Homesickness... and Adjusting to California...

A recent pic of the Big Old House in Pine Bluff that was a duplex in 1955...

While I was in the fifth grade and we were living on Fourth Avenue, I suffered homesickness. These attacks on my mind came mostly at night, or when I was soaking in the bathtub. I wanted to go back to Pine Bluff, to my relatives (especially Aunt Berl who had lived with us as long as I could remember and had cared for me when I was very small) just to see them again and to see what was going on there.

It wasn't as if we could Skype. We would have had no idea what a computer was, much less the internet. Letters were our only contact, and by snail mail they cost about three cents to mail, although it may have taken more than a week for it to get there. It cost more to mail it "Air Mail." In those days there was a difference between regular mail and air mail. Remember, even jet planes had not yet been invented. So even with air mail, that meant prop planes and many stops, and would take maybe four days to cross the country. We thought that was pretty good.

Unlike a few of our friends at school, we didn't get an allowance. Nothing. Nada. Zero. We were aware of our parents' struggle to find work. Lathing jobs were not always available. Daddy and Mama once worked in the grape vineyards pruning grape vines that winter when no lathing jobs were available. I remember them talking about it at supper. They were under some of those tall vines after all the grapes had been harvested, cutting down the "branches" so new ones would grow, when suddenly a rabbit appeared out of the vines, startling Mama. "I nearly jumped outta my skin," she said. Daddy laughed. But they both came home really tired.

So I longed to talk to my family in Arkansas and tell them just how different was our life in California. It never occurred to us to call them by phone. Long Distance was expensive, and no one had Nationwide Calling. Our family probably didn't make five long distance calls in the first five years we were in California. And Texting had not yet been invented.

I missed the big trees and the rain storms, the fall colors, the piano lessons with Mrs. Simmons, and our long time friends at our Church of God in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I was really homesick sometimes. California was another world.

For instance, School. In Arkansas I had always walked or rode my bike to school which was only about six blocks away. In California I had to ride the school bus when we lived on Fourth Avenue. I didn't much like the school bus, but it would be fun to brag about it to the kids in Pine Bluff.

Another thing that was different was that in Arkansas there were only white kids like me at my school, even though black folks lived next door and across the street from us in Pine Bluff. None of our neighbors, though, had kids that I saw or knew, although a lot of black kids filed past our house in the afternoons to go to their school. Schools were racially segregated in those days in Arkansas and all over the South.

Not so in California. In Delano, I found, there were two black kids and about seven or eight Mexican kids in my fifth grade class of about 25. And the Mexican kids sometimes spoke Spanish to each other. I wondered what they were saying. There was also a Filipino girl who was very friendly and kind to me, and a Japanese girl in the class next door, who eventually became one of my best friends. It was a pleasant surprise to find that people who don't look like me may have a lot in common with me, may even be a lot smarter than me, and have the potential to be dear and wonderful friends.

I gradually lost the homesickness as time passed. However, for many years even into my adult years, I had dreams about the big old house on Second Street in Pine Bluff. I would dream that I returned there and whoever was living there invited me in and everything was the same... But something would always happen in my dream that I couldn't stay there. You know how dreams are.

Many years later in 1979 I did return to that house while on a trip to the South from my home in Anchorage, Alaska. I had my ten-year-old daughter, Rachel and my four-year-old son, Jon with me. We drove through Pine Bluff on our way to visit Aunt Berl who was living in Mississippi at the time.

I found that house and took the kids up to the door with me and knocked. The mail box by the door had the letters W-A-L-K-E-R above it, so when a small, frail black lady answered the door, I asked, "Are you Mrs. Walker?"

"Yes," she stepped outside on the porch and closed the door behind her. I explained we were passing through town on our way to visit relatives in Mississippi, and that I used to live in this house when I was a child. She was a bit skeptical at first, and asked if we were perhaps related to the original owners, whom she said she knew.

"Oh, no," I said. "We never knew them. We were just renters. I think the landlord's name was Mr. Hood, and his daughter was in my class at school."

She smiled and invited us into the house, showed us all through the whole house, which was no longer a duplex. Her husband had renovated it and it was gorgeous. She had been the librarian at school until she retired, and was taking care of her aging mother. She introduced us to her mother.

We talked a long time. She knew Mrs. Simmons who lived up the street, the teacher who had given me piano lessons. After we left, I tried to find the Simmons' house, but couldn't remember exactly where it was. Anyway, after having visited the house again, that was the end of my recurring dreams about it. It was resolved.