Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [34]
For a brief couple of months, I was a treasured only child. Then the other kids started coming, and for the duration of my childhood they kept coming. Just inside the front door of my parents’ current house you will find a row of ten wooden lockers stretching fifteen feet from the welcome mat to the kitchen. Dad constructed the lockers himself and may have been in a rush, as the pencil marks are still visible through the varnish. Each locker had an integrated bench seat and separate spaces above and below the coat rack area for headgear, mittens, coats, and boots. Mom called the lockers “slots” and assigned us one each, using a grease pencil to inscribe our names above the coat hooks. Despite the nifty setup, the slots were forever overflowing with winter clothes and chore clothes and whatever we dumped after school, and Mom was continually admonishing us, “Clean up your slot!” which out of context sounds strangely personal. It was a losing battle. The porch nearly always looked like the back room of a Goodwill store under the inattentive management of compulsive ragpickers.
When you tell people you were raised in a large family, they come right back wanting a specific number, but we operated on a sliding scale. I have had a multitude of siblings; some born of the same womb, some adopted, some fostered, and some arrived in the nighttime absent formal affiliation of any sort. Some stayed for a weekend, others their entire lives. The last time my mother put a pencil to it, she calculated sixty or so children had come into her care. The one time we all sat for an official family portrait, in 1979, there were eight kids and two adults, so let’s just say on average we were a family of ten. Or know that one night before supper in the early 1970s Dad put an extra leaf in the dinner table, and it never did come out. “Grab what you want the first time,” he would say whenever we had guests at mealtime. “It ain’t comin’ around again.” He replaced the chairs on one side of the table with a wooden bench upon which we sat shoulder to shoulder. Mom summoned us to supper by leaning out the porch door and rattling a cowbell, and we came from all corners.
I was five months old when Mom and Dad took in their first foster child, a five-week-old infant with microcephaly. Her name was Connie, and she was “pre-adoptive,” meaning Mom and Dad were to care for her until the county arranged permanent placement. Some time later the social worker told her Connie lived just three months after leaving. Because Mom was a nurse, the county also began sending her “special needs” children. The first of these was a young boy named Larry. Larry was recovering from rheumatic fever, and per doctor’s orders was supposed to remain confined to the couch. Today Larry would likely be diagnosed with some behavioral disorder or another, and his family simply couldn’t manage him. He came with holes in his clothes, Mom says, and he was a handful, but full of fun.
Eventually as Larry regained his strength and was so allowed, he put me in a cardboard box and rolled me around the house on my Playskool Walker Wagon. Then one day he pulled me from the box, wrapped my fingers around the wagon handle, and turned me loose. When I flopped, he picked me up and relaunched me. Again and again we set out across the linoleum tiles, Larry hovering as I stumped along to the rattle-jingle of the balls and bells bouncing in the cylindrical cage of painted dowels that spun between the wheels. Eventually he weaned me from the Walker Wagon and turned me loose without props. One step, a couple steps…again, every time I fell he would right me and relaunch me until one day I just kept going. On average, I have been toddling smoothly ever since.
I don’t remember Larry, of course. In the photographs, he is a gangly kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a big grin. Mom says he would trap the cat under the sofa and then, employing the cardboard tube from a roll of wrapping paper as