“Back in the Hills of Home”

One of the things I always liked about growing up in a small town in the 50s and 60s is that I had a great deal of freedom.  From the time I was in about third grade I was able to leave the house in the morning and go just about anywhere as long as I was home for lunch, or whenever I had to be there.  I hiked the Missouri River bluffs for a good ten miles in both directions north and south of Rock Port.  When I was in high school, some Fridays I’d leave after school and not be back until Sunday morning for church.

I explored all sorts of things while wandering around the countryside.  The old abandoned farmhouses were always interesting places to poke around inside.  I’m sure I violated trespassing laws more than once, but it wasn’t really something I thought too much about at the time.  I didn’t destroy anything (OK, I knocked out the remains of a broken window pane now and then), and I don’t remember taking anything.  Of course, there was never much left anyway.  Most of these buildings had been abandoned for twenty years or more.  A couple of the more famous ones in the area dated back to the 1860s.

These were typically small frame houses with only a few rooms.  Now and then I’d find a two story place.  They were all in sorry disrepair with holes in the roof, broken windows, unhinged doors, the ravages of small animals, and dirt.  But each one was always an adventure.

A popular and necessary method of insulating some of the older clapboard houses was to stuff newspapers between the outer and interior walls.  The mice loved this, but the didn’t chew up everything, and I liked to see how far back some of the issues went.  Attics were sometimes treasure troves of yellowed newspapers and magazines, too.  I spent many hours reading articles from the thirties and forties!

My imagination was stirred in so many ways in these places.  Often there would be some furniture, usually broken, but not always.  I remember one place that was still basically furnished.  Wooden tables and chairs, dilapidated, bloated sofas with the stuffing coming out where mice and other vermin had pulled it out for their nests—if the piece wasn’t one big nest itself!  I would find a place to dust off and sit so that I could read through what I had found and think about who might have once lived there and why they had left.  Dressless dolls with vacant eyes and wheel-less toy cars and trucks told of children I might have known in a different time.  I wondered if they went on to become the parents of my classmates, perhaps, or they might have been older still.  What caused them to leave and leave these things behind?  Where were they now?

One of the places that really stirred my imagination had some of that left-behind furniture, but the stories it conjured were really something!  The three-legged table and mismatched chairs in the kitchen were completely smashed.  Broken dishes had been left.  Jagged holes in the walls and doors gave evidence of blows struck by fists of flying objects.  The most intriguing find, however, was what was obviously a bloodstain on the kitchen floor!  It was a good three feet in diameter at one point with streaks disappearing beneath an old gas stove.  A single bloody footprint pointed to the back door!

I’ll bet I spent an entire afternoon in that place just digging around and letting my mind concoct its own private murder mystery.  I was almost later for supper that night, and Mom asked—as usual—what I’d been up to all day.  She was satisfied as she often was by my casual shrug and, “Oh, just hiking around in the bluffs.”  Although she loved a good mystery and could usually be counted on to give me some information on the places I’d found, I never told her or anyone else about the “crime scene” or some of the other special places.  I guess I’m doing that now.  Maybe I was just saving up.  Tag along.  I may take you with me some day.