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| Category: The Sacred In Everyday Life |
Date published: October 15, 2004 |
An outhouse stood in the back of my childhood home, a Sears and Roebuck catalog for toilet paper, in-doors, a chamber pot sat in the closet stinking. Material you think for happy childhood memories? You betsha. Some might think them coal...I find them to be diamond.
My dad was a struggling carpenter with a wife and two kids when he first built the little house that has become my mom's garage. It consisted of four rooms. A kitchen with a black pot-bellied stove that heated the house with wood and coal, no running water, a pump stood outdoors. We had no living room, what should have been one, was my parents bedroom. Another room slept the other children that eventually had grown to six before we moved into the `mansion' next door. The `mansion', in reality, was a modest three-bedroom house with a bathroom and a toilet that flushed, running water and a living room with a sofa. But that didn't happen until I was around nine or ten years of age. The original house didn't have such luxuries...except for building fond memories in me today. A junk-room held the wringer washing machine and the galvanized tub that was dragged into the kitchen on Saturday night for our weekly baths. A twin bed was added to sleep a kid after the family had grown too large for the kid's bedroom to hold us all. The one closet held the chamber pot. Can you imagine a mother having to train little ones on one of those things? My mother was a saint.
The funny thing about childhood memories, sometimes the child within us, plants one in the mind that wasn't there in reality. As an adult, I remembered where the Christmas Tree had stood. Where Santa had left my new underwear and giant coloring book. But I had remembered a tree that was never there. "We never had a tree when we lived in the garage," my mother said, not long ago. "Where would we have put it?" "No tree?" I guess the child within me was unable to accept a Christmas without a tree, and so, she had fabricated one.
The walls of our bedroom would become covered with coal dust. We thought it great. With our small fingers, we were able to draw pictures upon the wall. It became our very own fresco. A pail stood on the counter in the kitchen filled with drinking water drawn from the pump outdoors. A dipper was used to drink from...we shared our family germs without a second thought back then. To this day, I can't look up in the nighttime sky, and see the Big and Little Dipper, without thinking back on my early days.
Can you imagine children today having to live without the luxury of a television set? Well, we did. Our first one was after moving into the `mansion' next door. My parents purchased a secondhand one that was in black and white. OH, BOY! Were we excited? You betcha. I think we had a radio back in those early years, I don't recall for certain. However, I do remember listening to one in my later years. The Grand Ole Opry, Dragnet and Jack Benny were just a few of my favorite programs. My mom loved the soaps. Yes, they had them... even back then. I attended a one-room schoolhouse. Six grades, plus kindergarten, in the same classroom with only one teacher. Did our education suffer because of it? No, not a bit. The younger children had the advantage of listening to the lessons taught to the older grades and concentration was placed on reading, spelling, arithmetic and learning how to write. Moral living was taught, and God and prayer were not forbidden in the classroom. For some reason, there were no hyper- active children back then...not that I can remember anyway. Is it the foods we eat? Is it television? Something seems to have altered the brain in the children of today. I don't have the answer.
I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where three out the four seasons are winter. We had very few toys...very few. Some of my fondest memories are playing store with the groceries. In the summertime, I'd play with the garbage...yes, you heard me right, the garbage. We didn't have trash pick-up in those days; my father would go to the dump every few months. To cut down on the buildup of garbage, he would burn the paper and cardboard in a large iron barrel. That meant that bottles of catsup, with a little remaining on the bottom, were available to us, as well as empty vegetable cans, etc. Added to our mud pies sitting in the sun to dry, it made for a wonderful `pretend' supper and a fun day. Ice skating, making snowmen, games of tag, farmer in the dell and little Sally saucer, jacks and marbles gave a child back then unlimited ways to have fun. Swimming pools? Nope, not back then, but a water hole did just as well...or mud puddles, created by rain that had filled the large holes made from tractor tires at my uncle Fred's farm. Today, it's five TV's, one a large screen, three sitting rooms and five bathrooms. Nintendo games and two cars...and not a one of them a Model T Ford. I can remember my uncle having had one of those. My mother had to borrow it for a few days while her own, newer model car, was in the shop one week. I was a teenager by this time, and oh, what fun we had. The passenger front seat was missing and a metal pail, the kind you haul water or grain in to feed the cows, substituted for a front seat. There were no seatbelts in those days. I sat on that pail while my sister and a friend sat in the small backseat. That old car was a bugger to start and would stall often. My mother would have me open the passenger side door. With my right foot on the ground, I would push to help get the old Model T. started. Were we embarrassed or ashamed to be seen in such a car? Nope, we had fun.
I realize that those hard days of old weren't much fun for my poor parents, but as far as us kids were concerned, we weren't being cheated of a thing. We knew no different. Life has changed drastically from those early childhood days. My grandchildren have more toys than Santa's workshop. I wonder how many of them will bring a smile to their faces when they have grown to be my age, probably not many.
My childhood days may have been coal...but they have turned into diamond in this aging woman's mind.
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In My Own Words: Out-of-the-Ordinary Experiences
