This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks about favorite memories from reviewers' childhoods.
The trouble is that most of my childhood memories are pleasant. Even the ones that involve illness or school...I was cheerful by nature then, too, and found ways to have fun in spite of the amount of time I spent, as a child, being sick or being at school or both.
Well, let's see. I've reminisced about the year in Folsom, California, during which my brother was born and (before the fad) I had a pet rock called Pal. I've reminisced about the winter after that, when we rented a house far back in the hills. During the next summer we moved into a house just outside the edge of town, with a view of a paved road.
This was not an ordinary house. I think it was featured in some photos of what terrible housing conditions we poor people in "Appalachia" (not the actual town) had to live with. It was a big bare barn perched precariously on the side of a steep hill. On one side its foundations were jammed against slabs of bare limestone that had to be sidestepped around or climbed over to walk around the house. On the other side it was perched on long poles, as seen in pictures of traditional indigenous houses in Venezuela. It had electric lights because, when it had been built and abandoned, government employees had come around offering everybody electric lights. It had glass windows. It had one big solid stone chimney. It had bare wooden boards for walls, floors, and ceilings, cut small and tongue-and-grooved together, and bigger bare wooden boards for siding, nailed on over the outsides. It had a metal roof. There were four rooms, but the back bedroom was set up for chickens to live in, not people. The main source of water for washing was tubs below the points where water ran off the roof. For drinking water, occupants of the house had access to a spring about half a city block away.
Contrary to what the social workers told the rest of the country, however, this was not a typical "Appalachian" home. It was not and had never been anybody's home. It had been built on a bet, with scrap wood, by a young man who built better houses for paying customers. What he won included the family's permission to court a respectable young lady. They were still married, and still living in a much nicer house aross the road from the house-built-on-a-bet.
The man who had built the house was by now a disabled senior citizen. He was said to be some sort of distant relation to my grandmother from Tennessee. Her pedigree was not documented so nobody could be sure exactly how or whether her distant relatives were related to us, but we treated them as relatives. Anyway his children had grown up as neighbors to Dad and his cousins; some of them were still friends. One day in town the subject of how far Dad had to walk to work, or to visit his mother, had come up. If a house closer to town were as cheap as the one we were renting, he'd move, Dad said. The old house-built-on-a-bet would be even cheaper, the distant or honorary relative said. "I'll take it!" Dad said. The house was clean and dry and solid, its three rooms were large, and it would be easier for four people to fix up and live in comfortably than some houses in town that were renting for more money.
It would be a few years before housekeeping magazines started reporting on the trend for young couples to move into actual barns and refurbish them into nice houses. My parents never minded being on the cutting edge of trends. Nor did my brother and I, though we were too young to know that that was where we were.
But life improved in many ways. Now Mother had hired help--two of Dad's younger cousins who came in and did chores, including amusing us, in the mornings. We loved them. We could go into town and visit Grandma often; Grandma was not the most interesting relative, but she enjoyed being visited so we liked visiting her. We could go to the library and check out books. More of those toys and books that had been shipped from the house in Folsom could be brought out of storage and played with. We had near neighbors who were relatives, who enjoyed being visited, who had interesting houses and gardens and animals. We had a safe place where the hens could be let out to pick and scratch, and we could get to know them. Next fall I could go to school! (I looked forward to that--right up to the first actual day of school, when I realized I'd been scammed.)
I remember that the house-built-on-a-bet did look big and dark and empty when we moved in. All that wood was dark-colored, and stained darker, in a soot-dirt-and-mold-concealing way that was very popular during the builder's formative years. "You can see right out through the cracks in the walls in that kitchen!" Mother wailed. The cousins brought in some wallpaper. What you could see, when we moved in, was a big old pear tree, covered in white blooms. The tree had been planted far enough downhill that you could see right into the top of it. About the time it lost its blooms, the walls were covered--at least with pink paper with images of food and flowers printed on it, mid-century fashion. Outside the kitchen, a long porch rested on the ground at one end and fifteen feet above the ground on the other. The porch railing was a good place to pretend one was in an airplane, or a rocket, or a sailing ship. I remember one evening when the lights went off after a storm when I thought I would rather have been back in any of the last two or three houses we'd rented. One, not two. The house-built-on-a-bet was a great place to be a child. I especially liked the child-sized storage spaces built into the walls of the front room.
From the kitchen window I could still see my older cousins board and leave the school bus, watch for visitors approaching on the highway below...but not watch birds in the pear tree. These were still the DDT years and all birds were becoming rare.
In this set of memories, I'm not big enough to carry buckets of water from the spring, or even from the tubs under the eaves. I'm allowed to walk along when a parent goes to the spring, carry a glass and scoop up a drink for myself. This is fun. I'm not mature enough to think what a chore the parents have to do, until one day--this summer, or another summer?--when I'm visiting one of the cousins who visit us in the mornings, and she lets me carry a five-gallon bucket of water. On that day I remember something I read in one of those old science books: Water is heavy. But I'm still a child. Parents can do anything. Parents don't admit weakness, at least mine don't, so in spite of some evidence I don't think any task is ever too hard for my parents.
At this house being shooed out to play in the sunshine is actually fun. The battleship makes its last voyage down the branch creek below the spring. I have a slingshot, which I never learn to use very well. I have two big plastic baby dolls, one of which was some older relative's baby, long ago, and one of which came from a store in Folsom; they become interesting when I discover that their arms, legs, and heads can be screwed on to each other, like my "Pop-it" beads; I have motherly protective feelings about my brother, the young cousins as they come along, the baby chickens when they come along, but never about those big hard plastic dolls, the un-babies. The baby dolls are made of the same stuff as the battleship so, after someone crossing the creek runs over the battleship, I float the dolls down the creek.
My favorite playthings are still the books I drag outside to read in the sunshine, and what nature has already put outside to look at. Strawberry plants in the garden above the house have pretty flowers, then delicious fruit. Cleavers cleaves to my bare legs with its prickly little hairs, in a way that startles me at first, then becomes amusing. Poison ivy grows on the steep slopes above the path from the road to the house, to encourage everyone to keep on the path and not cause soil erosion. The pear tree doesn't bear fruit, but mulberry trees along the road between this house and the helpful cousins' house bear fruit; there are "red," "white," and "black" mulberries and that summer we pick and preserve all of them. I learn about cherry trees, too, and peach trees that the poets in a World Literature book I like compare to little girls, and peas in pods, and corn on the cob, and tomatoes. I learn to recognize and avoid all the muck all those free-range animals leave on the ground, and to recognize each animal's tracks, and know most of the animals by name--if they have names. Animals reared for slaughter don't have names. All horses, dogs, and goats, and most cats, cows, and chickens, have names. No one in the neighborhood keeps sheep or pigs.
I learn about tobacco. Everyone in the neighborhood has a tobacco patch. Dad tells them they should give it up because it's so bad for the land; tobacco has to be sprayed with poison, and even then it still has to be walked around carefully to protect the leaves from any bruise, and still the plant always grows blue mold. When the leaves are cut and dried there's a system for grading them and a process for packing them for sale; this happens in late fall. Some kids get to stay home from school and help with the tobacco, but I don't, because the stuff that's sprayed on tobacco makes my nose run.
Pretty flowers don't grow around this house, because it was never anybody's home. What was planted around it was useful, even the poison ivy. Grandma, however, has a house full of flower pots and a yard lined with flower pots. She doesn't raise potted flowers to sell, only to show off to people. They are her favorite thing. She has great success with flowers she calls "Sweet William." William is what Dad calls one of the men in the neighborhood; not a bad man, but I never see anything sweet about him.
Honeysuckle, however, does grow around this house. Once it was useful--to help prevent soil erosion after the trees had been cut. Now that native plants and trees are holding down the soil, honeysuckle can be pulled up and played with. After being played with for a day or two it dries out and burns well.
All the chickens in the neighborhood are free-range. Most of them have learned to follow one human around the vicinity of one house, so they don't often stray. There is, however, a young rooster, a long-legged Old English Game and White Leghorn crossbreed, who strays around, challenging bigger and older roosters to fight. He always wins, without doing any permanent harm to the other birds. He's nicknamed Old Faithful. Noticing that he seems especially attracted to our alpha hen, Linda, Dad buys him. People expect a heavy sack will be needed to move this big aggressive bird. "He knows where he wants to be," Dad says. One evening after the chickens have gone to roost Dad scoops Old Faithful off his perch in a neighbor's barn and carries him home in his arms. Old Faithful rides along as if he'd always been Dad's pet. He does indeed know who Linda's humans are. Once taken to Linda's home and told it's now his home, Old Faithful makes it his home. He could go on straying if he wanted to. He never wants to. Other than following Linda and us when we move to another house in the neighborhood, next summer, he's never out of sight from our house again. No White Leghorn is even rumored to have that much sense, but it's not unusual for Old English Game chickens, who have not had all the intelligence bred out of their little bird brains.
Linda, however, does not go broody in this first year. She leaves that to the little bantam hens, Sarah and Shirley. We don't want any more bantams this year. My first lesson in raising chickens is how to discourage a hen from trying to brood. Sarah and Shirley are so silly that although they don't have any eggs to sit on, they sit on the corners of boxes in the shed and parade around telling everyone they're brooding. When shut out of the shed altogether, Sarah is so determined to find a nest and sit on it that she goes and hides in a neighbor's shed. No one realizes she's there; she's trapped, and later found dead.
Brown Leghorn bantams love to rear babies, I'm told. They'll adopt any kind of baby birds, and love them as their own babies, but Sarah and Shirley aren't intelligent enough to be good mothers. I accept this judgment. It certainly seems true for Sarah.
I've already written about Linda's family life. It comes later in time than this season, anyway.
I learn about dogs. At this age I don't like dogs at all. Things look different before you are four feet tall. Dogs are likely to push you over backward and drool on your face. I flee from most dogs, knowing that they don't want to bite me, because I don't want to be knocked down either. One of Mother's helpers introduces me, this summer, to her household's three dogs, Bud, Red, and Tippy. Red, the setter, doesn't have much time left to live. Bud is officially an old dog, a collie, who is not inclined to jump up at anybody. Bud is the first dog I like. Tippy, a black and tan hound, is young and bouncy enough that the cousins wisely keep him away from me, this year. Later, when Bud's gone, I will love Tippy too--but not this year.
I learn about bacon. Earlier in childhood I ate bacon and liked it. Now it's explained to me that bacon comes from hogs like those that made the neighbors' place, near our previous house, smell so bad. Do I still want to eat pieces of a dead animal that smelled like that while it was alive? I do not. I never feel any desire to eat bacon again.
I meet other horses. Relations with them go better than relations with Maude at the previous house, though I never will be very horsey. Blackie lives on one side of the hill, Suzy on the other side. Suzy's foal is Star; I get to name him and everyone says it's a good name for him. Suzy dies old--I seem to remember hearing that she was thirty years old--before Star reaches his full size, but after he's able to live on his own. Suzy's human goes into town, buys a pregnant mare called Dolly, and leads her home, one of the last horses allowed to walk down Jackson Street without an official parade permit and arrangements to keep any droppings away from the delicate eyes of town dwellers. Dolly really is as friendly as Maude was said to be; accustomed to children, apparently even fond of children, she's the first horse most children in the neighborhood ride and the one I learn to drive. Dolly's foal turns out to be a mule, called Jack; he's never friendly and it's his kick--"One inch to either side would have killed you"--that pushes his man into the Modern Age of Tractors, but that, also, is a few years after this season.
I'm less attracted to cows. Partly it's prejudice; I've been mentally classifying people as Horse people who move and think at Dad's and my pace, or Cow people who shuffle through life at what's become Mother's pace for years now. Cow people are to be pitied not blamed; they can be loved, but they are to be avoided when anyone wants to get anything done. Partly, also, it's experience. Cows do not approve of me, at this age. They can't think I'm big enough to harm their calves, so maybe they think I'm a bad example. In any case they always seem to moo and shake their heads in a threatening way. Learning to milk cows, and like those cows, comes much later in my life story.
Cats avoid me, at this age, too. I like them in theory because they don't knock people down, but I can't say they purr or cuddle, either. The neighborhood cats are all under a bit of a cloud in this season. They seem to know that they're being blamed, unfairly, for the loss of birds and for their inability to exterminate the entire biological category of small rodents. I never see anyone in real life petting a cat, as people do in books. My parents say they hate cats. They mean the idea; in practice they're not haters of any creature, but they make noises like cat haters. Cats kill birds and carry diseases and soil furniture and so on and so forth.
Chickens are close enough to my size that I relate to some of them as neighbors' pets. The ones who have names and are pets, anyway. It bothers me that my neighbors and relatives will rear a young rooster as if he were going to be a pet, though his not getting a name other than a description of his size or color might be a giveaway, and then one Sunday afternoon they'll go out in the yard, lure him to their hand with a food treat, kill him, and fry him up for dinner. It takes me years to learn that most of the chicken people eat comes from factory farm roosters who wouldn't have enough brain to become pets if they were treated like pets. In my childhood, eating chicken means eating Little Red or some other friendly foolish bird like him--and I don't eat chicken.
Hens, however, often earn names and recognition as pets, and though most of them aren't very interesting they are friendly. I'm invited to name a pet hen, and name her Thurley, after a school friend my mother remembers mostly for her odd given name, to go with our Shirley. One neighbor's alpha hen is Speckles, a big Barred Rock, and one is Spangles, a showy Ancona, and one's only hen is an off-breed bantam I call Tamara, because I'm told that that's a "weird" name and I think the hen looks a bit weird. Most bantams are Brown Leghorns with dark brown bodies and golden heads; Tamara has a dark gray body and silvery-white head, and a different kind of crest, too. Pretty, and I'd like to have her for a pet, but strange.
I meet wild animals, too, at this house. It doesn't have squirrels but the garden does attract insects. I don't yet like paper wasps, having been stung by one. I meet a fritillary butterfly in the garden, a big Manduca sphinx moth who perches menacingly on the screen door. "How can anyone be so stupid as to be afraid of a moth? Moths cannot bite, they cannot sting; the worst they can do is tickle," Drill Sergeant Dad pontificates. I don't want to be tickled by a moth of that size! Sometimes we see rabbits, which I like better, and sometimes in the garden we see toads. I don't touch toads, or want to, but I learn that they're friends.
I've been reading The Young Folks' Shelf of Books, with its stories written mostly for boys, and liking the idea of flares--fireworks used for signalling in the War--one afternoon I remember particularly. From comic books I have some mental picture of throwing a long object up into the air and having it form a firework in the sky. I tie a repurposed Fisher-Price toy, part of a "Rock-a-Stack" used to teach children to stack plastic rings in order of size, to a string, and run up and down the garden path, throwing it up in the air. In the story I've read the character was running through some sort of enemy camp signalling for reinforcements; what's in my little-kid brain is the fantasy of the little plastic spindle exploding up in a trail of red or green sparks. I'm running, trailing the spindle, visualizing fireworks, when my Aunt Dotty walks up the path.
"Dotty" is not her name. It's a word for the way she's become, recently, by taking medication for what's believed at the time to be cancer. Aunt Dotty does not look or act like a person with cancer. She has auburn hair, still quite bright for a person in her fifties, and warm brown eyes, and freckles galore. She knows exactly what's going on; it's just that the medication has given her a lot of ideas about other things that most people don't agree are going on, too, at the same time. Aunt Dotty has never been considered a Beauty; that was always Mother's role. In black-and-white photographs the clothing styles they wear are the easiest way to tell which of them is which. Aunt Dotty's face looks tired rather than classically beautiful, in real life. So her role has been to be the one who's fun to know, in spite of being the one who has migraines and the one whose doctor says she has cancer.
This visit is no exception. A visit from Aunt Dotty is fun fun fun all the way, even though she's here to help the adults with their project, refurbishing the old house, and I'm excluded from that. I drop my "flare" and run to meet her and help her carry in her load of presents and food treats, but that's the time stamp for this memory. The load of presents includes dresses and tights for me to wear to school. It's later than midsummer. It might be August.
(All that can really be known about Aunt Dotty's cancer is that she had a swelling in a place where fatal cancers often grow, and had the most radical treatment for it, in her early fifties. People who actually have the kind of cancer she had treatment for are considered lucky if they live for another five years. Aunt Dotty was active and fairly healthy for more than thirty years. So who knows. She was a celiac; she spent a fair bit of her time lying about and wailing about how bad she felt, and a fair bit working in a factory and building houses as a hobby, like a man and better than some, five feet two.)
I like the ideas of dresses, tights, and school. One dress is pink gingham, with white felt poodles on the skirt. I don't think that it makes me look fat; rather, when I see a child wearing a red gingham Raggedy Andy doll's shirt at school, I think it makes him look fat. The pink gingham dress is too big, but it can be taken in now and then let out and worn again all the way through the next three years. Then there's the winter dress, turquoise and teal, which is roomy and warm and quite flattering...so much so that, after we've spent the winter in Florida, Mother decides it'll be too short for me to wear next winter and remodels it into a shirt for herself. I may have set a record for the earliest age at which a baby-boomer started complaining that her mother raided her closet.
As for the tights: for all my life I'll prefer tights that fashion considers too big. The ones that fit the way they're supposed to fit have a nasty way of sliding down when I move. I like tights that bag at the ankles.
In this season I eat more garden produce than anything else. I also eat peanut butter, sandwiched between Ritz crackers or slices of Roman Meal bread. I like graham crackers in milk but don't get to eat them as often as I'd like. I'm being encouraged to read a lot of new books my parents are ordering, as recommended by Prevention magazine, to which Mother now subscribes. J.I. Rodale still edits Prevention and it still recommends a fairly strict granola regimen, which isn't bad at all if you live in farm country and are surrounded with fresh fruit and vegetables, as we do and are. We make whole meals of corn on the cob, fresh tomatoes with or without cornbread to soak up the juice, fresh cucumbers. We drink mugs of mulberry juice freshly pressed for jelly making.
We still get generous shares of the "USDA" food the poor people don't bother to collect. Food must not be wasted but some of it really is more fit for other animals' consumption than humans. Complaining about food is discouraged. Taking a dish of really vile food outside and giving it a decent burial is ignored, and there's nice soft dry ground in the crawl space, actually a high-ceilinged walk-through space, below the house. This is the season when Mother tries a recipe for flavoring boring USDA pasta with horrible, stale nutritional yeast, as recommended in Prevention magazine. Will it be a blessing to all the poor people? Will it motivate them to come into town and get their pasta? We all sit down and take one hopeful bite. Dad, the fount of scathing sermons against any expectations that food not be boring, is the first to walk out. We all walk out and scrape our plates onto the ground for the chickens. The chickens all take one hopeful bite, make startled chicken noises, and wipe their beaks on the grass, silently asking us what we were trying to do to them. This is the unforgettable all-time low, of course. Most of the recipes Mother tries for "fortifying" that USDA possum-food-grade food turn out much less bad.
In this season we don't get a lot of news. There is a war. My parents don't care to hear the war news. A few of the cousins are still in the Army and have to be overseas fighting in this war. Sometimes we make fudge to send to them, which is fun, although I don't get to eat a lot of fudge on these occasions. The cousins get large batches of fudge because, of course, they have to hand pieces around to all the other soldiers. Around the time school starts a radio will be dug out of storage, but not yet.
Do I discover new books in this season? Literature of the World, the most advanced reading textbook I've read so far, comes some time in this year but I'm not sure when. I reread the old books, making better sense of some stories after having read other stories, still putting together a sense of what each set of words means. Sometimes Dad brings in a newspaper. I'm not encouraged to read newspapers yet and don't remember reading any. I'm allowed to read Readers Digest and am horrified by all those wholesome, uplifting, informative articles about body parts, things that go wrong with them, and treatments that save them. I like the jokes, though, and bits of articles and Book Sections about children and animals.
I never have been especially attached to a soft toy, but Aunt Dotty's load of presents also includes two of a set of pillows designed for children with more or less realistic animal shapes and colors printed on the cotton fabric, which was then cut out, sewn together, and stuffed. Aunt Dotty thinks the pillows are cute enough to have names, so we give them names. Mine is a raccoon I call Malarky. My brother's is a lion he calls Charlie; later he'll change this to Charlie Dale, commemorating two of the boys in my class at school. (He will never meet either Charlie or Dale. They just have good boy names that none of our cousins has claimed.) Neither of us ever mistakes these pillows for real pets but we do get accustomed to sleeping on them. We carry them through miles of moves and road trips, replacing the stuffing when they start to smell musty, and the fabric will wear out before we let Mother put them on the garden, with our worn-out clothes, as mulch.
Later, much later, I'll look back and realize that although I'm not nearly as big (for my age) or energetic or mischievous as a favorite cousin who's only months older than I am, I could be considered a tomboy. I figure I came by it honestly, between having a "house-husband" instead of a housewife while Mother had a busines, being expected to play with my brother, and always being sent out to play in the sunshine. Aunt Dotty is trying to nurture whatever nurturing tendencies I have, which are the late-blooming kind. Once the celiac gene gets going I'll no longer have enough energy that anyone expects me to identify with Caddie more than Clara Woodlawn, Laura more than Mary Ingalls, Jo more than Beth March--but I do so identify. I don't want to be a boy but I want to be active and energetic, enough to keep up with boys. I think of it as immaturity, rather than lack of femininity, that at age five I'd rather run around reenacting war stories than sit down and sew dolls' dresses. Sewing and drawing and other ladylike accomplishments will come later, with better hand coordination and all that. Forty years later I'll fall madly in midlife love with a man who invites me to run and climb and throw things on a job.
In books people always worry about the tomboys. In my family that doesn't seem to happen. Farm girls get to ride horses and drive tractors and that sort of thing. When adults seem to worry more is when I stop being a tomboy. For the cousins, who don't stop being tomboys and or being taller than other children the same age, it's perfectly all right if they tinker with their own pickup trucks. Not all of my elders would be so crass as to say it but I think they all agree with the rule: If you want to know whether you're a Virginia Lady or a Virginia Gentleman, look down and count the bumps on your anterior surface. If you're one of our family, after about age twelve you will have either one or two. Which you see will take care of what you are. That settled, you may proceed to do whatever seems useful and worthwhile to you. The fact that you do it means that it is something a Virginia Lady, or Gentleman, as the case may be, does. Obviously. No further questions. Nobody's going to argue about those bumps. My body will form adequate bumps on schedule.
Meanwhile, at this age, I'm also aware that what I'm going to be is a writer, whatever fantasies I may enjoy about being a teacher or dancer or bus driver. Most writers do other jobs, just to have things to write about. Writers make up stories and before I go to sleep at night I'm always making up stories, always adventure stories at this age, races and rescues and shipwrecks and whatever else. I don't write down these stories or tell them to anyone else. I'm aware that they're silly little-kid stories. They bubble up through my mind, anyway. And I enjoy them.
I don't yet learn to do anything useful. I spend a lot of time standing in windows or doorways, watching adults at work. Later on I will learn that Mother, who started cooking before she was five years old, thought I was old enough to help make jam and wash dishes, and Dad insisted I be allowed to enjoy this last summer of complete irresponsibility. Meh. I would probably have enjoyed learning to do more useful things with Mother, more than complete irresponsibility, if Mother''s hypothyroidism hadn't been growing into the real disability it would soon become. She was to be pitied rather than blamed for it, even a child could see, but during most of my childhood my mother was a kind of person I've always hated to work with on any kind of project, the not very competent leader who drags everyone back down to per own level. In theory school could have offered some relief; in practice Mrs. Fatso, Mrs. Ratfink, Miss Mean, Mrs. Smelly, and Mrs. Dunce were all much worse, and none of my other primary school teachers was a great deal less bad. Mother was merely sick. I think some of those teachers never were very intelligent. Before age twenty I'll rate Mother the best teacher I ever had, and the only competition she'll ever have for that title will be my husband--but she is becoming more of a Cow person every day, this summer.
Mother has lost ground, but not all that much, in this season. Day by day the house-built-on-a-bet looks more like the sort of house people live in now, more than halfway through the century. It acquires a refrigerator, smaller than most refrigerators but effective. Food is cooked on a little wood stove in the kitchen. Rugs and linoleum cover the floor. White wallpaper relieves the dimness of the big front room. Windows get curtains and beds get quilts. Mother has a sewing machine. I like watching the sewing machine whir and flash, but usually I'm told to go out and play in the sunshine. It's a sunny summer.
