The house I grew up in is long gone. 14 Keyes Street in Florence became a bank parking lot, the victim of commercial development. But I visit that house often.<\/p>\n
In my earliest memories, I\u2019m riding my tricycle back and forth on the sidewalk out front, in the shade of two large maple trees. The house was a two-story with white clapboards and maroon shutters. We lived on one side with a long front porch. On the other side was our landlord with half a dozen cats.<\/p>\n
That was probably my parents\u2019 first apartment, a short walk from International Silver on Main Street where my father found work when he came back from the war, and I was born. My little sister would come along six years later.<\/p>\n
Only three of the rooms\u2014my parents\u2019 bedroom, mine, and a small kitchen\u2014 were livable. Four others, long vacant and neglected, still had gas jets on wall sconces.<\/p>\n
My room featured an area of bare plaster above a floor register, where dry heat from the coal furnace had peeled back the wallpaper. That white patch made a perfect viewing screen for picture reels in my View-Master projector.<\/p>\n
My closet gave me the creeps, especially at night. Horsehair poked through crumbling plaster, and my little boy imagination told me the corpse of some murder victim was emerging through the wall.<\/p>\n
On summer evenings, my window to the front porch was propped open by a screen in a wooden frame that kept out most of the mosquitoes. Smoke from my father\u2019s Chesterfields drifted through the mesh, along with the resonant voice of Curt Gowdy doing play-by-play of Red Sox games on my dad\u2019s AM radio.<\/p>\n
Railroad tracks next to our house along Depot Avenue, then a dirt road, carried a
\nslow-moving freight train that always stopped before crossing Keyes Street. We called it the Burgy Bullet. The engineer blew the whistle, a man stepped off, waved a red kerosene lantern to stop cars, then hopped onto the caboose as the train crawled through. <\/p>\n
A few years ago, I was thumbing through the pages of a book about Florence with photographs of houses built at the turn of the twentieth century, stately homes with residents standing by them in formal poses. Wouldn\u2019t it be great, I thought, to have a picture like that of the house that I grew up in. I turned a few more pages, and there it was!<\/p>\n
It was called Fruit Street back then, before the name was changed to eliminate confusion with another Fruit Street in Northampton. In that black-and-white photo, a different little boy, maybe five years old, stands on the front lawn beside a wagon with his<\/em> little sister.<\/p>\n We moved out of that house when I was in high school. I didn\u2019t see its demolition, and I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t. For me, 14 Keyes Street still exists, in a snapshot in my mind.<\/p>\n February 7, 2022<\/p>\n The House on Keyes Street The house I grew up in is long gone. 14 Keyes Street in Florence became a bank parking lot, the victim of commercial development. But I visit that house often. In my earliest memories, I\u2019m riding my tricycle back and forth on the sidewalk out front, in the shade of … Continue reading Ed Orzechowski<\/span>
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