Alligator

My mother is basketball pregnant, bending awkwardly in the summer heat as she pulls damp sheets from a brown wicker basket and shakes them flat, carefully keeping them from touching the hay-colored crabgrass before clipping them to the clothesline with wooden pins. I am running between the maze of crisp white and pink-flowered sheets, dodging towel fringe as she dare-threats me not to touch them with my popsicle-sticky hands. She knows I am tempted to use the gently billowing fabric as a napkin.  

  I’m two, so this early memory is vague, like the flickering 8mm film my father would later project onto the den wall a couple times a year once we moved to our two-story split-level house in Raleigh. Movie nights always opened with the same Woody Woodpecker short, as mom made Jiffy Pop and my brother and I curled up on the blue plaid couch under the wool tartan blanket daddy got in Scotland when he was in the Navy. This specific memory is not on any movie reels. It is only real to me.

  Mom is about to pop. We don’t know if it will be a boy or a girl and I don’t remember caring either way. Mom gave me a Madame Alexander doll to practice loving, and I push my baby in a miniature pram across the lumpy yard while mom finishes the laundry. Her dark hair is piled on her head in a Jackie O bouffant below short, straight bangs. Her white pedal pusher pants and pale-yellow swing blouse make her look like the angel atop a Christmas tree in the golden sunlight, with whipped cream clouds in a sky the color of blueberries. When I complain that I’m thirsty, she offers me sips of water from the hose that snakes across the yard and drips into her three-bush bed of roses. Her face eclipses the sun as she turns up the spigot and I turn my head so the smocking on my dress gets soaked as I giggle.

  I steer the carriage toward the creek just beyond the brick grill where daddy sometimes lines up beer cans and shoots them off with his bb gun. Mom demands I turn the stroller back toward the house. “Don’t get too close to the creek,” she says, “That’s where the alligators live.” Which only makes me more curious, but I obey.

  At night I rest my head against mom’s belly talking to the baby and hoping it will kick. Mom smells of Channel No. 5 and Surf laundry detergent from which our collection of Oneida stainless steel utensils came. Each time she buys a new box, we ooh and aw at the shiny spoon or fork she pulls out to add to our collection. Mom reads me Little Golden Books, but I can’t get my mind off the alligators.

What lies over the edge?

  I imagine there are two of them hiding out in that creek that seems to two-and-a-half foot tall me to be big as a river, flowing with water where the alligators live, though it probably isn’t more than two-and-a-half feet wide and dry as a chicken wishbone crisping on the windowsill. I understand that alligators eat children and my mom is really trying to protect me. But what if Lyle, Lyle the Crocodile from my story book is in there and he’s lonely? I imagine that the creek is really, really deep and Lyle can’t get out. Every night I dream of looking over the edge and seeing who or what is there.

  I know things can live in the deep. My daddy is out at sea in a submarine, so it is just me, mommy and the baby in her belly, packing up the house on Aldene Avenue in Goose Creek, South Carolina. We’ll see daddy again at our new house near the navy base in Groton, Connecticut.

  If I don’t look soon, I may never know what is in that creek.

  But I never get the chance. To this day, I wonder what was there. Probably just a brittle bed littered with rusty beer cans pierced by bbs. But maybe there was an alligator that just wanted to be my friend.

  ~~~~

When daddy completed his seven-year commitment to the Navy, we four moved to the house on Hayloft Circle in the Western part of Raleigh. There, the family grew to six, amassing memories and memorabila, the framed photos that filled every wall, the books that filled shelves, the junk that filled closets and lives filled with love and heartbreak, the shifts, changes, beginnings and endings across 56 years.

  Now I am haunted not by the wondering of what is in a creek in South Carolina but of what’s in a landfill in North Carolina.

  Over the past few years, every time I went home, I’d spent hours going through one drawer, one closet, one bookcase of memories at a time, listening to my father’s stories, collecting threads to his past and weaving them into my own. I imagined there would be time to keep this up across several more trips to the home I grew up in over several more years.

  But dad fell June and returning to his two-story, split-level house wasn’t an option. My sister found him a safe place to live but he needs the money from the sale of his home to stay there. That house that he paid $26,000 for in 1970 will hopefully keep him in this place for as long as he needs.

It didn't have to move this fast. My sister hired a company to sell, donate or trash nearly 6 decades of 6 lives lived in that house. She promised dad and her siblings we’d see photos before decisions were made, but nobody sent us anything. I called the company to get an idea of their timing, but no one called me back. Then last week, another sibling found a link to an on-line auction.

  The dining table that could seat four or expand to six as our family expanded. Highest bid $8. The colander that was my grandmother’s and hung from a nail in the rafters alongside a rope of garlic and baskets of apples from our tree. $1. The heavy popcorn popper that rested by the fireplace and was used when ice storms knocked off the power in the dead of winter as we curled up on mom’s beloved Karastan rug covered in grandma’s handmade quilts to keep warm. $3 for the popper. $16 for the rug and just $4 for all those quilts. The grandfather clock in the entry hall with the hourly chimes that float like a soundtrack through all my childhood dreams. $51. The winter landscape my mother painted in her Jaycee Park and Rec class that hung over the living room couch. $1. My grandmother’s tea cart that may have once been used for actual tea service in Brooklyn, but held a microwave for the past many decades, on top of which sat a pear-shaped cookie jar with a lid that was nearly impossible to close without being caught. Single digit bids.

  In two lots were all my dad’s clothes including the Christmas pajamas we got him during the pandemic so we could all match for our Zoom celebration. Top bid for maybe 30 pieces of apparel? $1. All those 45 records I collected as a kid – Cheap Trick, Billy Joel, Blondie – the whole stack for $5.

  A part of me is grateful I don’t have to clean out all the crap anymore. But there were those little surprises under the piles of meaningless papers and decades old receipts, like dad’s ledger when he was the treasurer for his “Mischief Makers” boy’s club and logged the 25¢ dues as the seven boys met in a log cabin that they built by hand in the Appalachian forest. I’d never have found that, or my parent’s wedding bands had I not done the excavation.

  Yet there are decades of stories still buried in my father’s memory that might only have been accessed through the portal of a thing that has been sold, donated or discarded. “Dad, was this your mother’s?” His mom died when he was eight and he only had one tiny wooden box that was hers. No one thought to look for it. It wasn’t in the auction. It is an alligator now.

  I’m going to my hometown on Friday, but not home. I’ll go to that empty house I last saw empty when I was four and bounded up the stairs to choose my room. And the little girl in me who still wonders what was in the creek behind my first house, keeps waking up at night wondering if somewhere beyond the edge of a recycle bin or in a landfill in Apex there is a letter from my mother to me that I will never see.

As Shared at Story Salon on September 16, 2026.