Staff writer
For some, photographs are a great way to remember their childhood.
For Peabody resident Sharon Pickens, her childhood memory was a door, which she was reunited with over the weekend.
“This last Saturday, (Flint Hills Gypsies owner Morgan Marler) was having a sale,” Pickens said. “I thought, ‘It’s a pretty nice day, I’ll go down and see what she’s got.’”
Pickens looked around the store, and was getting ready to leave when a certain door caught her eye.
“It was this old green that everybody used back in the day in the ’50s, so I walked over and the closer I got to it, I saw the beginning of a name in black crayon,” Pickens said. “It was ‘S-H-A-R.’ Down below it was done in cursive, so I got real close to it, and I realized when I looked up, in pencil, was my sister’s name her height, her age, and the year. And I just went bonkers.”
What Pickens had seen was the beginning of her name that her 5-year-old self attempted to write next to her height, age, and year it was written.
“And then I looked over and here was this gosh awful looking thing that was supposed to be a ghost that I remembered trying to draw with black crayon,” Pickens said. “It’s still there. And I thought this absolutely cannot be, that was back in 1951, and that house has been torn down and was gone for years.”
The home torn down several years ago was in the 500 block of Locust St. in Peabody, which the family moved into when she was 5.
“We had a cellar right off the kitchen and that’s where this door was,” Pickens said. “I remember my mother marking our heights, year, and age.”
Not only were Pickens family’s names on the door, so were the names of people who owned the house before the Pickens family.
“I just went nuts. I was so overwhelmed,” Pickens said. “I was just rattling and Morgan kept asking, ‘Are you sure?’ and I said, ‘Morgan, my name is right here! And my sister! It is our door!’”
The door, which Marler found at an auction in Hillsboro several years ago, was being used as a display shelf in her store and at shows.
“It landed in my hands,” Marler said. “I’ve been toting it around for a number of years, and now it went back home to her.”
Before she for sure bought the door, Pickens asked her son David to come over and make sure the door was hers.
“Our three children were very close to my mom,” Pickens said. “She lived there for a number of years, and they remember the door.”
Pickens and her son went down to the store to check out the door.
“He said, ‘Yup that’s grandmas door,’” Pickens said, “and I said, ‘Yup, it’s going home.”
Though she was just recently reunited with her door, Pickens had kept the idea of it in the back of her mind, including measuring her own children and grandchildren on a door in her current house.
“Here at our home, in our doorway in the kitchen, are the marking of our children and 11 grandchildren,” Pickens said. “They can fight over whoever is going to take that.”
Pickens said that she does not have a current idea for what to do with the door, but that she will do something creative with it.
“It’s home, and I love it,” Pickens said. “A lot of people would think it’s just a door, but to me, it’s part of my growing up.”