This is my exercise...
I was the fourth house away from the park. Grandma was next to me. After she had her stroke, we needed her to be closer so we could keep an eye on her. She rented the house next to ours because she refused to live with my father. My father was at ease when she refused. He didn’t want her to live with us either. I heard him and Mom nervously talking about their options one night.
“Joe, she’s your mother,” my mom persisted.
“Exactly why she can’t live with us,” he responded.
“Then where?”
“What about next door? I’ll pay the rent. Just as long as she isn’t here.”
I had no opinion in the matter. I was twelve years old and spent most of my time in my room on the computer or with the twins two houses down. Calvin and Amanda were seven minutes apart. Calvin was older; he never let us forget it. If we weren’t talking on the computer, we were at the park swinging and talking about how much we hated school.
When were younger, our mothers would walk us down to the park and let us play for hours on end while they smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. Smoking cigarettes wasn’t allowed on the park grounds. And it sure wasn’t allowed at my house. My dad would divorce my mom in a heartbeat if she knew she smoked. The park was her only way of getting her fix. Now that I’m too old for her to accompany me to the park, she stands over the kitchen sink with the exhaust fan on over the stove and blows the smoke out of the window. My father always sniffs when he comes home from work but doesn’t question much. Soon he’ll put the blame on me because I’m going to be in those rebellious teenage years.
The park was always empty. The kids in the neighborhood grew up and there wasn’t a new generation after ours. The families stopped having kids or moved away. Calvin, Amanda, and I would pick up sticks on our short walk to the park or kick stones all the way to the entrance. We would usually hang out on the swings sitting sideways and not swinging at all. Our talks were about Mrs. Myers yellow teeth and boring homework assignments or the house that was right before the park.
The house was maroon with black shingles on the roof. It was completely surrounded by a 6-foot fence. We only saw the second floor from the road. When we speculated who lived there we would climb the monkey bars and sit on top of them to see the rest of the house. The view wasn’t the best but it helped. Most of the shutters were barely hanging on. The screen door looked like it had holes in it and the grass was brown. It probably didn’t get the proper sunlight because of the fence. Mom said the house should be condemned, whatever that means.
We are also told to include a small reflection based on what we have and what we wish to accomplish.
*This self-directed exercise is based off of the map that I drew of Oliver Street. The map allowed me to reference to what the characters were interacting with. It allowed for the story to have more organization. It was interesting to see how I would stay within the framework of the drawing. The organization helped because I could keep the details clean and precise. I wanted to write a story from a child’s perspective after reading Pilgrims by Julie Orringer. It seemed interesting to write in a child’s point of view. I often found myself trying to tone down the vocabulary to what a 12 year old would know.
Eventually, I would have the story have the kids venture onto the property and find a child, about 10 years old, living on her own. I am not sure if I would have the child live there after her mother died in the house or have the child live there because she stumbled upon the abandoned house after fleeing from an orphanage. I guess I would have to see where the story took me.