a bit odd bunch.)
In my neighborhood as a young child, there was this old house, long since abandoned by its original owners.
I'd like to dedicate this blog to the aforementioned "Bobby", "Corinne, the girl who I used to watch Wayne's World and struck up a friendship so I could find out what it was like to live in said house, and to give my heartfelt thankfulness to "Matt" without my ability of picking on him the story could not have been told (well, it could have been, just not in an interesting fashion.)
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