Belated Post: A Few Happy Memories

Wednesday's Long & Short Reviews prompt invited reviewers to share a few happy memories. 

Well...I wrote a long poem about living in a funny old house that had been built on a dare bet, early in the twentieth century. These memories come from the first summer I lived there, the first summer I remember as really being different from the rest of the year. Earlier memories are unreliable--there were beach scenes, but at the beaches we visited, the sun shone warm in winter. But now I was almost six and paid some attention to the Calendar & Almanac on the wall.

We moved into the house with its kitchen on stilts in April. I was just starting to learn the names of flowers: hyacinths and daffodils, dandelions, violets, strawberry and fruit tree blossoms, clover, buttercups, forsythia, iris, vetch. The house on stilts didn't have a flower garden but did have a vegetable garden with a strawberry bed.  

It had cleavers.

Photo from Google, which credits a site called Treefool.com. 

I first noticed cleavers as a plant that stuck to my clothes. Plants were supposed to stick in the ground as you walked past them, but cleavers seemed to want to pull up its roots and trail after me. I didn't like that. It was not the way a proper plant ought to behave! I wasn't really scared, nor could I say cleavers' raspy little hairs hurt my leg, but I ran around the house calling for someone to get it off. I didn't want to find out whether cleavers had any other surprises in store, like leaping up my arm, if I tried to pick it off myself! If it could "cleave to" me as it was doing, what else might this plant do?

After that first day I've liked cleavers. It is a lazy plant that likes to lean down along the ground rather than standing up straight. It propagates by cleaving unto things and getting itself moved to new sites where it can re-root and multiply. Depending on where it grows, some people pick it green and eat it like spinach (the stiff hairs wilt away when cooked), and some dry it and add it to mint or Chinese tea as medicine. Either way, it flushes excess liquid out of the body fast, producing instant weight loss and the profuse sweating that often breaks a fever. I've had four occasions to use cleavers as a febrifuge in my lifetime. It served me well.

Other flowers, plants, and trees I learned to recognize that summer: the inconspicuous flowers of maple, oak, willow, pine, cedar trees; white honeysuckle vines, Lonicera japonica, an invasive nuisance we pull up; jimsonweed and horse-nettle; mayapple; green tobacco, which used to be many farmers' main cash crop; poison ivy, which was abundant along the front path at the house on stilts, and easily avoided. 

I learned how to "set out" plants that I'd dug up by their roots, to see whether they'd grow in new places. Some did, some didn't. I had no talent for sensing what a plant would need, the way I read that George Washington Carver had had.

I was learning quite a bit from old schoolbooks, a few of which seemed to be available in every house we visited, occupied or not. Of course some of what I was learning was out of date. The "true stories" tended to stop in the 1930s. At least one book actually referred to the World War as "Recent Events." I read about Carver and Walter Reed, Glenn Cunningham, Douglas Macarthur, Katherine Cornell, Marian Anderson, Helen Keller, Anna Pavlova, Maude Adams, as people who seemed to be still active at the time the stories in old readers were written. Many readers had stories about Glenn Cunningham; none of them even mentioned Roger Bannister or Abebe Bikila. Nor did they mention movie or TV actors since, in the Golden Age of Hollywood, screen acting was considered a lower art form than stage acting. I was encouraged to read the schoolbooks more than the newspapers. There was some concern, among adults, about what a five-year-old who liked to read ought to be allowed to read. Schoolbooks were often recommended specifically to keep very young readers away from the sensational, potentially nightmare-inducing things reported in the news.

The house on stilts was just across the road from the house where its builder lived with his wife. They had been born a little before the turn of the century. They were distantly related to Dad's mother but nobody ever explained to me exactly how; they were family friends, anyway, and honorary relatives.  Dad's mother's family name has been called a Cherokee name by some who use it, traced back to Scotland or France by others; in any case Grandma's mother, never photographed, was always said to have looked Cherokee, but this family's looks, like their name, had come straight from the English Border country. I think all of the fourteen children, and all of their children, had blue eyes. The builder now spent most of his days lying down as if he were waiting to die. I'm not sure what chronic disease he had. He had lost a thumb at the base, and would flex his thumb joint and show the little nub of a stub behind a little white scar that fanned out away from his carpal bones. His wife was very small and thin and active, and always reminded me of Granny Clampett on "The Beverly Hillbillies." She did much of the farm work, and liked it; she didn't have to worry about weight control. She always wore skirts long enough that she could bend over in the garden, and sensible shoes, and was always followed around the place by free-range chickens. She sold the milk from three or four free-range cows and the eggs from three or four dozen hens. 

Her flock also included four roosters. They had a clear pecking order with a big Rhode Island Red, logically called Big Red, at the top and a young White Plymouth Rock called Gitout at the bottom. I liked Gitout because he was the underdog, tried to make him a pet, failed. He had spent his whole life being scolded, pecked, and chased away; didn't believe that anyone wanted him to be where they were, and didn't care if anyone did! Then in strutted a young, slim, really rather small but long-legged, black and white rooster, a crossbreed of Old English Game and White Leghorn. He didn't look big enough to beat even Gitout in a fight, but he beat all the roosters in the neighborhood, easily, reliably enough to earn the name of "Old Faithful."

I've written elsewhere of how we acquired the title to three young Game hens. The alpha female Game hen was Old Faithful's mate. She lived with us this summer. Next spring was when she attacked Dad and then made friends with me. The other two Game hens were nobody's pets, almost feral birds who laid several big brown eggs, roosted in trees at night, and were killed by predators when they were two or three years old. 

In this summer it never occurred to me to be afraid of chickens, though small children see chickens differently than adults do. One day Big Red, confident and lazy, got close enough that I could have reached out and touched him. I'd learned that chickens didn't like to be patted, and didn't try. A snarky male relative sang out, "Go on a little closer! He won't bite! Are you afraid of that old red rooster?" I was actually thinking that Big Red might not be strong enough to carry me around like a pony, but he was certainly big enough.

In this summer I spent enough time with Dad's first cousins, Grandfather's brothers' children, to start to recognize individual names and faces. They belonged to a church that valued plain speech. It was not yet a source of embarrassment that I was allowed, even encouraged, to call them by their given names at home. In town I knew that sounded as if we children respected them less than we did people in town, and in fact we not only loved them but respected them more than any mere storekeepers or teachers. But it was the custom. In some families, I was just beginning to learn, children called their parents "Sir" and "Ma'am." Mine wouldn't have it. "I'm not in the Army any more! Don't remind me!" Dad said when I said "Yes, Sir." 

A female cousin came in to help Mother with the housework for an hour or so every morning, and sometimes baby-sat us; my brother and I called her whatever-her-real-first-name-was, just as if she'd been our sister. She was paid for this but there was no sense of a "servant class" in local custom. The young people who did extra farm and household chores outside their own household, and the older people who paid them, were usually cousins; when the extra chores were done and paid for, the only difference in their social status would be age--and sometimes the people who were paid to help someone with a disability might be older than the patient. I believe it was the custom in most families, as in ours, to talk as if the friends and relatives who came in to work were just "coming to see" their employers because everyone enjoyed each other's company. In fact everyone did enjoy each other's company. 

A lot of hypocrisy and outright lying has long been observed in Our Southern Way of Life. The church that valued plain speech deserved credit for recognizing and rejecting some of the empty "courtesies" but also deserved blame for perpetuating others. Encouraged to say what we thought, even vent our dissatisfactions, at home, my brother and I were also expected to work out for ourselves which relatives followed which set of rules of etiquette, which ones were amused by our chatter and which ones preferred that we be seen and not heard. The church that encouraged people to reject titles, even "Aunt/Uncle/Cousin" as attached to the given names of adults by children, also encouraged people not to tell others when they were offended but just stop speaking to them because they were supposed to know when they'd said or done something "wrong." According to their rule, the cousins would tell other people a person to whom they were non-speaking was still their friend or relative and they still loved the person, but they were no longer close, and they didn't want to talk about it. You wouldn't know whether the person had displayed "bad" taste in clothes, or was refusing to pay a large debt. Often the person wouldn't know what had gone wrong, either, and people stayed estranged for years over trivial reasons. When this happened the only chance of reconciliation, even among this set of relatives, seemed to be when someone made a particularly weepy "testimony" in church.

Their church was one of the charismatic ones. There are still several churches in the general category my parents called Pentecostal, in and around my town. There are different denominations in that sub-category of Protestants; Apostolic, Church of Christ, Church of God, a lot of mini-denominations with long names, sometimes a single congregation that meets in one small abandoned store calling itself a separate denomination. These congregations used to distinguish themselves with strict but slightly different rules; typically the women at least claimed they never cut their hair, however long or thick their "crowning glory" might be, and the men had short hair on their heads (if any) and no facial hair, and so on. Their meetings were characterized by long singing and prayer sessions during which individuals might feel moved to cry and confess "sins" (of thought and "feeling"), hug each other's necks, speak in "unknown tongues," or make even more bizarre displays of fervor. One sober and sedate old person was pointed out as the one who, at age eighty, jumped over all the benches up and down the sanctuary. My brother and I were never allowed to visit such churches but we were taught to respect them as legitimate ways some people expressed sincere faith.

Neither were we taught, although we could see easily enough, that denominational differences often had something to do with income. The local Pentecostal churches tended to be friendlier to farm families, who often had no disposable income, than the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians who met in the big buildings in town.  The big churches in town were friendlier to people who had jobs in town and put money in the plate every single week. This was the kind of denominational distinction my father hated, and would denounce at length, given a chance. Baptists' beliefs about the Bible were closest to ours, and the Baptist church hosted the Scouts and other children's social activities; Baptists could also be snobs. But Dad didn't think we children needed to be preached at about that topic. Children deserved scolding and sermonizing only about things children did: breaking and spilling things, talking back or not answering, bickering, not learning things, losing track of what their fathers were talking about...

Not having due sympathy for orphans. There was always some question about which of the organizations were actually feeding them. Americans taught Somali people how to do fraud the modern way. On the radio and television preachers would tell people about their ministry to starving orphans, and when someone went to investigate, no evidence of any charitable work in the country they'd been blathering about would be found, but the preachers would take long vacations in luxury yachts. Still, the world was full of hungry orphans. Poster children for charitable appeals abounded. Anything a child might complain about could always be answered with "Look at this girl/boy just your age who doesn't even have food to eat." Really satisfactory children, in Dad's mind, would have wanted to send everything to the orphans. I think it perturbed him that as we grew older we became more interested in toys and, despite reading books with titles like Kim, a Gift from Vietnam, didn't really want to adopt any foreign orphans, not that we could have afforded one anyway. Foreign orphans never did have much because there were always a lot of foreign officials in the way, all of them always thinking that anything really good you had sent to an orphan was really meant for them. I have read, as an adult, that they didn't mind not having toys because they were taught to "play" at helping do the work around the orphanage and, with due encouragement, soon learned to get the work done. I hope so.

Anyway some relatives were very close to each other, and some were non-speaking, and some enjoyed the drama of their social lives, and some felt perplexed and hurt by people they didn't think they'd given any real reason for non-speaking....Sometimes they talked about it in front of us children. Sometimes I listened to what they said. Mostly I didn't. It was none of my business and I thought the whole thing was silly. If we had a problem with something someone said or did, we said so, talked through the problem--not always in the most pleasant tones and terms--and eventually worked things out. Some of the relatives non-spoke to my parents. Some are non-speaking to me, to this day. I don't waste much attention on it. The conversation of the non-speakers never seemed as if it would have been greatly missed. I only read about, did not actually know, couples who lived together while non-speaking to each other for forty years or more. 

I did not yet go to school or know the rule that was supposed to apply there: You didn't have to like or hang out with a relative, but you had to show loyalty and not let people bully or sneer at one. In practice not much bullying, not even the nonviolent kind, went on at the school I was looking forward to attending next fall. Primary school kids would declare themselves enemies, but rarely come to blows or say anything obnoxious enough to attract the attention of each other's relatives! 

A school wardrobe for me was a topic of concern for Mother. "Anything with bluejeans" was the general dress code. All I really needed were a few sweaters and T-shirts but, while little children's clothes were supposed to be handed down from larger to smaller children, Mother wanted to make some positive contributions to the pool. From time to time I was called indoors for fittings. "Aunt Dotty" spent a weekend with us and brought in a batch of dresses, including my favorite turquoise and teal one-piece jumper-style, which I wasn't allowed to wear for long before its miniskirt started to look too mini, and a pink gingham dress with fleecy poodle-shaped patch pockets on a slightly longer skirt, which I didn't particularly like but was able to wear into grade three. Poodle motifs had been Out but came back In, from time to time, like saddle shoes, in the 1970s. At six I didn't pay enough attention to clothes to mind being used as an unpaid model for Mother's sewing design and remodelling skills.

Children were supposed to spend more time outdoors than indoors. I was a bookworm who used to be told to go out and get some sunshine because I could always read by electric light; this house now had electric lights. In practice there was not a lot of electric-lighted reading time for children in summer. Anyway Mother, or Dad when he was at home, or the cousin who couldn't get enough of our company, often took me and sometimes even took my brother for walks to visit other relatives' little farms. I got to know all the horses and dogs, all the milk cows if not the beef cows, and those of the cats and chickens who had names, by their names. Nobody had sheep, which graze too close to the ground and don't do well on steep slopes. That summer nobody had goats, either, although goats eat honeysuckle and weeds, and do very well on steep slopes. Dolly was the mare--not a heavy "work horse" type, a laid-off police horse--children were allowed to ride, two or three at a time, around her owners' farm. Bud, the gold-and-white Lassie-type collie, and Red, the hound-and-setter mix, were the first dogs I learned to like and pet. Of all horses I've known I think Dolly may have been the one I liked best; of all dogs, Samantha, who came along ten years later. Both belonged to neighbors, not to me.

I named a few animals, myself, that summer. My mother had had a school friend whose name was probably Thurleigh, but Mother didn't know how she spelled it and thought it ought to have been "Thirlie." I liked that name and was allowed to bestow it on a tame bantam hen whose owner hadn't chosen a name for her yet. 

I also liked the name "Maude," in honor of that dear old mare with whom I'd completely failed to bond last year, and was allowed to give it to one hen, but when I thought it might be a good name for a cat I was told that it was a human name. Miss Maude, the human, belonged to a family that disclaimed any connection with the owners of Maude-the-mare, were of course second cousins, but lived on the other side of the hill! Many animals answered to names that had been commonly used for humans but weren't being used by any human their owners knew. Giving the name of a human friend to an animal was considered an insult to the human. The cat was called Calico. 

The oldest mare in the neighborhood, Suzy, gave birth to her last foal that year; she lived just about exactly long enough to wean him off milk. One of my picture books said that few horses lived beyond age 30--Suzy was thirty-one. She had been named by someone else, and my Great-Aunt Susie had moved away with her husband forty or fifty years ago, so the mare being called Suzy was all right. Dolly was brought in partly because she might have had milk to share if needed. Dolly's foal was a mule, so he wasn't entitled to any name but Jack. I named Suzy's colt Star.

Cats and chickens seemed to be taken less seriously than other animals. They were smaller. Individuals didn't usually live long. Every farm needed a few but most farms usually had a surplus, so, if you didn't have as many cats and chickens as you wanted, someone would probably give you a few. Neither cats nor chickens were expected to be intelligent enough to learn their names if anyone bothered to hang a name on them, so many of them never had names, though a good female might be worth keeping for all the five to ten years she might live. If they were ill or injured you could save some time by killing them at home rather than taking them into town for the vet to kill. Sometimes, not often, when there were too many cats or chickens to feed or give away, people killed them just to get rid of them. Chickens at least could be eaten. I liked cats, as a child, but didn't have a pet cat until I was thirty. I grew up more of a dog person. Or, more precisely, a chicken person. I do like horses but have never felt up to the challenge of living with one on a full-time basis. 

I spent more time reading than playing with toys. The toys I'd mostly ignored in California had been packed into big metal storage drums, shipped, and stored in Grandma's basement. (Both of my grandfathers had died while we were in California. With the insurance money Grandma had moved into a house that was still small, but was bigger and newer and nicer than the one where she'd lived with Grandfather.) Dad went into town to work around the end of the month. On the last day of his work week he came home in a taxicab with cartons of surplus food. On other days he walked home, stopped to see Grandma, opened a barrel, and brought home a toy. So the toys trickled in by ones. Neither of us children cared particularly about the first few dozen toys. Two summers later, when we  had a big box full, I enjoyed the Lego blocks and Play-Doh and bonded with a stuffed animal. This summer, what I remember about the toys was floating the big plastic baby dolls, as well as the battleship, down the creek. Crayons were a little more appreciated; I liked scribbling and coloring. The only toy I really missed when  I didn't have it with me, during our nomad years, was a rocking horse. I was getting too big for them, and broke down a couple of bodies on the last one (they said it was built to hold weights over thirty pounds; they lied), but I did like rocking on them.  

My happy memories from this summer were "I" more than "we." My brother was not yet a real buddy, much as he wanted to be. Though he was walking steadily and had outgrown biting and breaking things, his company still interested adults a lot more than it did me. Children can learn good manners but they can't really think beyond the ends of their noses enough to be "nice," considerate people. This was the summer when I mostly ignored my brother. Next summer I got into being a girl as a way to reject and exclude the poor little kid, who, at least, had enough spirit to play along and enjoy being a boy. The summer after that I started, sometimes, hanging out with him. 

Toward the end of this summer comes a memory that is not particularly happy, though it didn't hurt me and therefore didn't feel particularly sad either. One morning I woke up, looked out the front window, and said, "The neighbors' house is on fire." It looked just like pictures of a house on fire in books.

"Are you sure? You shouldn't joke about that kind of thing."

"I'm sure. Come and see."

Mother took a look and ran to the door to see that Dad was already going out to call the fire department. The house on stilts did not yet have a telephone, nor did the neighbors' burning house. I think someone who lived between us and the store might have had a phone but I don't know whether Dad found a phone owner at home, or had to call for help from the store.

One thing that happened that summer was not a particularly happy memory, but it was important: A fire engine, a real big red one like fire engines in books, came up the hill. Then it went down again. The house was still on fire. I watched this from the window, dispassionately, as if watching television. Mother and Dad fought the fire hard, as did some other neighbors. All they could do was contain the fire. The house burned to the ground. The old couple had to move in with some of their children while waiting to collect the insurance money and rebuild. 

"But they didn't use the hose or ladder, and they didn't put the fire out," I said when Mother came in, smoky and ash-smeared.

"They said the creek wasn't deep enough for their pump to work and there was nothing they could do. They work for the town and only have to fight fires if people are on the town water system. So they went back into town."

I did not grow up thinking of firemen as heroes. From where I'd been I'd seen a lot of things the men could have done, with or without a pump. Mother had done them. Real Men did that sort of things for Mother. 

Meanwhile there was a dairy to run. I was not yet big enough to milk cows; Mother and Dad did that. I grew up thinking that dairy cows had a pretty good life; everything cows could be imagined to want. They roamed around grazing where they liked, or rested in the shade chewing their cud, all day. Morning and evening they were called to the barn for dishes of sweet grain, and milked. Cows actually like being milked and will bellow and look for their humans if the humans are late. They never had to be tied up; they seldom even had to be called. I thought they were ugly, messy, clumsy animals who were treated better than they deserved, at six. I liked cows better when I grew older and they didn't seem quite such a monstrous size. At six I said I hated them. "Cow" was a term of abuse for a human. The milk and eggs paid the old people's expenses while they were living in town.

I think, by the end of the summer, my parents were getting free rent and some money for living in that house. It was a comfortable arrangement, anyway. Short-term, though. Another set of relatives had to be considered. When we went to Florida for the winter, it was to negotiate how we were going to move into the wheelchair-friendly house where Grandmother could live with us.