When my brother and I learned that the little house where we grew up was going to be sold and probably torn down, we decided it was time to return to our roots after having left home over 30 years ago. This letter was the first step toward fulfilling our wish to sit together once again, inside those walls and sift through our memories together. Our wish came true!

September 22, 1993

Dear friends,

We have never met, but it is my wish that this letter will be an invitation to do just that.

It has been over thirty years since I left my hometown of Peoria and the little house at 2409 Sheridan Road - the house where my brother and I were raised, growing up with our pets and neighborhood playmates - the house that you now call home.

Many years of memories are captured inside those walls and in everything still growing there - years spent watching seedlings mature into the full grown trees that bore walnuts, redhaws and mulberries, and flowering bushes and vines that blossomed with lilacs, forsythia and wisteria.

I can picture our family gatherings inside those tiny rooms during the winter holidays and the summertime backyard picnics with aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts, grandmothers, and everybody's dogs. That same backyard would be strung with Monday morning clothes lines, heavy with freshly laundered linens and dripping with my father's blue dungarees, all propped up with long wooden clothesline poles.

In the kitchen, at least once a week, you would hear the metal clicking of the pressurized pot lid and smell the steamy aroma of ham and beans simmering inside, as preparations were made for my father's favorite dinner. On Tuesday evening's we kept my mother company in the kitchen as she ironed the last of the family's weekly laundry. We did our school homework at the kitchen table and listened to "Lux Presents Hollywood" on the radio.

My brother's room was right off the kitchen and had a door that opened out onto the backyard stoop. Swings were hung from two tall aluminum poles erected one in front of the other precisely due west and on the evening of the summer equinox you could sit on the stoop and watch the sun set right down the middle of the cinder alley, directly behind the two poles. My father had learned to appreciate the movement of the stars and planets while spending many long nights aboard Navy ships during both World Wars.

My room was next to my brother's. From the west window I looked out on the orange day lilies that lined the white picket fence and the walnut tree that had been transplanted from an uncle's farm. This room is very small, as you know, barely enough room to squeeze between the foot of the bed and the wall, but it was my private world for eighteen years.

There are special memories still lingering in the basement. I remember large earthen crocks full of homemade cherry wine; newspapers spread on the floor where home grown black walnuts were spread out to dry and those that were not snatched by squirrels that slipped through the basement windows would end up in my grandmother's date cookies. A narrow shelf suspended from the ceiling and circling the entire room held the steel tracks of a Lionel train and my father would hold me up to see as we raced around the room after it. In the humid heat of midwestern summers, the basement would be our refuge for ping pong, cold potato salad and ice tea.

Is there still a showerhead over the basement sink? That was my father's first stop when he returned home from work covered with the dust of animal feed from Allied Mills. Near the sink was my mother's Maytag washer with the old rubber wringer rollers and a small green two-burner stove whose oven was sometimes put to use if the kitchen couldn't home all of that year's Thanksgiving feast.

In the furnace room, there had been a huge coal burning furnace. Beyond that was the room where we stored the coal. I can still hear the shovel scrapping on the cold concrete driveway as old Mr. Fuller sent the last of the coal load through the window and rumbling down the wooden chute. Early winter mornings, before he left for work, we would hear my father shoveling coal into the furnace and shaking the large choke handle to settle the hot coals. Weekends, when he was old enough, my brother would earn part of his allowance by helping load the "clinkers" into aluminum wash tubs and carrying them up the basement stairs and out into the alley.

In the same room with the furnace was my father's collection of yellowing Popular Mechanic magazines and a wonderful assortment of quality tools, a collection of iron and steel, wood and bristles that, in my father's hands could transform or create almost anything. He used these tools to single-handedly build fences and gates, a garage, install plumbing and electrical fixtures, paint walls, refinish floors, lay linoleum, plant shrubs, build swings and trellises, repair bikes and wagons, erect a wooden carousel horse, construct a brick barbecue pit and form the mold for a concrete birdbath which he decorated with colored marbles and carved glass beads. These were the tools I learned to use by watching him and which I sometimes forgot to put away.

Sheridan Road used to be a narrow two lane road. The year they widened it was cause for celebration and the day before it opened for traffic there was an all day fair in the next block and a children's parade. We played baseball all afternoon in front of our house and in the evening a band played and people danced in the street all night.

The large brick building that now sits to the south of the house wasn't always there. It was moved to that spot in later years from another neighborhood. What use to be there was a small wooden clapboard frame house that say way back on the back of the lot. That was where Mr. Gardener lived. Mr. Gardener had a wife and five children and an old black jalopy truck that belched blue smoke and backfired when he started it up. Mr. Gardener also had a movie projector. Every summer Saturday night, he would rent a 1940 vintage black and white film from the Peoria Public Library and set up a screen next to his hedge out by the street. All he had to do was turn on the sound and every kid and some of the parents for blocks around would come and find themselves a spot in the cool grass. No one ever needed an invitation.

During World War II, my father would send home as much money as he could spare. My mother worked and made double payments to the bank so that when he came home it was to a fully paid for home. Our parents worked hard for the little money they earned and worked hard to make our lives as comfortable as they could. It showed. The house was always freshly painted outside and freshly scrubbed inside. The yard was well manicured and blossoming with the flowers of the season, clover flourished in the lawn and our wren house was always full. It was never the neighborhood of the well-to-do, but our place was a little jewel that would cause passers-by to stop and look. And if were sitting on the front porch enjoying the windblown trees across the street, they sometimes asked if we would be interested in selling our little house to them. We never were.

Things change. A huge old two-story wooden house that once sat next door on the north, gave way to a Standard Oil filling station, as they were called in those days. It took several of our McClure Avenue neighbor's houses with it. I know you can never go back and I have seen recent pictures of the house and neighborhood that have made me sad as they hardly bear any resemblance to my memories. When my father become ill my parents moved to Florida. By then my brother an I had already relocated to other states so there has been little occasion to return over the years.

This is why I am writing to you now. I hear that the house is for sale. Chances are it is ready to come down and be replaced by some commercial enterprise. We would not want to inconvenience you in anyway, but I can't express to you how much it would mean to my brother and I to have an opportunity to walk through it's rooms one last time.

I would be most grateful if you could respond either way at your earliest convenience. I will be leaving for a trip on October 8 and plan to arrive at the Pere Marquette Hotel on the 11th. If I should miss your letter, please feel free to reach me at the Hotel. I look forward to hearing from you and meeting you if that will be possible.

Sincerely,
Sharon Rockey

Sharon Rockey was known in Peoria as Sharon Benson, Class of '56. She lives in Sonoma, California, in the midst of the beautiful wine country. Rockey serves as Director of Online Communications for the North Bay Multimedia Association. She owns WebSpin Studios, a website development company and can be reached at sayrock@sonic.net.

Goodbye to Mother also by Sharon Rockey.
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