By Betty Miller Conway
My father built the little plank house in our garage. My basset hound, Oscar, and I supervised the construction carefully. Oscar wiggled his entire long body with excitement as my dad, whistling as he worked, occasionally asked me to hand him a nail, hammer, or some other tool. I felt very important as I “helped” him assemble the playhouse. First, Daddy built the walls like a big box, then he cut a window and a door, and finally he added a floor and roof.
I must have been only four or five, but I remember it clearly. It was November and already cold in the North Carolina mountains, cold enough that my mom insisted that I wear my winter jacket and a warm knit toboggan on my blonde curls. My dad waited until November to start construction because he had most of his summer farm chores completed by then and therefore had a bit of time to devote to other things. More importantly, at least as far as I was concerned, November was the month of my birthday.
I reccall my father in the garage with his skill saw and his carpenter’s rule. And how, about the time the box walls of the house were about halfway up, I asked Daddy to put me inside the box. He stopped what he was doing and lifted me over the wall. Then I insisted that Oscar be lifted over as well. “Oscar, too!” I exclaimed. And with hardly a sigh, my dad lifted that big, floppy-eared dog into the playhouse and set him down with me.
I think Oscar and I might have lasted five minutes before I discovered that there really wasn’t anything for us to do inside the box. Pretty soon I was begging my dad to take us back of the playhouse walls. And he did, setting down his saw and reaching down with long arms to lift first me, then Oscar, out. It was a scenario that played out over and over until the walls were finally too high for me to be lifted over. That's how the playhouse was built: with lots of interruptions, plank by plank, in the evenings and on the weekends when my dad didn’t have to work.
When finished, it was a cute little building, complete with lace window curtains that my mother made, and a front porch. My Aunt Margaret, who lived just up the road, helped furnish it with bright orange furniture from the dime store where she worked. There was a tiny couch, chair, and end table. We hung several pictures on the wall, but the one I remember most vividly was the old picture of a guardian angel watching over two little children as they crossed a broken bridge. The night looked scary and dark, and two planks were missing from the bridge leaving a hole over the abyss below. But the children in the picture had nevertheless managed to cross over safely. Aunt Margaret explained that angels always watched over little children and that every house, big or small, needed that picture on the wall to remind people of that.
My dad eventually placed the playhouse right beside our real house under the catalpa tree. The first Christmas or two, we put a tree in the window. We had one Christmas tree in the big picture window of our real house, and then another, linked with an extension cord, in the window of the playhouse. I'm sure it must have been my mother who wanted to put a lit Christmas tree in the playhouse. She was the one in charge of Christmas at our house.
When it got close to Christmas, we would pile into the old Ford Falcon station wagon and drive the dark country roads looking for Christmas lights. People didn’t decorate as much back then, so we were really thrilled when we spotted the big star on Buckeye Mountain and the nativity scene at the local baptist church. But no lights were as special to me as a kid as the ones we came home to at the end of that drive. I loved looking at the houses side by side: one big, one little, each with lights in the window.
But really, it was in the summer that I was most able to enjoy the playhouse. The playhouse was the perfect little dwelling for small children. When my friends and cousins came over, we spent hours playing in the playhouse. We swept the wooden floor with a little broom and served peppermint tea with the tea set Aunt Josephine gave me. We sat on the bright orange sofa and sipped daintily, trying not to spill a drop. We put our stuffed animals to sleep in the old-fashioned stroller that sat in the corner. Sometimes my cat curled up in the stroller too. We could hear the leaves fluttering in the trees above. And if we were lucky, a thunderstorm might blow up before our parents could come to rescue us! We would huddle in the little house, listening to the thunder and lightning crack overhead, grateful for the solid roof that my dad built—and for the smell of the rain coming down in sheets outside.
At one point when I was still small and my sister, Ann, even smaller, we cajoled my dad into sleeping with us in the playhouse. We ate supper in our real house, then carried quilts and pillows to the playhouse and arranged them on the hard plank floor. I don't know how my dad squeezed his six foot two frame into such a small space. He was two inches too long! Folding himself up like that made his back hurt.
But to be honest, I wasn't concerned about that. Mostly I was worried because I thought that a snake might get in around the corners of the baseboards. I tried to think about the guardian angel in the picture and remember that she would watch over us, even if we were in a little plank house instead of on a treacherous bridge. But to no avail. I lay there in fear until I heard my dad snoring, despite his sore back, and Ann’s little sighs as she fell asleep clutching her puppy pillow that our mom made her. And in the end, we all enjoyed— or at least remembered—one night in the playhouse when no one slept well, and everybody was a little bit afraid. Except for my dad. He was not afraid of anything as far as I knew.
Even as I grew older and distracted by other interests, Ann continued to love the playhouse. She put her real-life puppies in the stroller. By then, Oscar was gone. The puppies were an “accidental” litter from our little black and white feist that Ann had named Snoopy. There were only two puppies, and they were quiet-natured, unlike their more spunky, inquisitive mother. They loved being cuddled up in a baby blanket and being tucked into a warm bed for their nap (really, who wouldn’t?), and Ann loved to take care of them.
When we became too large to sit on the little furniture, the playhouse served as a rock collection museum, school room, and library. Later on, it was repurposed again into a clubhouse (albeit very small) for my neighborhood friends and me as we dreamt of boys and life and horizons far more sweeping than our own. No matter its uses, my parents maintained the playhouse, painting it when our real house was painted and making sure that it was rainproof (and snake proof!), even when we became too big and busy to fit inside.
Years later, my children and Ann’s children played in the house when they came to visit their grandparents. They took turns sweeping the wooden floor and sitting in the little chairs and sofa. My aunt sometimes came and joined them as my oldest daughter, Olivia, her blonde curls bouncing and her eyes bright with excitement, served tea and cookies to her younger sisters and cousins. Since Aunt Margaret was too big to sit on the furniture, she had to sip her tea while sitting on the hard floor! But even though she was in her seventies and surely her back must have hurt, I never heard her complain. Not once. And sometimes, if it were an exceptionally fine summer day, she would bring fried chicken and an egg custard pie so that everyone could have real food for a change! On those days we all drew up lawn chairs around the little front porch and had a picnic.
Eventually my mother—and then my father—passed on, leaving a rift in our hearts that will never really be mended. For a while, my sister and I spent every Saturday afternoon on my parents’ old farm cleaning and going through their belongings and thinking about all the memories. While we sorted through piles of Tupperware, Corning Ware, and old knickknacks, our youngest children played in the little house and in the creek that ran through the farm. Sometimes Aunt Margaret came down and played too. In her mid-eighties by then, she was getting stooped over, but somehow managed to throw a pretty sophisticated tea party.
But afterwards, the little house sat there alone. Our children all grew up, and there were no more little ones left to play there, no one to imagine all kinds of possibilities within its walls. By then, Walton and I had bought our own farm, just five miles down the road, and had moved the horses and most of the remaining barn items to our own place so that we could better take care of them. We rented the old homeplace out since we were unable to let it go. When I drove by, I could hardly see the playhouse since the catalpa tree had gotten so large,
But to my surprise, one day in November—near my birthday! —Walton managed to have the little house trailered over to our own farm and placed near the barnyard under a big maple tree. He made a new porch for it, and I painted it gray to match our house. With absolute joy, I arranged the old, faded orange furniture and hung up a few prints on the walls. The guardian angel print had disappeared over the years, but Aunt Margaret, (now in her nineties!) dutifully supplied me with another one.
Maybe someday we will have grandchildren for the guardian angel to watch over as they put their stuffed animals to bed in the playhouse and sweep the floors with a little broom. Perhaps they too will sit inside during a thunderstorm and smell the rain and imagine all the possibilities beyond its little walls. But for now, the chickens enjoy sunning on the porch and the squirrels find their way in, leaving gifts of acorns and hickory nuts on the little table. Our collie likes to lie in the shade nearby and oversee the farm as the clouds roll in and out of the horizon.
And when we are fortunate enough to have guests staying on the farm, the barnyard transforms into a hub of activity! The little house is again filled with laughter and the tinkling of tea party china as the smallest vacationers load little plates with nuts and dandelion leaves along with an assortment of plastic “pretend food” left over from my daughter’s old toy box.
Just the other day I saw that a child had decorated the outside of the structure with fall-colored leaves and twine. She served tea and pretend biscuits to her parents and grandfather who were visiting that week. Since they were not all able to fit in the little house, they sat outside in lawn chairs, and Eleanor delivered their treats straight to their laps. At one point I walked by and was treated to a piece of plastic chocolate cake garnished with a chicken feather! That made me inordinately happy. How happy my dad would have been to know that the little house was still being used by children well over fifty years later. He made it to last. Just like my memories.
