Elberta and Overton - Miles Hawthorne

My first home was at 1201 Elberta Street in Houston’s Sunny Side. I see on Google Maps that the house is gone and the corner lot where it stood is empty and largely overgrown with trees (or was when the photo was taken). Still, the neighborhood appears to be much as it was more than sixty years ago, consisting of modest homes with shade trees and lush lawns. One change is that the side street, Redbud, is now paved in asphalt rather than oyster shells. There was a screen porch on the back of the house with glass louver windows, alongside a camellia bush. In the back yard was a detached garage with a workshop accessed through a side door, where my father made furniture for the house in his spare time. (I still have the coffee table he made, and which I scarred with a saw, trying to be helpful when he was at work in the oil fields. When he assembled the three of us and demanded to know who had done the damage, I happily claimed it, they say, announcing, “Me saw! Me saw!” But the table got me back, if you will. After my father had finished it and installed its marble top and placed it in our little living room, I, with the idea of the man on the flying trapeze in mind, tried jumping back and forth between that table and the sofa. The first leap, to the couch was successful, but the cushions didn’t give so much support as the table. I fell short, my forehead striking the edge of the marble top, my wail bringing my mother out of her bath. I still bear the scar, though it blends now with the creases.)

We left there when I was four-plus and moved to 4824 Overton in Fort Worth. Overton at that time ended in open prairie that filled the far south side of the city. Soon earth-moving equipment appeared to build Loop 820, a service road that ran across the end of our street and beyond which the city proceeded to grow prodigiously. We would often find “horny toads” in the neighborhood, probably displaced from the prairie, and learned to handle them without getting our fingers pinched between their horns and their necks when they tilted their heads back in defense.

Our house was built on the last vacant lot on the street, and the first heavy rain made it obvious why our lot was still available for building when my parents bought it. The water rose against the back corner of the house and flooded the patio, soaking the carpet in my sister’s room and, entering the den, causing the linoleum there to come loose in big bubbles. After a few such incidents, my father dug a shallow trench along the side of the house and down the slope to the street, where he broke through the curb and then laid drainage pipe back to the front corner of the house, covered it, and mended the curb with concrete. That solved the problem. We then tore up the linoleum and laid ceramic tile in the den and adjoining kitchen and hallway and to the front door as a family project. Because my father decided it wasn’t necessary to follow the instructions to wipe the grout away while it was still fresh, for quite a while we lived with its cloudy residue.

The drainage issue arose from the fact that the lot had needed a good bit of fill to level it, so that our house and yard stood in the way of the natural flow. This fill wasn’t packed as tight as it might have been, and over the years the front (NE) corner subsided a bit, which probably accounts for why the concrete of the steep driveway delaminated, leaving rough spots and loose aggregate, and certainly explains why later a door we installed in the attic would stick and why a crack appeared along the peak of the attic ceiling. I see, however, that the house still stands to this day, even with the stair-step crack running up the red brick on the north side.

The neighborhood was populated mainly by families with children around the age of my two older siblings and me, so we had lots of playmates. Early in our residence, however, some of them informed us somewhat resentfully that before our house was built, that lot had been their playground. But as things developed, it retained that legacy, as our yard and front porch became a favorite gathering place and the venue for the game Run Around the House, our version of Fox and Geese. We were disappointed when the city installed streetlights that dispelled the darkness that facilitated that and other games of pursuit and concealment.

While the houses on our side of the street were built on sloping lots with steep driveways, those across the way were on level ground with flat driveways to match. Behind those houses was a drainage area with open ground where we played baseball, blew up plastic models with firecrackers, and picked and threw at each other the stalked, sharp-pointed seeds of grasses known as “Indian needles” that would stick in the victims’ clothes and prick their skin. One day walking through there on my way home from school I found two tall weeping willows covered with Monarch butterflies.

Sometimes some of us, usually boys, would set out in a group to explore farther afield, where there were still plenty of interesting natural landforms in the undeveloped areas. These included a creek that was usually dry, but after rains formed a waterfall tall enough for us to stand in. Nearby were jumbled remains of what we took to be old concrete “pillboxes” left over from artillery practice when the area had been part of the Army’s Camp Bowie, apparently dumped there among piles of dirt.

Eventually we finished the unfinished attic. My brother painted a mural of classical ruins above a ledge in the staircase, and when I was twelve, after he left home for college, one end of the attic became my bedroom. Its single window looked northward, onto the facing slopes of South Hills where from that same year I would hike with my skateboard, looking for hills that were challenging without being life-threatening.