The House by Phillip Hoyle

          We moved up to Clay Center, Kansas, on my fifteenth birthday, two counties away from my hometown Junction City. I was born in that Army town with population of around 20,000, adjoining Fort Riley, an Army post with a similar population, that sat next to another small city, Manhattan, with 20,000 population, home of a state university with about the same number of students. Although we weren’t leaving a metropolitan center, compared with the county seat town where we were headed, with its 5,000 population and one stop light, I felt like I was giving up civilization and moving to the center of nowhere.

          At least we were moving into an interesting house. We’d looked at several, each with strong points that appealed to me. Finally Dad and Mom purchased a roomy place with four bedrooms and a bath upstairs; parlor, family, dining, and utility rooms, entry hall with an exposed staircase that my sisters fantasized walking down in formals or wedding gowns, plus a kitchen on the main level; rough partial basement below and unfinished attic above; and an unattached garage, all sitting on three lots on the corner of Crawford and US 24, just one block east of Highway 15. It was a beautiful old place, built sixty years before for a local banker and his family. As the only boy, I got my own room but also a power mower so I could tend the huge yard. Around the same time as our move I dropped my long-standing subscription to The American Indian Hobbyist and began reading House Beautiful.

          Decorating became my theme. Mom was into the house project ordering drapes for the front rooms, buying an extra couch and slipper chairs for the parlor, shopping for a proper dining room set, bringing home fabrics, pillows, and endless ideas for making this house our home. I, too, started thinking about furniture, fabric, and fancy dishes. So immediately after the move, my next older sister Holly and I began haunting Mrs. Stedman’s antique store. We read House Beautiful and discussed our likes and dislikes. Then we shopped to see what we could find to realize our ideas. For months we saved our change and bought a Victorian marble-top coffee table as a gift for Mom. At the end of that first year my sister went off to college in another town. I still pored over the magazine to find ideas for my room.

          One day I noticed an ad for an art print company in New York City and sent off a letter requesting their catalogue. In a couple of weeks I received the illustrated listing and found myself entranced by a print of a painting depicting the torso of a young man wearing no shirt and the top button of his Levi’s open. I wanted that print but couldn’t imagine how anyone would hang such a picture in their house or room. But there it was in a nationally-advertised magazine in full color like an invitation into another world.

          I ordered several prints although not the one I most wanted. In figuring out what to do with them, I realized I needed frames and returned to the antique store we now called the junk shop. For years I had hung prints on my bedroom walls with straight pins. Now I needed to frame them, a need that has persisted throughout my adult life. I enjoyed my years in that beautiful old house with its fancy woodwork, neat window treatments, and the pictures I’d framed.

          A couple of years later I was moving into a college dorm and then three years after that was living in an apartment with my wife. Over the decades of our marriage we lived in several houses and apartments. Together we decorated creating a blend of our tastes. Often she’d move the furniture; I’d hang the pictures selected from an ever growing collection of framed paintings and prints that represented a diversity of style and content. Still there was no torso on display except in the bathroom mirror.

          Years later, after our separation, I started spending nights with my lover Rafael. He’d invited me to his house after a flirtation of several months. There we made love to one another. I was content to spend night after night in this boyish man’s apartment; he was intent on making a marriage of sorts out of our connection. Finally he said I should bring my clothes. “This will be our home, your apartment your office,” he said. Although I was quite taken with him and our relationship, I clearly saw that his apartment lacked style and ornament. It consisted of a large open room with a kitchen along one wall, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Rafael owned two couches, a floor lamp, a small table with two chairs for meals, a big TV that sometimes worked sitting on a large sewing table, a double bed mattress and springs, a single mattress leaning against the wall, a small chest of drawers, his clothes and several boxes of whatnots. From my point of view the apartment’s best feature was a small air conditioning unit in the bedroom wall.

          Together we sought to make this California-style apartment house unit our home. As we moved the furniture, I recalled my House Beautiful interest, the transformation of that old house in my teen years, my cooperative decorating experiences with my wife, and my continuing fascination with furniture and much more. Rafael and I found a bed frame and a lamp in the alley. From my office, I brought over my great grandmother’s wardrobe for the bedroom, a chair for the living area, and a portable sewing machine for Rafael to use. Then one day when Rafael was at work I brought framed paintings and prints to decorate the walls of this cold apartment. The transformation was immediate. The place finally looked lived in and warm. As I hung a collage of a pair of cowboy saints and other gay-themed art, I recalled the print that had so attracted my high school self but realized that this house didn’t need such a picture, for here I lived with a sexually inviting man who thrilled me in ways much more complex and satisfying than that intriguing image of years ago.

          The apartment finally complemented the warmth of our love. There we fixed Mexican, French, Italian, Spanish, Asian, and American dishes for one another. We entertained each other with stories of our lives. We cleaned, shopped, kissed, and kidded. We lived in that house beautiful a couple’s life of delight.

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

The House on the Plains by Cecil Bethea

Out east of Denver, off the Interstate and about twenty miles south on state road 95 stands the house.  Being two storied sets it apart from most houses of its era, about World War I.  The others were usual one storied with some Victorian trappings: a tower, a bit of stained glass in the front door, fancifully turned spindles in the the porch’s bannisters.  This house, facing east, stands off the highway about a hundred yards amid three thirst stunted cottonwoods and some desiccated shrubs unwatered for years.  Off to the left runs a rutted road that leads to the back.  Recent tire marks suggest a rendevous for teen age frolics in illicit drinking or couplings.  The yard was naked except for weeds dead from the December cold. 

No mailbox stood out front -- not even a tilted post remained although the ground was still compressed by the wheels of the R.F.D. drivers making their daily stops.  Steps leading up to porch are rickety at best even without the three missing treads.  Also gone is part of the porch bannister.  An empty space is agape where a door and sidelights had once stood possibly the result of a midnight raid of a homebuilder with not quite enough money.  The two story porch is supported by square columns made of six inch planks still showing a few splotches of white, perhaps the remains of plantation pretensions.  Boards long gone from the porch floor make like miniature moats to the trespasser.  Probably this area had been furnished with caned-back rockers, benches, a glider, a porch swing, maybe even a hammock.

Inside the dust driven by the winds has accumulated in whirls.  Of course the kids years ago had come for miles to pleasure themselves breaking out the windows .  Each of the four downstairs rooms has a fireplace that had been sealed up with holes for the pipes of the heating stoves.  Even though every room has two windows, at least the occupants had some heat.  A dozen or so recent Coors cans attest to a rustic bacchanal.  Evidently once there had been a built in sideboard because its alcove is an ugly void.  Attached to the dining room is the kitchen which juts out west toward the mountains.  The sink is long gone with only a hole in the floor which had held the drain pipe.  Probably pried out for scrap and sold by some desperate soul to feed his family during hard times or to slake his thirst with a six pack of Coors or maybe even two.

The northwest room downstairs has a built-in closet added later.  This was probably the bedroom of the parents or maybe the grandparents so that they could avoid the stairs.  Upstairs would be the sleeping quarters for the rest of the family.  Four rooms seems a bit excessive even for the fecund families who lived on the plains but were also frugal.  Even if the parents did sleep upstairs with the grandparents down below, two rooms could have easily held eight children with two to the bed.  Maybe the spare room was for a spinster sister or aunt who had no where else to go.  It could have belonged to a bachelor brother who owned a piece of the farm.  We’ll never know.

No doubt at least four generations had once called this place home, a place to cherish or escape.  Today we can only imagine the love and hate that strutted through the rooms, crises that waxed and waned, problems that bubbled and boiled.  Love of a parent for an unworthy child. Brothers vying for anything.  Sisters comparing boy friends.   Fighting amongst the kin over an inheritance.  A wedding for love or necessity.  The death of a grandchild from whooping cough or the death of a grandparent from old age.  The parties on a summer Saturday.  Christmas dinners.  The prayers for rain.  The worries about making mortgage payments.  If we knew such tales as these, we could embody the ghosts that drift about the place.

The house is blasted by the winter winds and broiled by the summer suns. the boards are warped with protruding nail heads. Each year it weakens.  Finally one winter worse than those of past decades will pile snow upon the roof.  A blast will descend from the ice caked banks of the Yukon and blow the house down.  An alternative is that on a hot summer’s day a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand will grow into one that’s as black as a mother-in-law’s heart and stretches from here to yonder.  Darts of lightening will spark down to earth.  A funnel will form and metastasize hitting the house with one wild eddy of wind and scattering the shards all over the plains. A more realistic expectation is that some liquored up teenagers, seeking new thrills, will set it afire to see a really big fire.  They will dance to rhythms unconceived and the sparks will soar into the purple night of the plains.

As yet, the house still stands moldering away out on the emptiness of the plains, a mute Wurthering Heights waiting for a Bronte to tell its tale.

About the Author


My Biography in 264 Words

          Although I have done other things, my fame now rests upon the durability of my partnership with Carl Shepherd; we have been together for forty-two years and nine months as of today, August 18th, 2012.

          Although I was born in Macon, Georgia in 1928, I was raised in Birmingham during the Great Depression.  No doubt I still carry invisible scars caused by that era.  No matter we survived.  I am talking about my sister, brother, and I .  There are two things that set me apart from people.  From about the third grade I was a voracious reader of books on almost any subject.  Had I concentrated, I would have been an authority by now; but I didn’t with no regrets.

          After the University of Alabama and the Air Force, I came to Denver.  Here I met Carl, who picked me up in Mary’s Bar.  Through our early life we traveled extensively in the mountain West.  Carl is from Helena, Montana, and is a Blackfoot Indian.  Our being from nearly opposite ends of the country made “going to see the folks” a broadening experience.  We went so many times that we finally had “must see” places on each route like the Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky and the polo games in Sheridan, Wyoming.  Now those happy travels are only memories.

          I was amongst the first members of the memoire writing class.  While it doesn’t offer criticism, it does offer feed back.  Also just trying to improve your writing helps no end.

          Carl is now in a nursing home, I don’t drive any more.  We totter on.