Hendersonville

Autobiography
After Wright Morris
For some years during my youth, my sister and I would spend a week or two during the summer at the home of a Scottish surgeon in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He and his family lived in an old restored Victorian house with an expansive yard that included a barn where a real horse resided. The front yard was mostly cleared, from what I remember, but at one corner there was a grove of pines that would give shelter from summer heat and provide a place to make plans and invent games. Along the right side of the house, if you were looking off the porch, was a straight driveway that turned into a circular loop as it came into the backyard. The driveway was paved with tiny white stones that would embed themselves into the soles of your Ked’s© and sometimes enter your shoe all together, becoming uncomfortable as hell.
Inside the circular driveway I remember a lone tree with a tire swing. This was also a good starting point for excursions, but I don’t remember anyone actually swinging on it. If someone had been swinging on it they would be facing the back porch, which was screened in and used mainly as a place to kick off muddy shoes and shake the little white stones out of your sneakers. Through a door off the right of the back porch, one would enter the kitchen and smell the smells of British households everywhere, a mix of roasting meat and lavender or some such scent. The smell would at once make you salivate, and mind your P’s and Q’s at the same time. It was here that I would start following my sister’s lead.
Dr. McConnachie, who we were allowed to call Chris, had three daughters and one son when we first started to visit. His wife Jenny was the most kindly, generous person I had known up to that point, family members excluded of course, for how can you be objective about people you’re around all the time. Their only son at the time, Cameron, was still a toddler, but I felt a kinship to him immediately because the poor chap was going to have to suffer three older sisters, just as I had. I felt I could be of help to him once he stopped dribbling strained peas all over his bib.
When we first arrived for the visit, the three daughters and my sister and I would just sort of stand around trying to think up something to say. Then Pandy, the oldest, or Natasha the next to the oldest, would suggest a game of Musher-Man and the ice would break. Actually it would shatter. The game of Musher-Man was so fun and exciting that we would forget our shyness and be fast friends for the rest of the stay.
The front of the house contained a wrap-around porch that seemed so vast that you could house a family there. When the dog-days hit, and Musher-Man’s novelty had worn off, this is where the marathon game of Monopoly would take place. Because I was too young to really grasp capitalistic commerce (I still am in many ways) this part of the stay was extremely boring to me. The porch had other diversions though, one of which was a porch swing that you could get going pretty well. Once, when I was pushing a full capacity load of shrieking girls to the limits of this porch swing, I had the bright idea of seeing if I could slide under it as it was in mid-swing. I couldn’t. The swing came back and hit me in the forehead. It was a good thing there was a surgeon around. Chris always seemed to be bandaging one of us up.
Upstairs, I was bunked down in Cameron’s room, which smelled of diapers, or nappys as the McConnachies called them. The other rooms seemed to be filled with thousands of interesting toys, mostly educational in nature, like magnetic alphabets and felt cutouts that you could recreate Bible scenes with. Usually we would forgo the use of these toys for the more interesting challenge of a drawing contest. As the girls drew puppies and flowers, I would draw tanks and airplanes. I felt I was the hands down winner as my drawings were less generic in subject matter. Jenny was usually the judge. We would all get a “Very Good” but I always felt slighted. Looking back it was Natasha who should have won. She is now an artist living in Colorado.
Chris and Jenny live in Africa now and have since sold the Hendersonville house. I can still feel the little white stones in my Ked’s© when I dream of that house.