2547 Honeysuckle Avenue

I used to think 2547 Honeysuckle Avenue sounded like a place made up for fairy tale, but in actuality was the address of a little detached house my family rented while my dad was a student at the university. The year we lived in this house I assembled a stable of pets that resembled an exotic petting zoo: gerbils, mice, dogs, cats, rabbits, fish, birds, turtles, baby alligators, and frogs that would alternatively ignore, love, lick, bite and leave us.

The "half" bedroom of this 2 1/2 bedroom/1 bath house was an oddly dissected room with a hallway on one side that connected the kitchen to the master bedroom and a small area on the other half we used as a makeshift guest room for visiting relatives from Ecuador, strangers to me who would stay for weeks to months at a time. My mom fit a twin bed with a brown, orange and yellow checkered bed cover (that was considered ugly even in the 70s) in this pocket sized space. When empty of visitors, the half bedroom housed our little pets such as Rusty the hamster and Jenny the gerbil (who was given to us because she traumatized her previous owners when she gobbled up her own babies). My sister's beloved parakeet, Glory, was also a resident of the half bedroom. Glory was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen, regal and coveted like only my sister's possessions were to me. She had turquoise wings with dotted yellow markings, a downy pale breast and an angelic white face. One day I discovered Glory laying lifeless at the bottom of her cage. Knowing my sensitive sister would be devastated by her death I tried to put Glory back on her perch. But, ker-plunk, she would not stay up. Over and over I tried. When my sister walked in and saw dead Glory in my clutches she let out a scream any horror movie actress would have been proud to produce; thirty years later she still mistakenly blames me for killing Glory that day.

2547 Honeysuckle Avenue's kitchen was bright, as sunny and yellow as my mom's pet canary she let fly loose around in it. This canary was killed in her kitchen by a stray cat my sister let inside. My mom did not mourn the loss of her pet as my sister did, she loved animals but never got too attached to them. We'd take all our meals in this kitchen. My dad would drag our TV from the living room so we could watch Disney while eating plain brown lentils, white rice and the meat my mom sliced and pounded thin as a paper for dinner. It was always a struggle for them to get me to eat my mother's food. I preferred the plumper and tastier offerings of McDonald's and Piccadilly where we would dine once a week. Eating out weekly, even to cheap cafeterias, was a luxury not a lot of my neighbors could afford; I thought we were rich because we could.

The house was small and square with sidings cracked and bubbled by the sun. At any given time there were a dozen lizards with bulging blue-ringed eyes and pointed chinless faces scaling effortlessly up and down its exterior with their sticky feet; Their agile reptilian bodies would change from bright green to dull brown with fright as I tried to catch them. Many gave up part of their tails to get away. Attached to the house was a porch where I would play with my Barbies sitting on the shredding wood deck and protected from the frequent and furious afternoon showers. Raindrops like big clear tadpoles would cling to the windows and screens.

The house stood on a tiny lot next to a large monster overpass with an air of determination. The concrete structure did not seem to intimidate our house, or us, as the constant hum of cars became as comforting a sound as a distant ocean swell and fall is to beach houses. The big shadow it threw over our yard provided cool relief from the brutal summer sun, and under this shade the patch of green was a magic land, a forest through which roamed creatures made for my entertainment. I would spend hours squatting on my heels watching the private lives of pill bugs, caterpillars, ladybugs, fire ants and other creatures under the blades of grass as heat-drugged flies drifted drunkenly around me. Here I kept a baby wading pool to house the animals I found in ditches and ponds around the neighborhood. If I was lucky I would find a turtle or two during my reconnaissance excursions, but when the afternoon rains raised the water level of the pool the turtles always escaped. I could stare at the minnows circle against the edge of their plastic home and watch the bubbles rising slowly from baby crawfish as I tried to lure them to the surface with bologna on a string. I'd chronicle how the lopsided polliwogs grew legs and arms and just before they matured fully into frogs I would take them into my aquarium inside. It was a lot of work keeping those frogs fed with crickets and insects I knocked down as they were swirling around the porch light. Once a neighborhood boy let all my frogs out of the aquarium and we would find their little dried carcasses behind refrigerators and ovens for months afterwards. Only Angela, a bullfrog of great strength and character, survived; she was not an amphibian that could be trifled with. I imagined she just gave this wicked boy an unwinking "captivity smaptivity, I'm not leaving this air conditioned room" look of disbelief.

On railroad tracks that ran next the overpass I would take long walks balancing on one of the smooth iron rails as if it were a tightrope. I never once saw or heard a train so I felt safe playing around the clearing hemmed in by solid walls of pine, sweet gum and tulip poplar skirted with damp and aggressive vegetation filled with, what I imagined, millions of invisible creatures keeping me company. I did not know the tracks separated the poor from the "better off side", and Honeysuckle Avenue was on the wrong side. Because I was several shades lighter than the black kids I got to go to the mostly white school for the children that lived on the good side of the tracks. My mother told me this years later. She said when she brought my sister and me to the white school to see if we could register and with one look the administrators let us attend without verifying our address. I did not make any friends at this school, but I didn't feel the need for friends. I had my imaginary world around our little house.

When my dad graduated and as he changed jobs we moved to other houses on streets with boring names and situated farther from overpasses and train tracks. Yet none of them held the same childhood magic as a house on a street named Honeysuckle Avenue.