Back Down Memory Lane

First I would like to wish everyone a HAPPY NEW YEAR! Hopefully there will be better times in the coming year. Forty eight minutes to go here in the Central Time Zone.

So, when I left off we were living in town in a very small house and I think it was VJ Day. Soon after that we moved to Highway 81, spending the first few weeks at my grandparents house while ours was being built on the adjacent 5 acres Dad bought from my Uncle Joe.

My Grandparents House on Hwy 81

That house is still standing out there almost the same as back in 1945, but now owned by someone else. The child standing in the lower part of the photo is one of my 58 cousins on my mother’s side of the family. No one is sure which one it is at this late date, but it could have been any one of us.

There were two bedrooms and an attic upstairs — my aunts and I were in one and Big Bro and 2 or 3 uncles shared the other bedroom. The attic was filled with treasures for me to find and play with in those days. One was a German flag one of the uncles brought home after the war, but the one I loved best was a china doll that had been given to my mother on her baptism day. Oh how I wanted that doll, but when my grandparents sold the house the new owners gave them 2 weeks to get out. Most of the treasures were left behind while they got the essentials together for their move. Legally they shouldn’t have had to move out so quickly but they didn’t know that. But I’m ahead of myself here.

Our new house was being built of cinder blocks, the newest building material at that time. One night Dad was demonstrating how they wouldn’t burn, not aware that Big Bro had slipped out of bed and was watching from the staircase. Dad lit a match and put it on the side of the block and they all watched it burn itself out without damaging the block. More on that in a few.

We moved in to the house before it was completely finished, since my parents wouldn’t go into debt for anything. There was indoor plumbing in the kitchen but it was almost a year before the bathroom was finished. Brother number 3 was born during that time and was unable to keep any formula down. Nursing hadn’t worked first and then the formula made him sick, so the doctor recommended goats milk. A lady down the road had goats and Mom got the milk from her. #3 didn’t really like the taste but he kept it down and came to like it when he felt better. After the goats milk he was given buttermilk, another taste he acquired as he was growing stronger.

I’m not sure of the sequence of the dates, but at some time Big Bro was allowed to burn the trash while Mom took care of the babies. Uncle Joe had a barn behind our house that was full of hay, intending to leave it there until the hay was used up before tearing it down. Think about it now — a 5 year old with a match in his pocket, cinder blocks that wouldn’t burn, and a little sister to impress. Yeah, he took me into the barn, brought over one of the blocks and was going to show me how safe our house was! Just to make it more interesting he filled the holes in the blocks with dry hay before lighting the match. It was amazing how fast that dry hay caught fire. He grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the barn when everything around us caught fire and we hid out in the chicken house while one of the neighbors ran over to let Mom know the barn was on fire. No idea who called the Fire Department, but they all had to hold her back when she tried to run into the flames to find us. We stayed hidden for most of it, but finally came out when another neighbor located us and ordered us out of there. My memory of what happened next is gone which is probably a good thing, but the next morning I can remember Uncle Joe standing there just shaking his head at the rubbish that was his barn.

Most of our play those days consisted of playing with things we found and some imagination. Empty baby jars were used to play store, along with empty cans dug out of the trash. Mom always squashed the top of the cans almost flat to keep us from cutting ourselves on that pesky rim that was always sharp. No matter though. They still had labels we couldn’t read yet and were well used by us. Our money was cut up newspaper, what we could grab before it was put to use another way in the old outhouse.

And at this point I’ll close this part of the story and add a poem I wrote for Roger Moore after he shared some memories of his young days in Wales.

THE HOUSE OF HALF MOONS
Out in the country and back toward the fwnce
Stood an old house built in days of yore.
Small in structure and built out of wood
With a half moon carved out of each door.

We never were a family of means 
but Dad worked magic with his two hands and more.
He built us two swings and that old wooden house
And carved a half moon out of each door.

There were no lights inside that small house,
No heat in winter, no rug on the floor,
But there were two seats that he sanded well
And that half moon he carved out of each door!

Between the two seats a partition stood
From the top of the roof to the uncarpeted floor.
One side marked "Ladies" the other side "Gents"
Beneath the half moons carved out of each door.

There's many a thing I remember well
And miss very much from those days of yore.
But one thing I don't miss from those golden days
It that house with the half moon carved out of each door!

This photo was taken in Panther Creek Park, not far from where I grew up. It’s a part of the one I waxed poetic about, but my poem took several of the old places and merged them into one.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

A Few More Memories

After writing my silly poem about the outhouse I started thinking about a lot of other things from back in those days on Highway 81. We had some indoor plumbing before moving in. The well had been dug and there was water inside the kitchen. With 4 kids already that was necessary. There was another little house closer to the back door – the well house. It had shelves inside where Mom stored her canned goods. Those shelves were always overfilled by the end of the growing season.

We lived with our maternal grandparents while the house was being built. I think almost all of my aunts and uncles lived with the grandparents at one time or another. I slept in the room with my two aunts while two of my brothers slept in one of the other rooms that were unoccupied at the time. All the bedrooms were upstairs, except my grandparents room. They didn’t have indoor plumbing at all. There was a well where they drew the water needed for drinking and cooking, while we used rainwater, caught in barrels placed under every downspout for bathing and washing our hair. I sometimes wish I still had some of that rainwater for shampooing. It left our hair so soft and manageable, although today I seriously doubt it would work. With all of the pollution it might melt the hair off our heads.

There was a hay barn behind our house, filled with hay and belonging to the uncle who sold dad the 5 acres across the pasture from the grandparents, and at the edge of his farm. My older brother had sneaked downstairs one night while the house was being built and watched Dad showing the adults how the cinder blocks the house was being built of wouldn’t burn. He lit a match and set it on the side of the block and they watched while it went out without burning the block.

A week or so after we moved into the house my brother, who had been entrusted with a couple of matches to burn the trash with took me into the barn to show me how the blocks wouldn’t burn. Naturally he had to add a bit more to the block, so just inside the barn he stuffed the holes in the block with hay before lighting his remaining match and applying it to the block. After the inevitable happened and the fire jumped across to the loose hay in the barn he pulled me out and we hid in the chicken house. I think one of the neighbors called the fire department while others held Mom back when she tried to run into the barn looking for us. All the neighbors rushed in and formed a bucket line to attempt to save the barn, but by the time the fire trucks arrived all they could do was keep it from spreading to the house. Time has dulled the memory of what happened after we came out of the chicken house, but I can remember the usual punishments and imagine that one was the worst ever.

I can vividly remember my uncle standing in the ruins the next morning, shaking his head as he surveyed the ruins of his barn. He had quite a great sense of humor though and laughed it off but he had intended to tear it down anyway after removing the hay so maybe he saw it as saving him that trouble. I never asked and of course, being 4 years old no one ever told me since back then kids didn’t question adults — with the usual “why”? that kids today still ask.

I can remember that Dad and my uncles still living at home dug a trench across the pasture and ran water from our well to my grandparents house during our second summer there. While they still saved the rainwater they put a concrete slab across the well at that time to keep the grandkids from falling in, or more likely tossing the cats in to see if they could swim. Only one cousin did that, but we all learned that while the cat could swim it couldn’t climb the walls of that well.

Right now I’m trying to write down all of my memories of those slower times way back when. I don’t know that my children or grandchildren will ever care enough to read about a slower life style without the electronics they have grown up with. Well, the grands grew up with them. My three grew up in the country on the other side of town where we had indoor plumbing, but the old outhouse still stood, leaning with age, in the pasture behind our pre-Civil War farmhouse, complete with a buggy house that had an upstairs room, a smoke house, and a couple of barns behind it. But that’s for another time, another story.