The store continued to do well, and
we moved into our own home in Minden,
just a couple of blocks from the Minden Dry Goods on the main street. To a five
year old, it looked like a castle. Peach
colored stucco with two stories, both of which we lived in. There were white birches in the front, a
large lawn and sidewalks to roller skate on.
Within months of the move, November, 1948, a new baby arrived—Steven.
Just two months earlier, I was six
years old and was introduced to public school.
How favored I was to have a carbon copy of Tavie Howard in my first
teacher, Mrs. Booth, another warm, loving and nurturing woman, and added to
that a good sense of humor. Even when a child had an accident and pee ran down
the isle, there were no reprisals, and everything was handled quietly. I fell in love with school forever.
And then there were the recesses.
The front of the school had large, dirt playgrounds. They were perfect for outlining rooms of our
“houses” in which we played together.
One of us would be the mother, and if Johnny Nelson was playing, he
would be the father. The rest of us
would be the children. If you were the
parent you got to boss everyone else about.
Part of being a “dirt-housewife” meant you had to sweep up. We would break off a small, lower branch of
an arborvitae next to the school building and use it as a broom to sweep the
dirt until there were no rocks or sticks showing. I remember having a sense of determination
and delight in whipping that little broom back and forth over the outlined
space until another game was announced by one of the more assertive girls.
We might play hide and seek or
“Mother may I?", or jacks with its onesies and twosies. But the most fun was playing cowboys and
horses. All the girls wore cotton
dresses to school, and each dress had a tie-belt in the back. When the belt was untied, one on either side
of the dress, they made for perfect reins.
Each boy would select a girl, grab her sashes and off they’d race
through the grass at the back of the school yelling at the top of their
lungs. Larry Taylor, my “cursing
instructor,” and I were always Roy Rogers and Trigger. (I love palominos to
this day.) It was exhilarating to gallop
and prance and race for all we were worth.
However, when I arrived home with one or the other piece of belt in my
hand, my frazzled mother, home with a baby and toddler, would heave a sigh of
disgust, “You have no respect for the clothes on your back! Don’t you know these cost money? Don’t you know they have to be washed and
ironed? Don’t you realize how much work
it is for me to keep you looking good, and this is how you repay me!” I’d
cringe and freeze until she took a breath, then dash upstairs to change into my
play clothes.
During one particularly heated game
of hide and seek, I went charging up the school stairs to the “free” wall, and
for some reason collided head on with it, knocking myself out. I woke up in the “time-out” room with a woman
pressing a cold, dinner knife against the great lump on my head. This did nothing to help. I can only assume she thought the coldness
would help reduce the swelling. This
fabricated first-aid had to be where my disillusionment with institutions
began.
One morning when I should have been
getting up for first grade, my fingers were swollen and itchy with a red, bumpy
rash, and a terrible pain in my head wouldn’t let me stand. Being a child, and even though six years old,
I simply did the next best thing and crawled down the stairs and into my
parent’s bedroom. I showed mother my
hands, and cried about my headache.
Alarmed, she immediately called our country doctor, Dr. Hand who often
forgot to charge for his services and also still made house calls. He diagnosed me with Scarlet Fever, a dread
disease at the time because fatalities occurred as there were no
antibiotics. First I had to be isolated
from my sister, Susan, now two-something and my brother, Steve, a baby. My father, Ken, was told to leave the house
so he could keep working, and he moved in with his sister and brother-in-law
next door, co-owners of our retail store.
We were all quarantined. Fun for Mom and Dad? I don’t think so. They would talk through the kitchen window
over the sink. Dad would bring groceries
or whatever was needed for the day, and there was Mom with a six-year-old with
a serious illness, and a two-year-old
and a baby in her bedroom she was trying to keep safe.
Then my sister, came down with the disease,
and was placed in my brother’s bedroom downstairs to make it easier for mother
to care for her. She had to be kept quiet in her crib. My brother was isolated in Mother’s bedroom
with the hope of keeping him from getting sick.
I was kept on a cot in the kitchen and not allowed to move. For some reason we had to be kept as still as
possible. This meant six weeks of
quarantine, six weeks of living on a cot in the kitchen and no school—I had
just started first grade in the fall. I look back on it now and realize that
many of the reading assignments and worksheets which kept me occupied on that
cot must have been an attempt to keep me learning with the rest of my
classmates. The best part of the disease was pulling off the dead skin cells
after a while. I must have looked like a
moth-eaten beastie. I suspect Scarlet Fever weakened my immune system for
future bouts of sickness, preparing me for long stretches of isolation and
inactivity. Reading would be my escape. This love of reading is the wonderful gift my
mother gave me.
Dad was in
most ways an absent father. He worked. He hung out at his favorite tavern. He
worked. He slept. When he came home to dinner and headed the table in what
seemed to me at the time, like an army sergeant, Mom heaped bitter complaints
of his lateness on him. Our dinner
atmosphere was always tense. When I try
to remember my dad, I picture him behind the counter or at the antique cash
register at the Minden Dry Goods or with bills laid out across the living room
floor on a Sunday as he tried to decide which he could pay and which had to wait.
On his rare days off, I remember his bringing home fish, game birds, deer and
other prizes for our dinner.
Mom was good at dodge ball. She
managed to stand between us and Dad when he’d “had a bit too much,” but her
frustrations landed on us when we didn’t measure up to her perfect standards.
She could find the tiniest bit of food left on a plate we’d washed, and then
our ears would burn as she went on incessantly about our ineptitude and
stupidity.
And yet we were loved. Mom was a
voracious reader, and encouraged us in every way to imitate her. By nine o’
clock, she would hustle Sue and me up the steep, shiny-brown wooden stairs to
our bedroom under the eves. The knotty pine walls and the sloping ceiling gave
us a sense of being in a tree house, and we scrawled our own graffiti into the
wood above our beds making the space our own. Mom would sit in a chair at the
foot of our beds and read to us books her mother had read to her, Honey bunch,
The Bobsey Twins, The Burgess Stories of animals that talked, and later on the
series of Oz books and Nancy Drew. I think she enjoyed revisiting the stories
of her childhood with us. These were rare and wonderful moments of calm and
happiness. The stories helped me realize I wasn’t the only one upon whom
discipline might descend suddenly like a hawk on a mouse.
One of the early highlights of my
life was learning to read. I couldn’t
put a book down once I’d started it. Mom
would yell up the stairs, “Nancy,
get that light off!” I complained to my
grandfather one day, and he conspired to make me a special reading light which
had two chains to pull, one to dim the light and one to brighten it. I could dim it when Mom called up; and, when
I heard her steps going away, pull the chain down just enough to be able to see.
In the winter, the oil stove
downstairs sent very little heat up, and so we had mounds of quilts to keep us
warm. My favorite amenity was the chrome hot water bottle in a blue-blanket
cover placed in the bed before we hopped in. The sheets felt icy, but there in
the middle of the bed was this haven for cold feet.
In the summer Dad would hook up the
hose to the swamp cooler in our bedroom window.
The chilled air would blast its full power over our beds and flow down
the stairs to give the house a bit of relief on those hottest of days which
could get up in the high nineties, even higher.
There was one great and terrible
disadvantage to having our bedrooms upstairs—no bathroom. Enter the
White-Enamel-With-Red-Rim-Receptacle-With-Cover for our pee, just big enough
for a child’s bottom and deep enough to hold a good yellow gallon. When it was introduced, I, as the oldest, was
assigned the daily emptying. I could put
it off for days, until my mother questioned me about my duty. By then it could be nearly full, reeking and
heavy. How I negotiated those slippery,
varnished stairs without ever spilling a drop amazes me today.
But those stairs could also be a
source of noisy delight when my new friends, Cookie and Sheila came to
play. Their steepness made a wonderful
slide, as we would toboggan down them with blankets, pillows or just the seat
of our pants, whooping and hollering at each bump so we sounded like a gigantic
truck trying to start. Ahh!...Ahh!...Ahh!...Ahh!...Ahh!
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