Glenda and the House on the Hill; A short and incomplete story

Glenda was only five when they moved out of the old square symmetrical house on the hill. To this day (and it’s been 40 years) she can remember the shadows on the wall at night, the shingles that came down the sides just below the attic and the iron gate around the top of the house that made it appear to be a rooftop balcony, but to Glenda’s recollection, there were not stairs or doors that lead to the rooftop.
Her room was painted canary yellow with green accents, back then there was no way to know if a baby would be a girl or boy until it was born, so the nursery was usually painted in neutral colors. Now it seems there’s no way to know if a child is a boy or girl until it’s grown into adulthood. Yes times have changed in 45 years.
Glenda had fond memories of the symmetrical house on the hill. At Christmas, her mother would place a single plastic electric candle in each window of the old house. Her father would go out to the woods and chop down a huge tree and drag it in. Then her parents would bicker jovially as they placed the tree in the water holder, untangle the strands of lights and place the mismatched decorations on the tree allowing Glenda to place the unbreakable ornaments around the bottom. Glenda loved lying under the tree once it was trimmed in its holiday finest. She would look up and squint making the lights bounce and twinkle like stars. Her dog Scruffy would often lay with her and sometimes the cats would jump on a branch smashing one of the pretty glass ornaments.

It all changed once her father was offered a new job and they moved to the apartment in the city. Yes, they had more money and her mother wasted no time in decorating the New York apartment in lush finery. Their first Christmas there, her mother purchased a white artificial table top tree. There was no room for a fresh cut Douglas Fir. Glenda tried to squeeze her head under the tree and look up at the all white lights, but the effect wasn’t quite the same and she got poked in the eye by the plastic branches. The arched windows were adorn with sparkly foil bows and more white lights and there were no shadows on the walls at night, but there were the sounds of footsteps, bed springs, laughter and shouting from the other tenements. Her father often complained about the unnatural noises and how much he missed the symmetrical old house on the hill.

Glenda’s mother tisked and tasked about the drafty old dilapidated house with the outdated kitchen. However, once they moved to the city, her mother rarely cooked. In the old house she had made marvelous meals. In the city, they had fancy takeout food and usually ate with chopsticks out of paper cartons.

45 years later, Glenda was the mother of three beautiful boys all strapping young men (do people use the term ‘strapping’ anymore?) The boys loved their mother, but they were not immune to mischief growing up and she often caught her youngest William lying under the Christmas tree in the old symmetrical house on the hill. Squinting his eyes and looking up at the lights. Glenda shook her head with a huge smile on her face then crawled down on the floor beside him. She squinted her eyes and looked up in the tree at the beautiful colored lights and giggled as the colors became diamonds.