I have decided to use my BLOG to “publish” the sections that were edited out of my book! I was told they had little to do with the overall story and would usually have a choice given to me on different passages, so in order to keep one, I often had to give in on the other and have it deleted from the manuscript. After talking to so many people who often remind me of the missing passages, I have to make them known to everyone who wishes to read them because they ARE funny or poignant and do matter in the end. So, here are the missing pieces of the puzzle of my life’s story. I have added to and rearranged each episode to hopefully make sense of these missing parts of my book to formulate a true understandable account of this moment in time.
Chapter 1 – Growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s
The house where we all grew up was small, with only three bedrooms. Naturally, since I had three brothers, all four of us had to share one bedroom. Adjoining our bedroom was the girls’ bedroom where all four of my sisters shared the room. Previously, the upstairs bedrooms had been the attic. As my parents had more children over time, my father re-modeled the upstairs into bedrooms and put in lacquered wood stairs with an ornate metal handrail.
The house originally had had grayish tile covering the outside with a huge enclosed front porch with evergreen trees in front of it. We used the porch as a summer bedroom and a play area in the spring and summer. When renovating, my father removed the front porch, put up an awning over the front door and cut down all the pine trees. He also replaced all the windows in the living room, putting in a large picture window and then proceeded to add a laundry room and a second bathroom, before finishing off the exterior with new-fangled white siding.
Before my parents had a gas stove and an oil-burning furnace installed, I remember we had a kitchen stove that used coal and the heat for the house was also provided by coal. On winter days we used to dry our socks and underwear on the top grate of the massive coal furnace that heated the house. Scorch marks where a sure sign of neglecting laundry!
One of my daily chores had been to take the ashes out and bring in new coal. At that time, we had a big coal bin and soon learned to use coal to draw on the stone sidewalk that ran around the back of the house to the garage’s large front pad. Coal made drawing great hopscotch boards on the cement easy.
Also during our coal era, we had an old wringer washer and I loved to watch my mother and sisters put the clothes through that wringer. When we got a new spin washer and matching dryer, it made doing laundry much easier for them, but it wasn’t the same for me.
The property on which our house sat had once been used as a clambake grove many years previous. There had been two pavilions that had had different uses such as for dancing and cooking and out-houses tucked away in the field for the patrons. Eventually, my father had one of the pavilions closed in and used it as a barn for storage and shelter for a bull we once had. The other pavilion was eventually torn down.
My father’s garage was always neat and clean and he kept every nut, bolt and screw in glass jars that had their metal lids nailed to the underside of his long, heavy workbench. Since there was no clutter on the smooth cement floor, the garage is where we practiced our roller-skating and the older siblings had parties – like a memorable Halloween party one year. I think the apple cider was spiked.
Our dad had a huge, or so we thought, garden behind the house between the back yard and the base of the mountain. He always put in corn, potatoes, scallions, green peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans and yellow beans. All the kids had to help with the planting, weeding and fertilizing. Of course, we hated working in the garden, but loved taking the salt and pepper shakers with us to eat tomatoes right off the vine which were still warm from the sun.
My father had a little hand-driven tractor he used to dig up the garden in the spring. Then in winter, he attached a front plow for the snow. The plow never worked very well, so all of us, and my father, would shovel the driveway with the mandatory snowball fight afterwards. The tractor was kept in a little shed in the back yard, but we kids called it the “barn.”
We shared the mountain we lived on with Antoinette’s family that had nine kids. Between our two families there were a total of seventeen kids. Some of us were close in age and naturally bound to be friends. On the mountain, the elder kids had built a cabin and sometimes took us riding in old beat-up cars for fun on the old wagon paths. We would go to a place we called, “The Quarry” and to climb the face of the small cliff leading up to the cabin. There were names we had for different areas of the mountain. One other special place nestled in an overgrown field had mountain laurel bushes all over and was filled with tall, silky grass and we called it, “Green Village.”
We kept ourselves amused with our “clubs” and playing on the mountain or in our yards. Our “clubs” were always modeled after Secret Agent Man, SAM, or The Monkees and our clubhouse sometimes was an old dilapidated outhouse from the clambake grove era. Well, until a bat got caught in someone’s hair that one time…
We built forts out of ferns in the summer and snow in the winter and made make-believe horses out of long sticks and twine. We loved biking, walking and swimming when we were younger. By the time I was a teenager, my mother had an aboveground pool installed for us kids. Originally I did the pool maintenance until passing those duties on to my sister, Arlene. Our walks became more daring when the old wire guardrails were replaced by stainless steel, solid waffle-like rails. That was because with sneakers, we could balance and walk on top of them. It became a challenge to see how far you could go, before falling off.
Football games were an important part of our childhood, instilled by the older children. We learned to love a game that was so important to the area. Rival school districts made us wary of their fans but the most intense feelings were saved for the annual Thanksgiving Day game with a neighboring district which we always attended. Sadly, thirty plus years later, that tradition no longer exists.
Holiday memories include:
Remember writing out Valentines to classmates, making hearts with doily edges and even cut-out silhouettes of Lincoln and Washington? And, making four-leaf clovers to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day was the major March activity just before making daffodils and butterflies for spring.
Rolling the Easter eggs on newspaper to make sure they were dry before replacing them back into the carton.
My favorite Halloween costumes were hand-made by my mother back then and Thanksgiving was made special if it landed on my brother, Christian’s birthday. There were candles in the turkey!
And then, Christmas
All of us children would sing Christmas carols along with Mitch Miller too. Our Christmas trees were always real and I remember how colorful the outside lights would be. We had a lighted Nativity until one of our dogs dragged the Baby Jesus through the front yard and chewed through all the wires. Arlene, Natalie, Antoinette and I, would go caroling—a good excuse to build snow walls in the middle of the road or stuff mailboxes full of snow. We looked forward to piling into the car to go drive around just to see the neighboring outdoor decorations which were only lights and a Nativity scene back then.
As I grew up and began wanting more in my life, I would steel every moment that I could to be alone and daydream. I often went out to the isolated backyard to sit on swings at night because I liked the quiet and looking at the star-filled sky without the haze from city lights. In summer, I sat and enjoyed the warm breezes blowing through the trees on the mountain or through the weeping willows in the yard and the flashes of heat lightning. Also, I loved watching the June bugs or lightning bugs as we called them and would lose myself in the rhythm of the swaying swing, look up at all those stars and wish I were someplace else, somewhere exciting. And, I’d have my special love. Sigh.
