We had a creaking wooden swing hanging on the wraparound porch of our 1915 Four-Square Arts & Crafts Home at 4554 St. Johns Avenue, Jacksonville. That swing had moved from the Avondale area of Jacksonville in 1935 to the location that I called home, my childhood “Eden.”
When the swing was in Avondale attached to the porch ceiling of my grandparents’ home it had an important mission: to entice my father to propose to my mother one cool spring evening. That was in 1930. By September they were husband and wife, working steady jobs to save enough money to buy their own house and dreaming of the future they would share.
In February 1935 they found that dream—two stories, brown cypress shingled—on the edge of town off Roosevelt Boulevard. It was almost country—two acres of overgrown yard, the inside worse than the outside. During Prohibition the house had been a “speakeasy,” then in the ‘30s a “legal” beer garden.
My parents hung that old porch swing around the side of the porch in a little alcove. My parents and grandparents tore out booths which ran along the side of the porch and throughout the inside, carting off truckloads of debris. Their phone number was “2-1935,” the month and the year they purchased that house.
During their first few weeks in the house, they slept upstairs on the “sleeping porch.” Late one night Daddy heard a car drive slowly up the long, dirt driveway, a horn honk and somebody yell out, “You open for business?”
Daddy got out of bed, went to the screened window and hollered back, “Nope. Closed for good.”
It took my parents 15 years to get their children. They adopted me in ’45 and eight years later got me a brother. We spent many hours of togetherness on that big porch, swinging and visiting. Thank goodness television didn’t become a part of our lives until the late ‘50s and air conditioning not until the ‘70s, so we had the rich experience of life on a front porch.
The porch swing didn’t last throughout my childhood, though. When it was finally taken down and used for kindling, we roasted hot dogs over the skeleton of that old swing. As it turned to ashes, I remember thinking that the smoke from that swing took with it ages of memories, spreading those sweet thoughts throughout this universe.
When our parents died in the ‘80s we sold the home and cleaned out the various outbuildings and their accumulation of 60 years of trash and treasure.
As I was piling junk high beside the roadway, an elderly man approached and asked, “Sellin’ the place?”
“Yes,” I responded, tears welling up in my eyes.
“Well, you know when I was a kid, I used to hide in them woods and when the revenuers wud toss those likker bottles over that fence, some just wudn’t break. Me and my buddies wud git us free likker.”
“My daddy used to tell me stories about those days,” I added.
“Well, did ja see that trap door under the kitchen floor where they’d hide the good stuff?” he casually enquired.
In utter amazement, I said I’d never heard about a trap door. After he rambled away I ran toward my old house, got down on my hands and knees and crawled up under the kitchen. And there, with a rusty screwdriver wedged in place, was that trap door. Just below that well-kept secret were broken bottles, one still bearing the label “Purity.”
Swings, love, ashes, broken bits of glass, and memories—life is oh-so-very precious.
Author’s Note: When I sold the house written into the deed was that the house could never be razed or moved from the property. It made the TV station in Jacksonville movers turned the house around and moved it a 100 ft south. Today that old beer joint turned home is now a haven for unwed mothers.