Description

In this descriptive essay, student Mary White imaginatively recreates her childhood home in the
country.

My Home of Yesteryear

by Mary White

Situated on the bend of a horseshoe-shaped dirt road that intersects a back country highway is the
place I called home as a child. Here my elderly father raised his two girls without the help or
companionship of a wife.

The house is set back about 200 feet from the road, and as we saunter up the narrow dirt
pathway, lined with neat rows of flamboyant orange gladiolas on each side, the tidy appearance
of the small, unpainted frame house entices us to enter.

Up the steps and onto the porch, we can't help but notice a high-backed rocker on one side and a
bench worn smooth by age on the other. Both remind us of the many vesper hours spent here in
the absence of modern-day entertainment.

Turning the door knob and entering the parlor is like taking a step back in time. There is no lock
on the door and no curtains on the windows, only shades yellowed with age, to be pulled down at
night--as if you needed privacy out here in the boondocks. Dad's big over-stuffed armchair is set
beside the well-stocked bookcase where he enjoys passing a hot afternoon with a good book. His
bed, an old army cot, serves as a couch when company comes. One lone plaque with the words
"Home, Sweet Home" adorns the wall over the mantelpiece.

Just to the left is a doorway, minus a door, beckoning us to investigate the aroma drifting our
way. As we step into the kitchen we are overtaken by the rich smell of freshly baked bread.

Dad is removing the loaves from the belly of Old Bessie, our coal-burning cookstove. He leaves
them to cool in neat rows on our homemade plank table.

Turning toward the back door, we see an honest-to-goodness ice box, and yes, there's a genuine
silver quarter for the ice man to take in exchange for 50 pounds of dripping ice.

I can picture him now as he snatches the tongs tightly into the frozen block, causing tiny slivers
of sparkling ice to fly everywhere. Swinging it down off the back of his chug-a-lug of a truck
and instantly throwing his other arm up to keep his balance, he staggers with his load toward the
back door. Hoisting the block of ice into place, he gives a long, loud sigh of relief and drops the
shiny quarter into his pocket.

Stepping outside the back door, we suddenly realize there is no running water in the kitchen, for
here stands the only water pipe around. The galvanized tubs, set upside down by the steps,
indicate that here is where most of the bathing occurs. A little footpath leads us to a hand pump,
somewhat rusty but still providing a cool refreshing drink--if we can prime the pump. As Dad
douses its rusty throat with water, it gurgles for a minute or two, then belches back a flood of
sparkling clear spring water, free from the chemicals the law requires of modern water systems.
But the pathway doesn't stop here. It winds on out behind a dilapidated shack. No imagination is
needed to know where it ends.

As dusk approaches we must slip around to the front porch and relax as we enjoy a country
sunset.

The sky is absolutely breathtaking with its soft ribbons of orange and violet. The sun, ablaze with
beauty, casts our long shadows across the porch and onto the wall behind us. Everywhere nature
is praising its Maker and singing its night songs. Off in the distance the whip-poor-wills are just
starting their nightly lamentations. The crickets and frogs join in while bats dart overhead in
search of a juicy tidbit for breakfast. Bats, you see, begin their day at sunset. The house itself
joins in the chorus with its creaks and cracks of contraction as the coolness of the evening settles
around us.

Indeed, a visit to the old homeplace brings back many fond memories, almost making us wish we
could turn back the clock to enjoy a few moments of peace and innocence.

For practice in re-creating the sentences in Mary's essay, see Sentence Combining: My Home of
Yesteryear.

Examples of Narrative Setting

 "The first den was a rock cavity in a lichen-covered sandstone outcrop near the top of a slope, a
couple of hundred yards from a road in Hawley. It was on posted property of the Scrub Oak
Hunting Club -- dry hardwood forest underlain by laurel and patches of snow -- in the northern
Pocono woods. Up in the sky was Buck Alt. Not long ago, he was a dairy farmer, and now he was
working for the Keystone State, with directional antennae on his wing struts angled in the
direction of bears." -- John McPhee, "Under the Snow" in "Table of Contents" (1985)
 "We hunted old bottles in the dump, bottles caked with dirt and filth, half buried, full of
cobwebs, and we washed them out at the horse trough by the elevator, putting in a handful of
shot along with the water to knock the dirt loose; and when we had shaken them until our arms
were tired, we hauled them off in somebody's coaster wagon and turned them in at Bill
 Anderson's pool hall, where the smell of lemon pop was so sweet on the dark pool-hall air that I
am sometimes awakened by it in the night, even yet.

"Smashed wheels of wagons and buggies, tangles of rusty barbed wire, the collapsed
perambulator that the French wife of one of the town's doctors had once pushed proudly up the
planked sidewalks and along the ditchbank paths. A welter of foul-smelling feathers and coyote-
scattered carrion which was all that remained of somebody's dream of a chicken ranch. The

chickens had all got some mysterious pip at the same time, and d ied as one, and the dream lay
out there with the rest of the town's history to rustle to the empty sky on the border of the
hills." -- Wallace Stegner, "The Town Dump" in "Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory
of the Last Plains Frontier" (1962)

 "This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of
chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring to the snowline. Between the hills lie high level-
looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze. The hill
surface is streaked with ash drift and black, unweathered lava flows. After rains water
accumulates in the hollows of small closed valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of
pure desertness that get the local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep and the
rains heavy, the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter, rimmed about with the
efflorescence of alkaline deposits. A thin crust of it lies along the marsh over the vegetating
area, which has neither beauty nor freshness. In the broad wastes open to the wind the sand
drifts in hummocks about the stubby shrubs, and between them the soil shows saline traces."
Mary Austin, "The Land of Little Rain" (1903)