133 Leighton Drive, Ventura, CA, 93001, about 1994
My great grandparent’s house in Ventura, California was built in 1925 down the block from where it currently stands and was moved up and set up on stilts in the location it is at the corner of Leighton and Cameron. A lot appears to be different these days as the asbestos siding is gone and has been replaced with stucco, and the white picket fence is gone, too. Hooray for the siding, but I am sad it has been replaced with stucco, and I am sure sad about the fence.
My first memory of the house goes back to Easter, when I was six years old, and Cousin Frankie hid some easter eggs around the yard for some of the younger ones to go looking for. I spotted the egg brilliantly hid on the top rail of the fence on the other side of a rose bush. I was too young to know better than to go for it, so I did, and it was quite upsetting. I withdrew from the bush with legs Poka dotted in blood. It is California and I was wearing shorts, so there was nothing to protect me from the damage.
I have lots of memories of that house and the people who lived there. But to sum them up, I will say it is a place where there are smells that I associate with it. Irish Spring soap is the smell I remember from the bathroom. I cannot remember the name of the scent from the freshly washed sheets, but I remember slipping into the bed in the back bedroom when I would stay. I also remember the sound of the voices in the kitchen and breakfast room the next mornings, my great grandparents and Butch and Shirley and my grandparents were a typical sound that morn. Working class people, they were usually talking about their jobs. But topics could vary. There was always laughter. I’d get up and follow the sounds and the scent of bacon cooking on the old gas stove. Back in those days, appliances would get old. It would be bacon and eggs and toast for breakfast, and I would always marvel at my great grandfather, “Slim,” who for some reason liked to cut the white away from his egg yolk, then eat the whole yolk in one bit, leaving no sign of it on his plate. It was at that house that I came to know the taste of buttered toast in the yolk, which is to this day is one of my favorite tastes, with a slight sprinkle of salt and pepper, of course.
I spent a Christmas there, too. I don’t remember it very well, but there are pictures around the house somewhere that show Frankie, my aunt Amy, and my great-grandparents and grandparents there. It was an event that was not repeated in the years to follow, I suspect because my great-grandparents were getting too old to host such events.
My great-grandmother, Amy, had a shopping cart from one of the little local grocery stores, the kind you very seldom see anymore, and she used it to haul her laundry from the back porch where the washer was, out to the line, where she would hang it to dry in the warm California sun.
The garage faced Cameron and was situated behind the house with a little driveway between the garage and the side yard. They kept a travel trailer on that driveway, and we took it camping locally several times, including the beach, and Wheeler Gorge Campground. They also went places further way, like The Fountain of Youth out by the Salton Sea, and up to Gree River, Wyoming, Flaming Gorge, Utah, and of course to Lyman, where one of my great-grandmother’s sisters lived. I was in the bed over the table in that trailer on Rincon one night, looking out in the moonlight the first time I ever saw a wave reflect off a beach wall then return and collide with the next one coming in. It splashed straight up into the air quite away and amazed me. That was the same beach we were on when my great-grandfather gave into my plea’s and let go of me to get hit by a wave, and I discovered in it that it was hollow as I can remember looking up the tube before it crashed in. At that age, I wondered if anyone else in the whole world knew this amazing thing!
Slim died in ’85. His Find-A-Grave link is here:
Merlin Fredrick “Slim” Siedenburg (1907-1985) – Find a Grave Memorial
Great Grandma lived on till ’93:
Amy Eliza Walker Siedenburg (1913-1993) – Find a Grave Memorial
After that, grandma got the house, then sold it around the year 2,000. By then, she and Grandpa Kelsey had divorced. Frankie was dead too. A lot had changed in the family over the years, but that old house was just the same in so many ways. Sometimes it’s the places, not the people who are the steadiest things in our lives.