French Street

I was four years old when we lived on French Street. An historical two-story green duplex, which had served as officer quarters for the Jeffersonville Quartermaster Depot. My babysitter lived next door. One day at lunch, I looked at her hands and thought: Your hands are so beautiful. How lucky you are to get to keep them. My brother had insisted that, because I had touched a corroded battery, my fingers were going to rot off. He had also turned my tricycle into a go cart and frequently brought snakes into our front yard. Sometimes I would take my nap on the couch next door, sucking my thumb for comfort. Now and then the babysitter would send me home to nap alone, where there was no comfort: something monstrous lurked in the kitchen. And upstairs, in my mother’s dark bedroom directly to the right of the top stair, lived a wicked beast. Avoiding the beast required running from stairwell straight ahead to bathroom, or from stairwell to the right on a diagonal to bedroom, which resulted in more exposure time in the large open hallway. The basement, with its fresh pile of coal and ancient coal-burning furnace delivered its own horror.