Cardboard Castle
An ordinary moment. An unexpected memory. And an old story dragged out by the ankles.
Yesterday I was flattening my weekly Amazon boxes. Living tucked away in the country has taken some getting used to, and the weekly Amazon delivery situation is a new reality. It’s never just a box with your thing inside. It’s a box in a box inside a box, until your toilet brush arrives in something the size of a small maritime vessel.
Other than being utterly annoyed and reorganizing the entire boxing infrastructure of Amazon in my head, I caught myself standing there with a box cutter in my hand and staring at the boxes until I realized I was thinking about my old cardboard castle.
And just like that, it was 1971. I was seven years old.
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We lived in a fourplex in Rose Park, Salt Lake City, which was back then considered “the other side of the tracks.” This was, to my recollection, our fourth or fifth house. We moved with jolting regularity, but we had been here for one school year and two summers — that’s how I counted time.
My mother bartended nights at the Black Bull and worked days and raised three kids alone. My father left when I was a toddler. You don't miss something you don't have. There were a few other mother-kid packs in this neighborhood, so it felt normal. We were a three-pack sharing one bedroom: a bunk bed and a single we rotated like a timeshare. When my turn in the single came up, I decorated the wall next to it like I was curating the MET.
But behind the fourplex was where all the action happened. Specifically, the alley.
Connected to the alley was a thrift store where we were allowed to pick out our own outfits for school, which was genuinely the coolest thing about being us. I found brown corduroy pants that were my size, which was a real prize, and a striped shirt to match. Done. First day of school outfit sorted. I was very pleased with myself. But the real treasure was the donation bins out back.
The same alley that dressed me also housed me. It became my entire supply chain. Couch cushions. Old drapes. And boxes, big ones, if it was a good week.
I dragged everything to the backyard, up against the chain link fence, in the part shaded by an old beat-up tree that hung over and became the roof of my lean-to cardboard castle.
I cut the windows in with a dull kitchen knife, which was also a glorious find from my alley pickings, broken handle and all. I held it up and thought: weapon, tool, something to cut up meat with. I had no meat. Nothing says “safe childhood” like a seven-year-old with a dull kitchen knife and absolutely no supervision.
Fucking find and a half.
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I didn’t sleep out there. It was the kind of castle you build because the adults are busy doing young-adult shit and you need one place on the entire planet that is entirely yours. Nobody missed me out there. That sounds sad, and partly it was, but mostly it was the 70s and children were released into the wild at dawn and collected at dusk like stray cats.
But in my cardboard castle it was quiet. Even back then, quiet was something I learned I needed to survive. It was just me, my random collections of stuff, with windows exactly where I wanted them, because I was the one holding the knife.
I was the 1973 Queen of Rose Park and the alley was my queendom.
Every queendom needs a trusty warlord, and mine was Lonnie. Lonnie was a boy from down the street with short-cropped curly hair and the survival instincts of a moth near an open flame. He fell out of trees the way other kids fell asleep — worse, he never got better. He just kept following me up the tree and falling out. It was frustrating and amusing in equal measure. Once he dropped past me from the top of a tree we were both climbing. Slow motion, all the way down. Broke his collarbone. A few weeks later he was climbing again. I respected that and let him give me a kiss. Then he demonstrated how to manually ejaculate his dog, which he seemed very proud of. There were no more kisses after that.
We were friends because he liked lighting fires and I liked lighting fires, and for me that was a complete personality match. We took a hose and put it in the basement window of a crotchety old man across the street and flooded his basement. We stole rhubarb from an old woman who defended her garden with a BB gun loaded with rock salt, which as far as I was concerned was a pretty fair transaction because I loved being shot at.
Probably something there to look at. Another time perhaps.
Here’s the thing about running a real estate portfolio alongside a pyromania hobby: eventually the two divisions meet. My castle had withstood a lot over that one summer — weather, neighbor insurgencies, general chaos. I was the quiet kid, probably why they instinctively knew to stay pretty clear of it, and me. But there were still frequent attacks and the need for Lonnie and I to pull out the dull kitchen knife. Back to the pyro part — you can guess what happened. One day, somewhere between I wonder and oh no, it was up in flames.
Which, looking back, is a metaphor for the decades to come. Build it. Burn it down. Move on.
I also buried a time capsule under the castle. I don’t remember what was in it, but it was now under the rubble and seemed like a safe place for it to live. Which means somewhere in a Rose Park backyard, or maybe under a new Popeye’s, there’s a sealed container of things a seven-year-old swore were worth keeping, waiting for a person who is never coming back.
I try not to think about that one too long.
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The boxes are flat now, stacked in the bin out on the street. It’s Friday. They’ll be gone in a few hours.
I have a lawn now. A garden with borders. I stand out there at dawn instead of dusk.
Is this real? Do I get to stay? Is someone going to make me leave?
She’d be more trusting of the boxes.
These stories were dragged out of my mind. I stand by almost none of my decisions. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. Mainly because I can’t remember them.
That’s what’s on my mind this week. Meanwhile, in the actual kitchen — muffins baking. Music on. Pull up a stool. Recipe below.
OLD-SCHOOL PB&J MUFFINS
(with peanut crumble)
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OhHellYeah.
Forts and Fire. Long Summer days with zero supervision. A world of endless possibility.
I’m so glad I clicked on this. Great writing.