Butterfly’s Flutterings

My name is Nicole. I live in the Northern Sierra Nevada Mtn.s. I love the area. The town I live in is a very small typical mountain town. Except for one hitch, during the summer we are crowded with tourists. We go from being a normal small town of about 2500, to a small city packed to the limit with 25,000 to 30,000 bodies. It can be a little harrowing. Which brings me to where I work. A hotel. I work at the front desk. Now we aren’t a big hotel so its usually just me manning the phone and trying to keep the building from burning down. When its my shift anyways. When its not my shift I really couldn’t care less if the place just blew over in the wind. Well…. except I’d have to look for a new job. I wouldn’t want to do that.

I have three sisters and no brothers. They are all younger than me and in various stages of disarray. We are all different ages. I am 23. My sister Krystal is 22, My sister Stephanie is 19. And my sister Heather is 17. I will be writing separate pieces on each of them.

O.k so i was born in 1985. In a small town in northern California. We didn’t live in that town, I was just born there. We lived in another small town called Gridley. Its a ranching town mostly. filled with Cowboys and Mexicans. The area around is filled mostly with cattle and rice and various types of orchards. It is a great place. When I was about 4? we moved to the community I live in now. To Westwood. We lived there until I was 6. Then moved back to Gridley. We lived in a lot of different houses all over town. my mom couldn’t seem to keep a place for very long. We were always very lucky to have my grandmother. I’d always think of it as such an adventure when we were between house because we got to stay with her. Her house was completely different from anything we usually got to live in. The smells, the whole atmosphere was not only cleaner, but just generally more happy. We would have thanksgiving at Grandmas too. There would be more food than you could imagine and enough people to eat it all. There was always new people I’ve never met. Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins. One Uncle in particular was my favorite. My Uncle Howard. He was the baby of the family. When I was about 7 or 8 he would have been around 25. And he acted like it too. He was awesome. I would wake up some mornings surprised to see him sleeping on the couch in the back room. Hungover and probably kicked out of his most recent girlfriends house. But we always had so much fun on those days.

My mom was a single mother. Sure she had the odd boyfriend over the years. A couple of them even moved in with us and tried to help out. They were never the best of guys though. Usually the rough type that rode motorcycles or drove those old beat up chevys and cameros. They always had a beer or some other form of alcohol in there hand. Half the time they didn’t even have a job. They lived off whatever job my mom happened to have at the time and our monthly welfare contribution. We grew up very poor. They weren’t all bad though. I remember a couple who were just plain great, but they couldn’t deal with how much my mom partied, and all the drama that seemed to follow her around. We did move around a lot. We lived in 5 different houses in 6 years, until I was 12. It wasn’t too bad, except I got very embarrassed when a friend would come over and wonder why we were in another house. I got so that I wouldn’t invite people over. I would just go to their house. It was always in the same spot.

I remember two houses in particular. One was in the boonies. Way out in the middle of this huge field of cows. It’s the worse place we ever lived in as a family. But it was also pretty awesome. It was a one bedroom one bath shack. Ten miles outside of town. Our nearest neighbor was a mile down the road. Except for the hippie couple that rented the metal building next door that should have been a garage. This place was bad. Puke green, surrounded by fields. and when we moved in it had no running water in the kitchen. There was something wrong with the pipes. To get to the school bus in the morning we had to walk about 2 miles to the highway. The bus driver refused to drive out to our place, as the roads were so bad. And my mom didn’t own a car. the one neighbor that lived a mile away was in between us and the highway. He had this horrible little dog that would try to bite us. we had to climb the fence on the side of the road and walk along the levee of the rice field that ran along that side. That dog was mean. The owner though was one of the nicest there was. My mom did finally convince the school to make the driver come and get us at least when it was raining. So that was nice.

As I said the kitchen in that house had no running water. but there was an old spicket that came out on the back porch that had been converted to a back room. Basically the door was torn out of the back wall of the kitchen and a room just randomly added to the back of the house. it was a couple steps lower than the rest of the house and it still had the bedroom window and all the usual out door siding on the inside wall. so what my mom did was just move the entire kitchen. She borrowed a bunch of plumming books and just built the kitchen in the back room. I still have no idea how she did it. she even somehow moved the cook stove in there.

The hippies next door had started a small garbage dump behind their place. It was nasty. oh and did it smell in the summer. They only had all the trash hauled like every six months or so. So you can imagine how much piled up. But we were kids so it was so much fun looking at all the crazy stuff that ended up there. Then there were the rats. We weren’t allowed on that side of the house after dark because of all the rats that were in the garbage. So we played out front. But those rats were HUGE. They were the size of our cats. We would always sneak over there and throw stuff at the dump to see if we could scare them out. Like I said we were kids.

The one cool thing about that house was the pond. There is this great little pond up the street. you couldn’t swim in it because it was way too nasty. But it was really good for catfish and crawdads. We would catch millions of crawdads ( i.e crayfish, crawfish, mudbugs ). My mom could never get me to eat them though. I would now, but only if they were already peeled. There was the water canal that we could swim in though, or more commonly refereed to as a ditch. Normally they aren’t very safe to swim in. But the part we went to had a grate on one side to keep the garbage out and another grate about twenty feet farther. That way we wouldn’t get swept up with the current. It was really fun. Jump in one side then fly down the canal and land at the other side then climb up, run back, and do it all again. We had a blast.

I think the main reason I remember that house is because its also harbors one of the saddest memories of my life. Not the saddest though by a long shot. About two or three months before leaving that house I had decided that I couldn’t live out there any more. I hated it. I could never see my friends and was starting to grow away from them. I almost always missed the buss. Either from my own procrastination or my moms. My schoolwork suffered big time. I was just tired of the hardships that came with living so far away from everything. So I moved in with my grandparents during the school week. It was great. No sisters, no rats, no dirty shack. I loved it. And of course I loved living with my grandparents. I didn’t know that it might become permanent.

I was at school one day when I got called to the office. With my attendance record it wasn’t unusual. Except I had been staying at my grandmas for a while by then so I had no idea what I had done. I was really worried. When I got there they asked me to go ahead to the principles office. I was really scarred by then. When I knocked on the door it opened and my littlest sister was holding the knob. She wasn’t even old enough to be in school yet. I was just confused by that point. I walked in and there were my other sisters, the principle and another older lady that I had never met. She was from the family services office. It turned out that my mom had been arrested for something I can’t even remember now. The lady made me go back to class and get my backpack. I told her she wasn’t taking me any where when I realized I was meant to get in the front seat of her car. She actually forced me into the car then buckled the seat for me. Because I struggled my littlest sister Heather began to cry so I stopped. We drove about 20 miles to the capitol of our county where the social services offices were. And ended up sitting there for about six hours. That little room was the worst place I could imagine being in. It had plain cream walls with all these very childish pictures on the wall. A box of child’s toys and one small couch and a chair. The door was locked so we couldn’t get out and if we needed to use the rest room there was a bell we had to push so we could be escorted. Finally my grandma arrived. They took their time telling her I guess. They told her what happened and that they had some families lined up to take us until my mom got out and proved she was fit to keep us. My grandmother threw a fit. We ended up going home with her. She became our legal guardian. My mom got out about 9 months later. She lived with us there. She wasn’t allowed to move us out until she completed her probation and parenting classes.

It was a great time. We were always well fed. We got the best of both worlds, our crazy mom and our stable grandparents. My grandma got cable tv for us. That was the very first time I had seen MTV. The first music video I saw was from L.L Cool J. That was one of the happiest times of my life. I would hang out with my grandma after dinner and play solitaire with her. We would either play separately or against each other.  I never beat her of course. My sisters and I would play a game in the front yard called statues. You could only play it at dusk. We would just play a random game of tag, but every time a car drove by you had to freeze. My grandma used to humor us and tell us she really thought statues had sprouted on her lawn.