I am up in the morning anywhere from 3:30 AM to 5:00. If I lay there any longer my aches and pains seem to kick in to remind me of my age. This was all well and good back when I lived alone in my one bathroom house, but now I have a son who lives with me and he leaves for work at 5:30. This means he sneaks very quietly up the stairs and into the bathroom and I do not hear him. So when I open my bedroom door and see the light under the bathroom door, I know I missed my golden opportunity and I will now be doing the little dance that does no good what so ever, but seems necessary.
So this leads me to the moonlight trail to the outhouse back at 709 North Strong Street , Nickerson, Kansas, seventy years ago. While it was still light we all had to go visit the outhouse. Hopefully that would be the last trip for the night. Now, in the event we actually had to go in the middle of the night, we were allowed to make concessions. One of these was if we only needed to go as far as the horse tank if we only had to do #1. There was a "chamber pot" located behind the wood stove for the little kids to use and Dad. I do not ever remember being an actual "little kid." I am sure that after we left the Stroh place Jake, Josephine, myself were all big kids. Dorothy was a tiny baby and Mary was 2 years old. That would have meant Donna was 4. Since they were little they went to Ora Ayres to be babysat while I was in school She charged 50 cents a week.
I remember her kitchen well. It had very big wood cookstove that took up the whole kitchen. I need to interject here that when her and Jerry(?) were first married they were in a car wreck and Ora had suffered some brain damage. She was still a functioning adult, but her reasoning skills were rather limited. She could babysit and she could cook. We grew up eating chocolate cakes that she baked every day and were used as a substitute for bread. Now her cakes were a strange green color, but mother said it was because she skimped on the chocolate or used an inferior brand. But that is neither here nor there and has no bearing whatso ever on anything and I do not know why it stuck in my mind.
Jerry was an avid gardener and when he harvested his crops were kept in his bedroom. His harvest seem to consist of mostly peanuts which were boiled and eaten that way. Gross. Never understood that, but it really was not any of my business. The back yard had a grainery and that was where the chickens lived. The "out house" was located in one corner of a row of ramshackle sheds strung together that surrounded the grainery. It was a hole in the ground with a wash tub with a hole cut in it and turned upside down. That was one place no one wanted to go and I never had nerve enough to perch on that with my pants down! It was breeding grounds (in my mind) to a new breed of giant, poison spiders.
Some times mother sent us big kids to bring the little kids home. That was always a treat because Ora would give us a piece of the green cake and we actually liked it as long as we did not know the difference. Entertainment at her house consisted of blocks of wood which were used as cars to travel on the dirt roads we drew on the dirt yard.
As I write this, I realize that this was our "normal". If I gave one of my grandkids a piece of wood and told them to go pretend it was a car they would think I had lost my mind! I can get Jiraiya to walk across a field with me to check on crawdads in the ditch, but a block of wood is just a block of wood to him. He likes to fill the feeder for the geese, but then the computer games are his weapon of choice.
I miss my life on Strong Street and I can not imagine why I ever wanted to leave, but I did. My idea of heaven is not a street paved in gold, but the sandy soil of Strong Street and the mud that dried in the puddles and waited for the sun to bake it so we could walk barefoot and feel it crunch beneath our feet.
That and a piece of green cake will get me a seat at the throne of God any day!
1 comment:
It's amazing that you have such clear memories of those early years. Mine are fuzzier and few and far between. I remember nothing as magical as the world you describe so poetically. Perhaps I picked up on the frustration and discontent of my mother. She'd spent part of a year at college (Colorado Agricultural College which became CSU) then several years in the Navy during WW II (WAVES.) After the war she returned to visit her family near Brush and was swept off her feet by a movie star handsome young farmer (also a Navy vet.) She never really intended to get married and when they ended up on a homestead in northern South Dakota she soon grew disenchanted with her lot in life. I think it was clear to me that she wasn't happy and wanted more.
And things soon did get better for them. They were ambitious and hard working. Dad had a very successful career in construction equipment sales, and Mom became a realtor. But all their lives they set their sights on the next big opportunity, the next challenge to overcome, the next adventure. The moves were frequent. I'm the only one of my siblings who graduated from the same high school they started at. And I will always be thankful that I had such a good high school with some fine teachers. Don't know where this is going. Maybe I'll come back and try to add something. Now it's time to wash the dinner dishes and get ready to leave early in the morning for Denver. Have a nice evening and a good night's rest.
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