The Brick House

 The house in Starr Valley, Nevada my grandparents moved to in 1944.

When I was a very little girl, my grandma and grandpa lived in Florida. My grandpa managed a ranch called Deseret there that's owned by the LDS Church.

 picture taken at Deseret Ranch:  from left my grandpa, Spencer W. Kimball (then president of the Church), Art Haycock, Camilla Kimball and my grandma

Every summer, they came home to Starr Valley, Nevada for a few weeks and we had two weeks of parties.  We spent our time with our cousins while the adults visited and laughed in the living room.

When it got late, Grandpa would call us all together for family prayer.

We would kneel around trying to stifle our giggles and maneuver ourselves in the ideal proximity to our favorite cousin of the moment.  All was quiet though, when Grandpa started to pray.

And though I don't remember any of the words, I will always remember how I felt to be there, with my family.

Our parents would take us home and put us to bed then go back to The Big House which is what we called the red brick house of my grandparents' that was up the hill from our house.

Unfortunately, the best picture I have of the house.  I wish I had a picture of its summer glory. 

When I was about eight years old, my grandparents moved back to Starr Valley for good.  They brought their horses, including Cross Bars (the horse President Kimball is riding in the picture).  He was instantly a favored and celebrity horse among the grandchildren. My grandma grew enormous red geraniums in the big windows that formed the corner where their kitchen table sat.  They filled their house with exotic items from their travels like a crocodile skull from Florida, a shark's tooth inside a prism on a window sill, and an Indian headdress from when my grandpa was mission president in South Dakota.

We had what my sisters and I called, "Dahl Parties".  They were socially treacherous at times, vying for the right cousin clique to be a part of (it's really dangerous to have that many girl cousins so close to the same age) but they also hold a prominent space in my Happy Childhood.

The red brick house was a wonderland.  I adored everything from the old fashioned bathtub to the Mickey Mouse phone in Grandpa's office presented to him by Disney. (It had a plaque on it to that effect.  I'm not sure why...it happened when they were in Florida.)

The Squeaky Bedroom was downstairs.  It was so named because of the very squeaky bed.  Also in that room, there was a deep closet we could wedge several cousins into and close the door.  When I read "The Chronicles of Narnia," I imagined the wardrobe to Narnia to be like the closet in the Squeaky Bedroom.

Upstairs, there was The Rose Bedroom.  The walls and vaulted ceiling were completely papered in rose wallpaper.  It was a dream confection for our girlhood fantasies.  Gauzy white curtains were at the window that overlooked the front yard, barn, fields, valley, eternity.

The rest of the upstairs was one enormous room with four queen sized beds and enough floor space for us to enact any sort of shenanigans we could conjure.  There was a big box of dress up clothes.  And over a dozen girl cousins within five years of each other.  You get the idea.

Some, but not all of the girls.  From left: Dixie, Margaret, Leslie, Britta, Sarah, Gretchen, Olivia, Marianne, Catherine, Danielle, Shanon and Erica.  Not pictured:  Elizabeth, Rachael, Molly, Rebekah, Josianne, Susan, Me, Hannah, and Jessica.

Outside the back window, in the big room, was the flat rooftop of the back porch.  Although we were not supposed to, we often climbed out of the window, crossed the flat roof then climbed onto the peaked roof of the storeroom at the very back of the house.  It was built into the side of the hill.  Balancing on the narrow ridge we'd walk across the roof then drop down to the grassy hill.  Such a feat!

The huge yard was its own marvel.  I loved the yellow roses, the tall, tall trees that left everything in a dappled shade, and the deep front porch.  We played in the lilac bushes and waded in the small stream that bubbled across the lawn.  In the orchard there were two tree houses, built by our parents in their youth.  The Little Tree House was in a small tree that was easy to climb and produced plump yellow apples.  The Big Tree House was in a much bigger tree and had a ladder.  Once when there was a Dahl Reunion with all of the extended family, Grandpa's siblings and their families, we staked out the Big Tree House as our own.  (We even pulled up the ladder to ward off invasion.) Who were all these extra cousins we didn't know and why did they think they could play in our orchard?  We hurled tiny, rock hard crab-apples at them.

After it got dark at the Dahl Parties (and the undulating laughter was still pouring out of the living room where the adults were), we'd play No Bears Are Out Tonight.  We had a handful of older boy cousins.  They'd hide off in the dark yard behind a tree.  A gaggle of girls would walk carefully around the yard, clutching each other in fright and singing, "No bears are out tonight, Daddy shot them all last night."  When the boys leaped out from their hiding spot and roared, we'd run screeching back to the security of the porch and the light pooling from the living room windows.

We weren't that scared really, though.  Nothing could get us in the familiar and wonderful place that was Grandma and Grandpa Dahl's house.

I never doubted it would be like that forever.



If you would like, click on over to Lily & Thistle where I am the happy-to-be-invited guest blogger.