This is a sample of an unpolished, early TRUE story recounting the events that took place during the loss of their family home due to eminent domain.

Jenny wrote this for her family before her schooling and professional writing began.

When I was six years old I sat alone on the front porch of my home waiting for the police to come and arrest me. I waited at the top of the stairs, four band-aids on one leg and five on the other, with scrapes of which half were probably band-aid worthy. I waited with my pink flowery suitcase. It had stickers all over it, some half-peeled, and blonde Barbie hair was hanging out between the hinges. I packed some of the things I needed most in jail —my two Barbies, and my Humpty Dumpty doll that was normal on one side and all cracked up on the other. It had a string that pulled out and said, “…All the kings horses and all the kings men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.” I had a change of clothes, but not my itchy wool brown elephant dress, and on my first finger I wore my magical plastic ring that changed when I moved it from an eye open to an eye shut. I got it for a penny in the gumball machine in front of Valley Drug. I sat there waiting, watching that eye blink over and over. I waited because the night before, I stopped the trucks from tearing down the house, at least temporarily. At the time I didn’t understand why we couldn’t keep the house, but now I know that our misfortune has a name. The euphemism is “eminent domain,” but our family calls it outright highway robbery.

My family and I lived in what I considered then to be a castle, and even now to me that notion seems faultless. It was the main house on a turn of the century farm, and three other little houses on the block were where, in its original state, the hired help lived. It was a soaring, graceful Victorian whose brick walls were eighteen inches thick. I knew that because when cable TV first came out there, the cable man used an eighteen-inch drill bit that barely made it through. The movers couldn’t guarantee that if they moved our hundred-year-old manor, it wouldn’t just fall apart on their trucks due to the prodigious weight. Unlike a lot of other houses, the bricks couldn’t be removed. If they tried, all that would be left were the windows, and nothing left to hold them up but the heavy stone foundation. There were no studs. The entryway had a staircase of thick carved walnut that I used to imagine took me to my chambers and my secret room. As you climbed up, the stairs wrapped all the way around the open hallway below, making a full circle in railing with a crystal chandelier that hung down in the middle. My secret room was off of that railing and out the window to the rooftop over the front porch.

I went out there daily to watch the unfolding scene of rubberneckers “passing” by. I knew who had been following our case in the papers because their faces gave them away. If they agreed with the school district and the city of Logan’s felonious offering for our house, they’d gawk at the house, pointing or waving their arms with their noses high, looking self-righteous and gassy, floating far above my own personal ability to reason at my young age. I wanted to sic the dog over to bite them on the ass. I imagined the remnants of Mrs. Hooper post-popping, flying and twirling in circles farther and farther away until she deflated in front of the discount Hostess store, trampled on by pedestrian brown bags filled with month-old Twinkies and Ding-Dongs. But a mournful headshake and a hand to the chest of someone tsk-tsking and saying, “That’s just a crying shame,” or, “Those poor Gilman’s, Oh! Those poor dear Gilman’s,” and I knew we had another ally. Occasionally, I’d pick the lint off of one of my root beer barrels and chuck it down to them as a way of saying “thanks.” I was never scared to be way up there, and I never would have fallen off.

Unfortunately, the nosy neighbor lady across the street would almost every time call up my mom and say, “Mrs. Gilman your daughter is up on the roof again!” I always knew she called because mom, who would otherwise be busy with the other kids, would yell out the window, “Jennifer Kathleen! You get back in here this instant! You’ll fall off and break your neck!” I didn’t know much else about that neighbor lady except she had a daughter younger than me who saw her grandmother in the corner of her living room at the exact moment she died half the country away. She told her mom grandma was there, but her mom didn’t believe it until the phone rang with the news.

Our neighbors immediately south of us were the Nebecker’s. The old man was a scrooge. He used to bait our collie dog, Ruffles, with food and then call the pound to come take her off his property. When my Dad and my Grandpa finally built a fence between us, he complained that it restricted his view. He said he liked to look out over the open space from his kitchen window, but behind us was the high school’s athletics field, and immediately behind us were the tennis courts. We used to climb the school’s fence to play so much that there was a permanent dip in the chain link. What Mr. Nebecker was viewing wasn’t any open space that I could see, but the girls’ tennis club every Wednesday and Friday after school. They wore little pleated skirts and bounced. The collie gave him away in the bushes. His poor wife was bats. She had hundreds of dolls on the front porch and she dressed and took tea with them all day.

To the north of us was Mrs. Sparks. She was old and frail and my parents worried about where she would go when they tore down her house, and they often brought her meals in case she wasn’t eating enough. She never had visitors. She lived there from the time she was married in 1912 and in the end, lived by herself for more than twenty years with the exception of a big beautiful white cat named Nehor that froze to death outside just before she was forced to leave. When her son finally came to visit that winter, he sold her house to the school to be torn down and pocketed the money. He sent her out of her house to finish her life in a rest home. She didn’t live there long.

The school district decided that the new weight room facility had to be where our houses were. I guess it would have been too much to ask those kids to cross the street where there was an open field screaming to be built upon. The city granted it however, and my parents were offered fourteen thousand dollars for the house, when three years before they paid twenty-five. It was appraised at fifty. Whenever we clean our houses thoroughly even now, we call it “appraisal ready” after this battle. We had that house looking so smart you could have eaten breakfast off of the bathroom floor, if you wanted to. Dad, who won awards for his amateur photography, took pictures and developed them in his darkroom down in our basement. He made an album full of the most riveting eight by ten color prints of our house imaginable.

When our case went to court, the first thing the city’s attorneys tried to do, was to discredit the word of the appraiser, Bob Hanks. But as soon as they started, Judge Lindsay told them, “I don’t need to hear about any of Mr. Hanks’s credentials, I appointed him to the State Board of Appraisers right here from this bench. I know all about his credentials.” It was neat watching all of the big attorneys sink smaller in their chairs. At one point I swear that I could see them eye-to-eye.

The appraiser sat in the witness stand looking over dad’s photos, sighing breathlessly and saying things like, “Oh yes, I couldn’t forget this lovely old house,” and then he’d turn a page, point to a spot on the photo and say, “My-- isn’t that something,” …on and on, and with each page turning the album farther and farther away from the bench until the judge leaned all the way over-- forgetting his seat and nearly falling trying to get a look. By the time the judge finally had the book in his hands he was drooling. The attorneys continued their fruitless arguments while the judge looked wide-eyed at the photos, replying occasionally with a hypnotic “uh-huh,” turning one page, then another.

The judge ruled that the city had to give us the fifty, plus we could stay in the house until my mom, who was sick with her pregnancy at the time with my little sister, delivered and fully recovered. Mom was at a high risk of losing this baby, and we were doing everything we could to help her stay with us.

After the case was settled we thought the controversy would perhaps dissolve a little for a while, but actually, the view from the roof grew more interesting after that. The division was becoming wider and more noticeable. Half of the town treated us like we were folk-heroes. I’d be up there sucking on bottle-caps, when out of the blue a gang of Harley-Davidson guys would ride up to the house shoulder to shoulder and yell out, “Give ‘em hell Gilman’s! And, “Go get the bastards!” and “Hey, you shouldn’t be up there…” or some hillbilly in an old truck would come down from the mountains, stopping with hat in hand to ask if he can be helpful to us in any way. Mom and dad would shake his hand and thank him, and he’d leave with an accomplished swagger, knowing he did something good and right that day.

We had some time bought before we had to move. It was the most wonderful time and intense time our family ever had. All of the energy of knowing we had to give up something, someplace that we loved and didn’t want to give up within a few months time, made us restless.

Mom was due in June and we didn’t know how long we had after that. Contractors were starting to show up outside, walking through our yard on their own free will. Mom was bedridden now, using her down time to make the most handsome crewel embroidery. Doc Skabelund was a local anesthesiologist, and he was our good friend. He looked like Santa and he always winked at us. He started worrying about mom and coming by the house every other day. We kids knew that if the baby made it; she would be the most special of all of us. We resolved that we would make her the smartest baby in the history of babies and so my big brother Brad dug into my mom’s university books. He found the biggest word that he thought the new baby would be able to pronounce with the prodding of its older siblings. We vowed that after she was born, her first word would be “psychological.” We practiced it over and over so we’d have it down by her birth, so as to fully expose her. We would say it in clusters to her. Psy… co… log…i…cal. We kids would make the news for sure. I remember selling Kool-Aid on the front parkway to the rubberneckers, all the while repeating psy… co… log….

That last summer I believed I could fly. I wasn’t scared of heights and I knew I was special, magical, but I just hadn’t figured out how. The laws of gravity didn’t apply to me, I didn’t think, but I hadn’t dared chance it until it was absolutely necessary. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs through the upstairs family room, and past the second kitchen. I often stood up high on the roof or on the deep window frame in my room and looked out. I thought about how it would feel to be between where I was and the ground below. I thought about the wind and about sailing through it. It wasn’t just air, it was substantive, it carried weight which would in turn, carry me. I was too little to know about physics or flight; what I saw was beyond that, it was something tangible that could only be seen through little eyes. I wanted to test it out.

My little brother Jeff was there one day, watching me stand on the window while holding his “Yurtle the Turtle,” pulling its string, making it talk. The turtle had a nice big shell that I knew would float on the wind. If it were Jason Pitcherdon George in his hands, I would never have done it. Jason was Jeff’s red-haired, freckle-faced doll that wore overalls and he was his constant companion. When the high school kids walked by our house, before and after school they would always say, “Hey Jeff, How’s Jason Pitcherdon George doing today?” Jeff would smile, turn around, and run in the house. To this day I don’t know how he came up with that name, and what exactly was a pitcherdon? It came from the enchanted lexicon that exists in kid’s brains. I know it did. The same place that my big sister Brandie got the name “props and bra” for her lumpy oatmeal.

But this day he had Yurtle the turtle… and so that solved my immediate problem. I took Yurtle and sailed him out the window. I watched him float to the ground, just like I imagined, the weight of the air carrying it. I can remember it only in slow motion at first, but then it speeds up when Yurtle hit the ground hard, with a big loud thump and a twang. Jeff was bawling, confused about why I did that and he wanted his turtle back.

I knew I was in trouble so I ran down and outside, fast. I pulled Yurtle’s string and found that I broke it. It wouldn’t talk anymore. I wrecked its guts. I ran into the utility room to hide it hoping Jeff would forget all about it. I started to bury it in the box of Ajax detergent when mom came hobbling in, asking me what’s going on. I spilled the box all over the carpet and while mom was yelling and cleaning that up, Jeff was harassing me from behind, wanting his broken turtle. I wanted him to go away so I wouldn’t be in more trouble and I grabbed the first thing I saw from the trash, which I later found out was oven cleaner, and sprayed him right in the face. He really wailed then and I knew I was dead. Mom ran in the room, saw what happened and swung him over to the kitchen sink.

It all happened so fast, I started running. I ran as fast as I could and I didn’t know where I was going. Everything was mixed and blurry and I was running on faith. I really didn’t know which way was up but I trusted my legs. They were the only part of me in control at this point. I ran through the living room, into the front hall and up the rounded stairs higher and higher before I realized I didn’t have anywhere to go. It was like a bullwhip cutting loose before the crack. I came out of the spin from the circle stairs and tore straight ahead to the family room window and I had to keep going. This was not the window with the roof, it was another one, with nothing underneath but the rock covered driveway two and a half floors below.

My big sister Brandie started screaming before I even had the window open. She saw I was a force that couldn’t be stopped. Brandie never screamed that I was aware of before that or after. She was the only level-headed one of us. It got mom running and I knew it. I had to get out. I ripped open the window and went out headfirst. It was my time to fly — not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I let go of the window frame and started to feel free, I was soaring, and there was nothing around me until I scraped my arms on the brick straight down below the window. Mom had me by the ankle. I was being pulled up to my certain death and by the time I was on my feet again I saw mom’s panicked face.

“What are you doing?” She shook as she said that, breathless, squeezing my arms tightly to my sides so I couldn’t do anything but look at her. I said, “I’m going to see God mom, I’ll be right back.” I don’t know why I said that. Maybe I tried to reassure her that I knew what I was doing, I’m not sure anymore, but I know I was confused, maybe more than her. She tied my foot to my bed until she could deal with me. I didn’t have any chance of escape so I just lay there, tied to the bed, waiting for dad to come home.

Mom went down to deal with Jeff’s burnt eyes. I was wakened up sometime later and forced to go to the eye doctor with Jeff to explain what I had done. On my way down, I walked slowly toward the stairs and when I passed Jeff’s bedroom, I saw Jason Pitcherdon George. I picked him up for Jeff. I knew it would help make him feel better. Maybe it would help make me feel better. Turns out Jeff had little holes in his eyes because of me. The doctor said that they would eventually heal and that soon, he would be able to see fine again.

When we got back home there were two ladies I had never seen before walking around our house. Brad said they just walked right in. They were writing down a list of items in our house and saying things like, “I’m going to take this chandelier and the lighting fixtures in the living room,” and “My husband already promised me we could have the staircase…we’ve already had the architect draw it in.” And then they went into the kitchen opening up our cupboards while saying things like, “charming…”. You should have seen the look on my dad’s face. I knew he was going to blow and I just started laughing, I couldn’t help it, I just cut loose. He took both of those ladies by their purse strings and pulled them out the door. They looked so astonished; they stood there staring into the door, mouths open, while my dad slammed it behind them and locked it. They yelled something through the door about getting us out of their house. My dad said he recognized one of them as Wayne Jacobs’s wife. He was the contractor in charge of tearing down our home.

At the end of that unpleasant day, we flopped exhausted in front of the TV and were astonished to catch a showing of an earlier recording of the Boise philharmonic. The amazing thing was that there was no way for us to have a recording of that concert, but somehow, we were lucky enough to see it. What was even more amazing was that my mom was playing the bassoon with that very orchestra in that very concert, shown on our TV from a different year, from a different city and a different State… and we saw it. I remember I could feel my spirits lifting and as I looked around the room, the rest of my family’s did too. We saw mom on TV. It was marvelous. We all watched entranced but Jeff, who was sleeping soundly on the floor. Mom played the bassoon beautifully. I can still close my eyes and hear it. Whenever I need soul food, this is it. To this day I weep when I hear the warm, woody, melodious cry of the bassoon. She was amazing. I tried to follow in her footsteps by playing the violin. I regret now that I quit too early. I regret that for decades we haven’t been able to walk through those hallowed walls that cocooned and cradled so many of our important memories. Several more times that summer we had parasites that slinked around, trying to claim bits and pieces of our lives, stealing our memories with their fantasies of carved newel posts and fancy cherry and pecan paneling.

My dad kept our spirits up during those last days. We were broke but when it came down to the bones and scraps, he always found a way to get us by. He’d pull out his Stratocaster and Silvertone tube amp and play Beatles’ songs, or do his Chet Atkins style finger picking while we danced with our friends in the backyard. Mike Minder, who was 6’2” and 300 pounds and one of my dad’s best friends, came over and rode his motorcycle up the stairs to the front porch. We were all squealing with delight, but mom could have killed him. He was nuts and so was the rest of his family. His wife Mary was an ironclad fiery red-head who had to throw away their two son’s chemistry set six times that summer because of all the stink bombs they made and the number of fires that were set in their shed.

Another man who had followed our case in the papers drove a big rig truck over and backed it into our driveway. We didn’t know him, but he had a drug store in the next town that burned down and he filled the truck with salvaged items that helped us to make it through. I remember looking at a spinning rack full of sunglasses and even though they were all too big, I still got a pair. To us it was Christmas in July only instead of fresh pine we had the pungent smell of burned plastic penetrating our sinuses. I can recall that smell today, and have on occasion in the neighborhood dollar store. There’s no mistaking it.

*****

The houses around us were gone. We were the only house left standing and the heavy equipment was getting ready to move into our backyard. Mom had given birth to Stephanie and we were bombarding her with psy...co...log...i...cal, knowing she couldn’t talk yet but because of our not-so-subliminal suggestions, she’d have that word locked into her brain. When she was ready, she’d say it first.

It was early August. I woke up one morning to find the big yellow trucks ripping out our great back yard. The hills, the trees, everything… it was all gone except a string of grass just big enough against the back of the house for our swing set. I was alone watching it from the kitchen’s double hung windows. Mom and dad were cooing with Stephanie in their bedroom and the others weren’t up. I felt like if I didn’t do something they’d rip out our swings too, but then would they stop at the house? I’d had it.

I went outside, walked the thin line between dirt and grass and hopped on and started swinging. Right under the nose of the trucks. At first I thought I did it to protect our swings, the only thing left in our yard. It wasn’t long before I knew I was protecting much more than that. I swung hard, harder than I ever did in my life. I closed my eyes and kicked out to the sun. I found it and then reached beyond, somewhere over the universe. I lay down on the to swing and fell forward on the fro. I caught the air at the top and fell back again, forward and back, forward and back, harder and higher, harder and higher. I was flying for my family, for our place in that time, and in that moment. The farther I flew over the dirt line, the more room the trucks gave me to fly. It was working; I knew it and so did they. It was just me and a big bumble bee that morning against the leviathans, the bee helping me to keep my strength, buzzing in time, whispering with its wings, “you’re doing it Jennifer, it’s working, don’t stop now…”

That’s when I decided I would stop them for good. I had to. They were getting too close to us now. I wouldn’t let them break us. They could knock the house down with one well-chosen swipe and the trucks were there, emphatically waiting to prove it. I ran around the house from attic to basement, searching through junk drawers that hadn’t been packed yet and moving boxes that had. I went through the upstairs kitchen and mom’s sewing machine desk gathering up all of the nails, push pins, thumbtacks that I could find, hiding them in my pink flowery suitcase along with a flashlight and a spade. I waited until it was the middle of the night and everyone but the crickets was sleeping.

I snuck out of bed, quietly picking up my tennies, and slipped down the circle stairs and past mom and dad’s bedroom, through the kitchen and out the back door and into the dirt. I sank down; every step was a chore, but a worthwhile one. I lit up the ground around the tires of the trucks with my flashlight and dug just deep enough to bury the tacks and nails underneath. I did this to every tire, first on one truck, then another. By the time I was finished, the light from the waning moon and the underground sun was casting shadows. It wasn’t night anymore, or day. I was stuck somewhere between east and west and heaven and hell and I was tired and needing to sleep, because I knew that before long, I would be off to jail.

I sat on the porch waiting, picking on one of my scabs when mom and dad finally came to see what I was hanging around for. They had been watching over me from the picture window most of the afternoon, but later they told me that they were more interested in observing than interrupting. “Whatcha waitin for Jennifer Cash?” My dad said, sitting next to me. Mom gave me a glass of water and washed the dirt from the night before off my face. “I’m waiting to be arrested.” I said. My dad held back a faint smile, knowing the seriousness of the situation. “I ruined the trucks out back,” I said, “I did it and I’m not sorry. The police will come and I’m going tell them what I did.” Mom quickly went around the house, I assumed to check on the status of the trucks. My dad looked concerned and said, “Tell me how exactly you stopped those big trucks?”

I told him everything. My dad told me that I probably wouldn’t be arrested and more than likely, they would never suspect a six-year-old girl had ruined the trucks, but if they did, he told me how to handle it. It was a secret that his father passed down to him when he was in trouble once as a boy. He told me, “Carry your lunchbox with you everywhere you go. If someone starts to give you a hard time, shove it as hard as you can into their stomach and yell—“HOLD MY LUNCHBOX!” They’ll grab it and when their hands are full, you punch them right in the nose.” It worked for him when he was little, and on one later occasion with a big fifth grade jerk, it worked for me too. I never knew until they told me many years later that it was because it was Saturday that the trucks weren’t running. I later realized too that I couldn’t have ruined the huge tires with thumbtacks, but my parents let me believe in what I had worked so hard for. I will always respect them for that.

It was the next to the last night in our house and something was up. The energy was tangible. We kids were running all over the house which had mostly been emptied of furniture, flattening the areas of shag that stayed firm from it’s sanctuary under the sofa. We had a lot of men quietly coming by all day, secretly dropping off shovels and pickaxes and crow bars and electric tools from their cars, down into the hands of helpers waiting inside the cellar door. Doc Skabelund was there, so was Mike and Mary Minder, and Jim and Peggy Reese. There were many more I didn’t recognize, all papering up the windows.

That evening, Ronnie Porter’s mom came to get Brad and Jeff, and just after that, the Fairbanks’s came to get Brandie and me. I was scared even though Debbie and Leisa Fairbanks were our closest school friends. I worried about mom and dad and what was happening, but I couldn’t talk about it with anyone. Instead I just pretended to eat my crappy cream of mushroom soup and then went to bed, which was on their living room floor surrounded by dozens of Doug Fairbanks’s wood carved birds.

While we were sleeping that night, this is what I later learned had been happening. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty men and women that parked down the street and slowly started filing into our house, one or two at a time. Dad and Doc were in charge of the tool dispersion, and Mike and Jim started taking the helpers to different rooms, handing out their assignments. Some skilled in electrics were there, and some skilled with the plumbing as well. Everybody had a job and my mom helped too, when Stephanie slept. They kept the master bedroom for last so that mom and Stephanie had a safe place to be.

One by one the rooms came down. They had managed to build up piles of the Cherry and Pecan paneling, along with wood molding and picture rail. Mike Minder and dad were in charge of loosening up the kitchen cupboards, which was some careful chore because the countertops were all tiled with a patterned mosaic. The upstairs was coming downstairs in bundles and boxes. In the dead of the night, three big rigs showed up and backed toward the house in the dirt. As quietly as possible, and with an electric cord and light tucked deep into each truck, they started filling them up. They managed the fancy woods and doors and interior stained glass windows, then the appliances, old bathtubs and sinks, and from the top down, the delicate lighting fixtures. Next came the circular staircase with each and every baluster and carved post and railing. They were finishing loading that up when someone had heard that Wayne Jacobs caught wind of what was going on and was on his way over to try to stop it.

Everybody panicked and began throwing stuff into the trucks. There was an enormous four-foot wide, old heavy iron stove in our kitchen that needed at least four strong men to lift, and Mike Minder wasn’t going to wait for anyone. Dad said it was the most remarkable thing he’d ever seen. Mike rushed over to the stove, wrapped his arms around it and picked that entire damn thing up by himself and ran it into the truck.

Wayne Jacobs never did show up, nor did he know anything about it. The outside of the house was left in perfect condition. There was no way to know by looking at it what had happened inside over night. We spent the day playing outside in the front yard, and one more night in our house, together as a family, sleeping on the floor of the shallow, sad, empty living room that had in its glory sheltered us from an earthquake, echoed back our songs, and cradled our new born love when she just arrived home from the hospital. Even the radiators were gone.

*****

My dad was attending law school in Sacramento a few weeks later when the subpoena arrived. The Logan papers said that my parents were being prosecuted for a felony and for escaping the state, but they later had to retract that. Wayne Jacobs was suing us for stripping the house before we moved out. To this day I would love to have seen the look on his face, and his wife’s when they proudly walked through the front door. Because it was related to the earlier case, we had the same judge. After all of the state’s evidence was presented, Judge Lindsay ruled, “I have looked through every City, State, and Federal law in this case and after much research, the court could not find anywhere that it was illegal to steal your own property.” The case was dismissed.

For three years the truckloads from our house remained hidden less than thirty miles away from where they began. Doc Skabelund had a little house in town, but he had a farm outside of town with a Quonset hut that he rarely used except to park his tractors inside. Until the day he died, he never told one other human being where it was, or what he had done for us. He was an extraordinarily good man.

My parents and I live in Boise about fifteen miles apart now. I go over often, through their front door and to the left the stairs climb up and around higher and higher until it makes a full circle in railing and a crystal chandelier hangs down from the middle. I mostly pass under them now and I usually find mom and dad working in the backyard, but sometimes I find my dad in his elegant dark room, built from the old kitchen cupboards with the mosaic tiles.

Our castle was torn down years ago, but I visit 207 South First West often in my dreams. I dream I’m up high on the roof again and when I walk to the edge, I spread out my arms and fall over until I sail. I sail and the wind feels good. I sail over the sidewalk, past the giant oak, and around to the side of the house where I pause to see in the windows new children with their grown aunts and uncles, dancing to their grandpa’s Stratocaster and their grandma’s bassoon and the music is magnificent and the world there is beautiful, and not because of the bricks and stone, but because it is beautiful without it.