My Childhood: Highland

My parents rented a house in Highland, near 6th Street. I remember this house well. It was small, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. It’s most prominent feature was a huge swamp cooler, nestled on massive four-by-four stilts, behind the house.

The best part of this house was the very large back yard. It was huge (perhaps half an acre), and my dad took advantage of the opportunities it provided. He painstakingly put together a garden, in which he grew roses and other flowers, and many kinds of vegetables.

I don’t know if he built the duck pond, or if it came with the house. Regardless, he went out one day and returned with some ducks and geese. I remember the geese were huge, white birds with bad tempers. The ducks were my friends.

Of course, being a curious child, I explored every inch of this wondrous place. I crept under the bushes behind the pond, I crawled under the porch, and I explored the maze behind the plants in the garden.

One day I was exploring, and decided to take a look under the big swamp cooler. I hadn’t looked under there before, because I was a little scarred. It looked huge, and I was afraid it would fall on me. Also, it was always dripping slimy water, which I didn’t really enjoy running down my face.

But I was bored and curious. So I crept under the cooler, and found a footlocker. It was locked with a padlock, which was partially rusted through. Easy enough for a smart young boy to pry open. As I opened up the lid, I was dreaming of buried treasure, perhaps it was full of gold coins or, even better, pirates cloths!

Instead, it contained very heavy metal objects. They were shaped strangely, with groves etched into their sides. They each had rings, obviously meant to be pulled, in the top. Other objects were long and thin, with pointy tops.

I picked up a couple of these things, and began tossing them from hand to hand. They were heavy, but that didn’t matter. This was my treasure! I didn’t know what they were for, but they looked valuable and alien.

I wandered into the house with these things. Boy, do I remember the look on my dads face when he saw me tossing them around. I never saw him move so fast in my life! He grabbed them, and demanded to know where I got them. I showed him the footlocker, which he closed. By this time I thought I had done something bad, so was crying.

Later, he sat me down and explained what I found. Apparently, the round, heavy objects with a ring in the top were hand grenades. The long thin objects were shells for a cannon of some kind (I remember they were very large). The footlocker also contained a variety of guns, military clothes and other assorted items.

I think my dad threw all of the stuff away, because I never saw the footlocker again. I shudder, thinking back, on how close I came to, maybe, killing myself and perhaps my family!