The Pink House — an earliest memory haibun

“We’re going to the pink house” was music to my ears, and to this day, it evokes my earliest childhood memories. I was fortunate to have both sets of my grandparents living in my town, and I’m guessing it was much easier for my parents to communicate with me by referring to our destination as the pink house versus grandma and grandpa Wilson’s house. Besides, the house was painted pink, and it’s not very often you get use that phrase in a sentence.

I loved my grandparents, they loved me, and I loved going to the pink house. A trip there usually meant two things: 1) my grandpa would be making popcorn in his special pan with the crank on top, and 2) I would get to sleep in the front windows.

adventure awaits
those going to the pink house
painted with great love

I would watch in wonder and amazement as my grandpa placed a small layer of corn kernels and some oil in the pan, cover it up, put it on the stove, and start turning the crank. Before long, I could hear it popping, but eventually the popping would stop. He’d shake the pan a little, give any remaining kernels a chance to explode, and then open it up to reveal the former small hard yellow inedible kernels had magically transformed into large fluffy white tasty morsels.

After the popcorn was gone, my grandma would fix me a bed in the front windows. In the summertime, she would throw open all the windows, allowing a cooling breeze to pass over me. I would stare out the window at the little park across the street, trying to stay awake as long as I could, but eventually succumbing to dreamland.

warm summer evenings
popcorn and window sleeping
pink house memories

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Linked to dVerse Poets Pub – Walk with me down Memory Lane… where today, Lillian has challenged us to recall our earliest memory and relate it in a haibun.

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When I was born, my maternal grandparents lived in our city.  They moved away when I was about five, so all my visits to their home in town predate that age.  Whenever we would go to visit them, it was called going to the “pink house” instead of going to my grandparents. 

My grandpa’s stovetop popcorn pan was similar to this one. I remember the red crank handle.

Here’s the pink house today, courtesy of google street view. As you can see, it’s no longer pink, and probably has not been for many decades. It sits on Collingwood Boulevard, Toledo, Ohio in the old west end, about two blocks from the Toledo Museum of Art. The little park across the street is called Toledo Spain Plaza,

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HAIBUN (hie’-bun, the ”u” pronounced as in “put”) A Japanese form in which a prose text is interspersed with verse, specifically haiku (three lines containing a total of seventeen syllables). A haiku typically appears at the end of a haibun, but other haiku may appear earlier, even at the beginning. Haibun often takes the form of a diary or travel journal. — Definition from the poetry dictionary by John Drury.