Our New House

From the series Uprooted,   

Segment five   

After having endured a horrible summer after arriving in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida Rebecca and Robert’s mama and daddy started looking for a new house.  They lived with Aunt Lou and Uncle John, but as kind as they were it was time to establish their own home once again.   

The children were excited about getting a new house.  They also loved shopping for furniture and just could not wait until they had their own house and rooms once more.  That was until mama and daddy showed them the house they bought.   

After going through it, Rebecca innocently asked, “Where is the rest of it?”  The house was so small and all the rooms so small that she actually thought that the house was her new playhouse and she excitedly ran out the door looking for the main house.  Instead she saw another small house feet from both the front door and the back door with a smelly garbage dump at the back of the small lot.   

“This is the house,” mama said when Rebecca came back in with a questioning look on her young face.   

 

“But where is Robert supposed to sleep?” Rebecca innocently asked.  “There are only two small bedrooms.”   

“Well,” daddy said, “You will share this room,” he said pointing to the larger of the two small bedrooms.  “You will each have a brand new twin foam rubber bed.”   

“Oh,” Rebecca responded as she sadly lowered her head.  She realized that this was the best that mama and daddy could do, but she once again wondered why they had sold their big house on the big lot in North Carolina to come here to live like this.   

She innocently asked, “But, where are the orange trees.  I thought that there were supposed to be orange trees everywhere.  There are no trees whatsoever or even grass in the yard.”   

Daddy replied, “See those little sprigs of grass?  They will grow together to form a solid mat of grass.”  Rebecca and Robert shot looks to each other saying that they neither one believed him, but as time went on those shoots of wiry grass did intertwine to form a green lawn, but the grass was sharp and not soft like North Carolina grass and it became just one more thing about South Florida that the children did not like.   

At least the children had greater freedom once moving to the new housing development.  There were at least a few other children there and they could play on the mounds of powdery white sand where the pine trees and palmettos had been bull-dozed before the land was once again leveled to build more of the tiny houses.   

They even went with daddy foraging into the dump that started at their back yard and they were amazed at the good stuff they found that rich people had thrown away.  At least that was something.   

To be continued ….   

Patty Cooper, Elizabethton, Tennessee April 3, 2015   
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