the incredible shrinking house.

When I was young, during the pre-elementary school years that everyone sort of vaguely remembers in a fuzzy dream, we lived in a house on Hillside Drive.  It was a white cape cod with a gray slated roof that angled sharply from a point in the center of the cubic house down to the top of the first floor.  Our street ran right behind the hospital where, once a year, they would hold the most glamorous fair with Aladdin's carpet slide and cotton candy machines.  My sister and I shared a room on the second story and my parents had the other across the hall.  There was a bathroom up there too, but I can't remember now the color of the wall paper.

I had won a contest, a drawing I think, at the dentist office.  The prize was a colossal stuffed dinosaur that was roughly five inches taller than I.  Owing to the fact that my favorite movie of all time (at that point) was Puff the Magic Dragon, it was quite possibly the greatest day of my life when I won.  They brought me into the office, put one of those floppy pointed princess hats on my head, and took portraits of me and my new guardian.  Then I took him home and dragged him around our castle of a house every day.  

Puff sat underneath the window in our room that looked out over the backyard.  There was an enormous tree reaching toward the window with grabbing hands that would moan and shiver in the wind.  It was the kind of tree that is incredibly enticing in daylight, yet completely terrifying during the night.  My dragon was the mystical keeper of our bedroom and then, when I got tired, my transportable bed of sorts.

When we moved away from West Chester I cried for months in desperation for the old house with the towering pointed roof, the grandfather trees and the window that was so high up above the ground.  Our new house was one story and seemed so diminutive to me then.  "Ginny," my dad would say softly to me, patiently, brushing my unruly hair away from my wet cheeks, "that house was much smaller than this house.  It just seemed bigger because it was tall."  I didn't buy it.  

In time I got used to the new house and I would lean up against Puff watching television in the basement.  He began shrinking, as I recall.  

Eventually we went back to visit the old house on Hillside Drive.  A blind man with a mean old seeing eye dog had purchased the home from us. He had torn down the white picket fence my father had put up and painted one summer as a gift to my mom and erected a five-foot chain-link replacement.  He filled my mom's flower beds with plastic toys for his son.  The brick porch was crumbling and the house seemed slightly less white and more grayish.  It was drizzling, as I recall, and I'm not good with rain, slightly seasonally affective.  

I was shocked.  "It looks so puny," I said to my parents with a kind of unimpressed grimace. We sat in the car with the doors closed, staring out the windows.  "It seemed so much bigger before."

"You were a lot smaller," my dad said.

"I just can't believe it!" I exclaimed. "I thought it was so enormous." I was thirteen now.  

"It was, to you," my mother said.