We rented this house for $64 in 1962! It was the only time I had any idea of the money my parents spent, or paid for bills. Although I was the one who had to answer the phone so that when bill collectors called I could tell them my parents were not home.
My mother kept on working at the Velvet Freeze while my father took the four of us to Chatham, Illinois daily. He was plastering and painting while we played. For lunch he brought a thermal bag with lunch meat and mustard along with a loaf of bread and potato chips. Each of us got a dime to buy a cold soft drink at the little grocery store up the street towards the square. That was a real treat back then. It was also a treat to have my dad home and available. I loved talking to him while he worked and I loved being the one to make the sandwiches.
This house was on the main street going out of town and the town was small. The population listed on the sign in front of our house said 1000 and we used to joke that now it was 1006. There was a funeral home across the street that kept long tailed smelly sheep in the back yard and an ambulance in the garage. Usually the wind blew the smell away from us. We could get our mail at the little post office near the square and the space around the square was divided pretty equally between taverns and churches. It felt very quaint, like I had gone back in time.
I had been the only one in our family who attended Sunday school at the church next door to the house on Walnut Street and I thought I should pick a church to go to here. They were all little white wooden buildings with small steeples and they seemed much less daunting than the church in Springfield. I had not missed a single Sunday there because I wanted to win a white Bible at the end of the year, but they said I didn't get one because my parents weren't members.
Our backyard was impenetrable, filled with apple and pear trees and two out buildings besides the old stable/garage. My dad hired a boy with a tractor to clear it out and we discovered a horse tethered by the back fence! However our attempts to ride him were futile. He simply walked over to the back porch of the house behind us, lowered his head and dumped us off! The side yard was a swamp! It turned out that when the house was built, a gazillion years ago, someone buried a barrel outside the kitchen window and the sink had been draining into it ever since.
We found some old dried up paint cans and mixed water into them to make a sort of wash we used to paint the inside of one of the outbuildings. I think it had been a chicken house. We called it our club house and cut a hole in the roof that we covered with an old grating for a door. In order to join you had to stand up on the roof and jump off. It was probably less than eight feet, but if you were standing up it seemed much higher. Playing in this yard made us feel like we lived in the olden days. We climbed trees, picked apples and made applesauce and tried to have a picnic in a sunny glade. It turned out sunny glades are full of insects that also love picnics. We were out numbered by the spiders ten to one. One afternoon my sister climbed way up into one of the trees. I can still see her standing up there. Crying. Dad had to come home and climb up to get her down.
The house was a rambling old, very old, two story wooden clapboard. Someone had tacked on odd little porches and windowed lean-tos around it, so it felt kind of mysterious, but it was damp and not well insulated. We turned one porch into a sort of play room. My dad used one for his office and books and there was one off the kitchen where our cats had kittens. We had two cats. One had a half orange and half black face. We called her Spitzer and she was a very good mother. The other was a little gray tabby we called Spit Fire who had kittens all over the room. She had one up on a ladder and one under a chair and so forth, but once they were born she wanted nothing to do with them. My mother put them on a dishtowel in the electric skillet to keep them warm until Spitzer adopted them as her own.
It was all uphill from the kitchen to the dining room. The intervening space became our laundry hall. We put the washer and dryer there. The only bathroom was off the dining room and my parents' bedroom was next to that. The living room had a staircase going up to the two bedrooms we used. One for the girls and one for the boys. These bedrooms were only heated by a vent in the floor open to the rooms underneath. I found I could watch The Twilight Zone after my bedtime if I lay just right and peered through the one in our room. The only other defining characteristic of this bedroom was the very shallow closet. It was only about six inches deep. More of a clothes press than closet.
In spite of all the work my father did on the house he described it as "Cold and drafty. At any moment I (he) expect clouds to form and rain to fall in the living room." We didn't really mind it. We were just kids.
In the beginning we were allowed to ride our bicycles wherever we wanted. The idea was that it was a small town and very safe, but after we all rode five miles out to the quarry one afternoon, that ended. So we did what the other kids did. We watched the high school boys do tricks at the corner cafe. One of them could hold onto the pole and hold his body parallel to the ground. We decorated our club house, rode our bikes around the square and I made a secret place to hide my writing by hollowing out an old book my father had discarded. Of course that book stood out like a sore thumb among my other books, but I never noticed.
My dad enrolled us in school. He liked to tell the story of how when they asked him which grades, he said 2,4,6 8. My school only had seventh and eighth grade. It was way out in the country and had once been an elementary school so there were swings and slides and teeter totters to play on at lunch. Lunch was different here. The food was made by the lunch ladies who inspected our trays before we turned them back in, to make sure we ate it! I felt like I had gone back in time, but they did have a personal hygiene class where they showed a movie that was very explicit. I remember the girl sitting next to me fainted and farted before she fell on the floor. Up until then I thought fainting sounded very feminine and delicate. That ended that!
They did not have an orchestra so I could not continue with my violin. Instead my mother decided I should play the saxophone because she still had her old one. My dad used to laugh when he described our band teacher. He said there were a lot of good players, but their timing was off. Everyone just played till they got to the end. Some faster than others. Band class was up on the gym stage. Mr. Chapman would direct with great gusto and sometimes got so frustrated he threw his baton up in the air over his head. One day it flew right out an open window!
My mother quit working at the Velvet Freeze and became a Goldblatt's Paper Route Monitor. She would put us all in the car and drive around checking to see if kids had put the Goldblatt's ads on doorknobs. Then she decided we could do Chatham ourselves. She gave half the town to two of us and the other half to the other two. She was still the checker, but we had to walk house to house and rubber band the rolled up paper to door knobs. That didn't last long. I was afraid of dogs and my siblings were pretty lackadaisical.
My mother also decided that she and the other kids would all come to church with me. One Sunday while we were listening to the sermon everyone noticed the minister would occasionally twitch, jerk, or pause briefly before continuing. It turned out my brother, Tom, was surreptitiously shooting rubber bands at him. Mom thought this was hysterically funny? At Christmas they asked my mother if I would play my violin for the service, but I declined. I never played a piano, or violin, or saxophone, or oboe, recital. I was too scared and nobody in my family really encouraged me to do otherwise. Even though we were expected to take music lessons there was never any interest expressed in how we practiced or progressed.
I had my thirteenth birthday in this house and I remember how solemnly my father said, "Welcome to the world of teenagers. From now on you will feel misunderstood." I didn't understand, but I wanted to look cool so I pretended to. I cultivated looking like I understood many things I didn't, probably hailing back to first grade when my teacher tried to teach me that no one was perfect. And obviously failed.
My dad's mother, my grandmother Prehn, had moved after her divorce. First she, my aunt and my cousin lived in Colorado Springs and later they moved to Hereford, Texas. When I was very little she had showed me a matchbox full of dead baby mice! I thought they were so cute. Now she sent us a preserved scorpion and a horn toad from Texas. These were not so cute, but we kept them out in the toy room. Grandmother loved animals. When I was a toddler I remember walking among her pack of two collies and two English Spaniels. Later she had a pet skunk and a St. Bernard. When I was very small I would visit with her and she would give me dog cookies (Milk Bones) to chew on. I thought that was bizarrely cool. She had once been a teacher and she was very creative. She handmade many smocked dresses for me as an infant and later made us all beautiful dolls she called, Binkies. I think I have a lot of her characteristics, but after she moved away, I only saw her one more time when we visited her in Colorado. I was nine then. She and my mother did not get along. The story goes that she came for dinner one night and the napkins didn't match, so she left saying she would rather be hungry than improper. I suspect there was a lot more to this story, but who knows. Grandma was a bit of a social climber and snob, while my mother prided herself on what she considered her shortcomings like not going to college and was an ardent reverse snob. As two sides of the same coin they were bound to clash.
One of my mother's decorating techniques was hanging our stuffed animals around the edge of the ceiling in our rooms so we could see them, but not get them dirty playing with them. She also hung the souvenir dolls people gave us from our lights in the middle of the room for the same reason. Other dolls, like the mechanical babies from Germany that moved and cried, or the Dutch doll from Holland, lived in boxes in our closet along with our doll china. Her intentions were good, but somehow she did not realize that a toy you cannot touch or play with is not much of a toy.
One day my brother, Tom, caught a huge garden spider in the backyard. He put it in a jar and took it upstairs to his bedroom where he promptly lost it! It just crawled away when he was distracted and he never found it again. That night my parents were sound asleep when they were awakened by blood curdling screams. Rushing up to my room they found me in my bed, wide-eyed and still screaming. I dreamed that one of the dolls hanging from the light in the center of our room was that spider. It took them a while to wake me up and settle me back down.
Unfortunately I continued to have these night terrors and wake up screaming, sometimes running out of my room trying to escape. I still do to this day, but very seldom now. Back then they were so frequent my parents must have decided I was broken and made the decision to move back to our old house on Douglas Street in Springfield with the hope that it would fix me.
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