Bring on the kids next door

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

The sign is on the lawn "sale pending," so it's not a done deal yet. But I am pretending it is. I have my hopes high and my fingers crossed. I am thinking about cookies and cocoa with marshmallow and jars full of penny candy.

The priest who lived next door for 21 years moved last month and the house has been vacant since. It used to be my house before it was his. "Oh, you moved next door," people usually say when they learn this. "You were lucky. It must have been such an easy move."

I don't tell them it wasn't easy. I don't tell them that I was happy in my first house, that I loved taking care of it, dressing it up, showing it off; that I learned to cook there and to sew and hang wallpaper and paint. None of these things was a chore then. I was a new bride in that house and a new mother. I never wanted to leave it. I wanted to keep everything exactly as it was forever.

But we moved, opting for a bigger house, a bedroom for each child, a fenced-in backyard, a garage. And when it was a priest who bought the old house, I was glad because he said he wasn't going to change a thing. And he didn't. All the years he was there I could walk next door and go home again.

I figured an older couple would buy the house this time around. The house has only two bedrooms and no garage, and it's on a main street. It isn't a house a young family would chose.

And yet a young family chose it. The priest rang my doorbell the other day. "It's sold," he said "to a woman with two children."

The children are 6 and 3, a boy and a girl. He didn't don't know which was which, and I don't care. I'm happy that there will be children in that house again, high, excited voices, little feet running up and down the hall, crayon drawings taped to the refrigerator, peanut butter and marshmallow in the cabinets, Sesame Street on the TV, the school bus stopping in front.

There will be kids playing on the lawn, jumping in piles of leaves in the fall, making snowmen in the winter, leaving their plastic toys outside, crying on summer nights that it's still light out and too early to go to bed.

"You can be their Mrs. Merlin," my daughter Lauren said when I told her about our new neighbors. And it all came around, just like that Harry Chapin song, "All My Life's a Circle."

Mrs. Merlin lives behind us. Mrs. Merlin and Bert, that's what Lauren dubbed them when she was 3 and that's what we call them still.

We'd just moved when Lauren started visiting Mrs. Merlin. She'd hurry across our front lawn, climb between the rails of a post and rail fence, then run down the long driveway, up Mrs. Merlin's steps, ring her bell and sit in her kitchen and eat candy that Mrs. Merlin had bought or cookies that Mrs. Merlin had baked especially for her.

I don't know what they talked about at that table. I just know that Lauren always came skipping home with a smile on her face and something clutched in her hand: a trinket from Mrs. Merlin's house, a coloring book Mrs. Merlin had bought, flowers from Mrs. Merlin's yard.

All my children visited Mrs. Merlin but Lauren was the most devoted. She didn't stop going there once she was allowed to walk down the block or across the street, once she had other friends. She still rang Mrs. Merlin's bell and showed her the drawings she did at school and the stories she wrote with gold stars on the top. She still invited friends over and took them to meet Mrs. Merlin.

I always thought of her as so much older, but here I am now about the same age she was when Lauren began to visit. Now two children are moving next door to me and it's my turn to have cookies in the house and coloring books in a drawer and time to sit and listen to a little kid's tale.

I don't know these children yet but I know I'll like them. I like the repetition of life, the wide, endless circle of it. I like being part of that circle, looking out my door and seeing children again.