Places inevitably change but the old magic should never be forgotten. Thirty long miles northwest of Salt Lake City is a very important four corner intersection. Here lies the location of what was, for a few short days in summer, my childhood Narnia. This intersection now looks nothing like it did back then. Why does that come as such a shock to me? Suddenly, it seems unbearable that this magical place is being absorbed into suburban sprawl.

I will try to sketch it out for you as best I can remember. It was a tiny four-corner town in the middle of rural farms and pastures. On the northeast corner was a church building that was fairly new back then but has since been torn down. On the southeast corner was a plumbing business, a pool hall, and next door a tiny cement block city office building. On the northwest corner I’m pretty certain there was only a pasture, no buildings. On the southwest corner was an old fashioned country grocery store which had the most tantalizing penny candy display.  On more than one occasion I was sent to that store with a dime to burning in my palm.  I left with a tiny crinkled paper bag full of sweets (my favorite was cherry flavored candy lipstick). South of the store was the enchanted kingdom of my maternal grandparents. We called them Mother and Dad.

My immediate family lived in southern California with traffic an towns unending from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, all sandwiched in between the ocean and the desert.  For many summers we traveled across that desert to Utah to visit my mother’s hometown which was sandwiched in between mountains, orchards, farms and the Great Salt Lake. My mother packed fried chicken, carrot sticks, and celery sticks (no dip) along with a cooler full of ice water for the midnight crossing of the desert.  Our car had no air conditioning. We drove off the heat by rolling down the windows and wiping our skin with a wet cloth. It was a mysterious night journey through the warm darkness among Joshua trees, past the lights of Las Vegas, and through steep wind-carved canyons.  By morning the fried chicken was gone and I would start saying,  “are we there yet?”

By the time we had reached Mother and Dad’s place, I felt like I had entered an older fantasy world. The two bedroom clapboard house was nestled in the middle of a large lawn shaded by tall cottonwood trees, lilacs and forsythia, currant and chokecherry bushes.  Mother was quite proud of what she called her “rock garden”  which bordered the sparkling quartz gravel path that approached the front porch.  I enviously eyed the tidy “chicks and hens”, pansies and hollyhocks, and decorative rocks she picked up from her  travels.  All so pretty and cultivated compared to  the wild tangle of ice plant in front of our California home.  A shallow irrigation ditch ran down the middle of the property from the larger ditch along the street to the garden at the very back. When the ditch was full of water my cousins and I would carve squash from the garden into a regatta of sail boats and barges.

Northwest of the house at the end of a long driveway there was a garage where an ancient Ford sedan was housed.  The garage smelled of grain and engine oil. Beyond the back lawn was a sprawling garden brimming with treasures: shiny red tomatoes, yellow squash, crisp cucumbers, silken corn stalks, and sweet onions. Behind the garage was an old outhouse and a chicken coop that for many years supplied the fresh fryers that were eaten at Mother’s kitchen table.  Dad quietly dispatched the critters away from my impressionable eyes. But I watched as Mother cleaned out the innards and plucked the feathers from more than one of those ultimately delicious hens on her kitchen table.

Dad would sit in a corner in the kitchen and smile and nod as the clan bustled in and out of the back screen door which at some point had a hydraulic arm installed to keep it from banging.  The round kitchen table in its place by the sunny back windows would be loaded with plates of sliced cucumbers and onions in vinegar, juicy red tomato slices, fresh baked fluffy white rolls,  and ears of corn. Once, at least, there was wild asparagus that I picked from the fields on a foraging expedition with my mother.  This was daily fare for our relatives that lived in the area year round but to me it was the feast of a fairy kingdom rich from the bounties of the earth.  I don’t know why but we never grew such things at our home in California.

One year I was around to see Mother make homemade soap from the grease drippings she so frugally saved from every meal.  She poured the hot liquid soap into pans and cut it into bars which were then grated into soap flakes for use in the old wringer washer stored in a corner of the bathroom.  I was fascinated by the sight of clothes being cranked through that wicked looking wringer which of course I was warned, gravely, never to get near with a finger or arm.

Mother had a talent for making her home beautiful with patchwork quilts, hand painted and decorated wood chairs and cupboards, braided woolen rugs, and sparkling china knick-knacks.  It took an enormous amount of work to run that tiny two acre farm but to me it seemed as seamless as magic.

On several occasions we arrived late in the night at Mother and Dad’s home in Syracuse, Utah.  My mother and father and my sister’s and I somehow shared the one extra bedroom of the house.  We were hastily fed a snack of buttered rolls with homemade chokecherry jam then ushered into the bedroom  where an extra folding metal bed was opened at the food of my parent’s bed.  A soft homemade feather mattress was laid out and made up with sparkling clean sheets fresh from the clothes line, smelling of sunshine and homemade soap.  We snuggled down in the depths of that feather mattress and were covered with a brightly colored quilt, artfully sewn by hand and with the aid of an old treadle sewing machine, into a log cabin, or flower petal, or crazy quilt pattern.  A bed worthy of a princess,  a home worthy of all the castles, in all magical kingdoms, from all the fantasy books I have ever read.

Bit by bit, as I grew up and grew older that magical world was dismantled.  The wringer washer was replaced, the chicken coops and outhouse were torn down, the house was moved to a different lot miles away and served some other family down through the years. The four corner town is now a tidy suburb with new homes, new parks, new schools, and a new city building.  Today, Mother and Dad’s little farmstead is now the site of an Arby’s fast food restaurant.

But the old kingdom is still in my heart and soul and down in my bones. I am told nothing on the internet is ever completely deleted.  In this case I hope it is true because some things should never be forgotten.

(In Memory of: Elnora Stoker Dalton and Horace Orlando Dalton)