The Kitchen: Memories and Memories

A conversation with my husband today got me thinking about kitchens and the ones that left an impression on me.It is funny how one thing--in this case a large preserving kettle in an antique shop--will spur a memory and lead to remembering long-forgotten places, people, or things.

Me, first Christmas in this house, 1976. That's my
first Tappan stove in the background. The house
was nowhere near finished yet.

The kettle reminded me of the neighbor we called "Grandma" Compton. She wasn't my grandmother, of course. My grandmothers lived in England and New Orleans. But she suggested to my mother that we children call her that, even though to be honest she was a little frightening to us. She was, we thought, really old. Now I realize Grandma Compton was probably about the age I am now, possibly a few years older. Her deep, rich voice intimidated any child thinking of mischief, and her eyes didn't seem to miss a thing.

(This memory of Grandma Compton's kitchen is sharing space with some pics of the evolution of my kitchen here in this house I built with my first husband 40 years ago.)

 We didn't go to her house often; in fact, I can only remember being there twice. Once was with my mother for some kind of party event where pretty things were shown by a lady to a group of other ladies, and the pretties were passed around for everyone to see. I don't remember what the things were, but I remember trying to keep one of them until my mother's firm voice told me to pass it on.

About 1979, pretty tired from canning all summer and getting
ready for my parents' second visit. Things were a little more
finished, but no electricity yet.

The second visit is the one I remember most clearly. Grandma Compton had come up to our house with a large, steaming preserving kettle--the blue-black speckled kind--full of the most heavenly-smelling applesauce. In her booming voice she suggested my mother send me down to get more apples, as she had more of them than she could work up.

So a little bit later I was shyly knocking on the door of the big white Victorian house two doors down
from us and shaking a bit when a loud voice called "Come on in!" I made my way timidly through the dark hallway with its looming oak hall tree and wide stairs that disappeared in darkness above me. "Come in, come in!" the voice boomed again, and then I was in the kitchen.

About 1982. My parents were visiting for
the third time, bringing English family
with them. Still no electricity, and the Tappan
had given up and was replaced by this stove that
I came to hate.

And what a kitchen it was. A cast-iron, white porcelain sink with a high backsplash was on one wall, and another wall was covered by tall dark wood cabinets with beadboard doors at the bottom and glass doors at the top that reached all the way to the ceiling 12 feet above. Windows looked out to a sunroom and gardens beyond. The smell of spicy applesauce filled the room, wafting from steaming kettles on a large old-fashioned porcelain stove that stood on curving legs. A large aluminum kettle added its own heat to the room as it boiled away on another burner.

Grandma Compton's sharp eyes saw me and she said, "Hello there. You've come for the apples, I expect." I could only nod, my voice completely trapped in my throat."

She clumped over to the door that led to the back porch and lifted a brown bag full of apples, bringing it over to where I stood like a statue. "Will you help your mother with these?"

I nodded quickly and swallowed. "Yes ma'am," I squeaked.

She smiled. "Well then, get along home now." I scurried out of there and up the walk with the heavy bags, my feet seeming to grow wings.

Early 1986, when I was working fulltime as a security guard in
Charleston. That year I had my 5th son, and in 3 years I would be a
 sophomore in college, and we would finally have electricity.

I can still see that kitchen in my mind, with the crockery bowls on the shelves in the cabinet and Grandma Compton in her full apron and sturdy black lace-up shoes with their chunky one-inch heels. And I think now she would have liked it if I had stayed and talked, for she lived alone. I also think her kitchen is part of what inspired my love of vintage kitchen tools and crockery from the 1930's-1950's.

What about you? Is there a kitchen that stays vividly in your mind, one that brings back emotions and even smells when you think of it?

And another thought: Where does the word kitchen come from anyway? According to Wiktionary: 

My wood cookstove, which I finally sold
2 years ago.

"From Middle English kytchen, kichene, küchen, from Old English cyċen, cyċene (“kitchen; cooking; cuisine”), from Proto-Germanic *kukinǭ (“kitchen”), a borrowing from Vulgar Latin cucīna, from Latin coquīna (“kitchen; cuisine”), from coquō (“to cook”), from Proto-Indo-European *pekʷ- (“to cook, become ripe”). Germanic cognates include Saterland Frisian Köäkene (“kitchen”), West Frisian koken (“kitchen”), Dutch keuken (“kitchen”), German Low German Köken (“kitchen”), German Küche (“kitchen”), Danish køkken (“kitchen”). Romance cognates include French cuisine (borrowed into English cuisine), Italian cucina, and Spanish cocina. In other languages, the cognate term often refers both to the room and the type of cooking. In English, the distinction is generally made via the etymological twins kitchen (“room”) (of Germanic origin) and cuisine (“type of cooking”) (from French)."

My kitchen today, with another beloved Tappan range:

For a fascinating look at kitchens through the ages, check out these sites:

Wayfair's Kitchens Through the Ages.

This Old House's American Kitchens Through the Ages

If vintage stoves are your thing, this post on Old House Online is a fun browse.

I am looking forward to reading about your favorite kitchens in the comments!




Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Tomatoes in the Attic

Ah, tomatoes!

It's that time of year--at last! Our tomatoes are later this year for some reason. Perhaps all the rain in June and early July slowed down pollination. We've been getting a few here and there, enough to keep us happy, but now the boom is on. Yellow, pink, black and red are filling up the table on the deck as Larry brings them in. He prefers picking before they're completely ripe; I like to leave them on the vine as long as possible but since he's doing the picking, I'm not complaining.


I have always loved tomatoes. Some years we plant as many as 14 varieties, but this year I think we're down to 7 or 8. My absolute favorites are the black varieties--Black Prince and Black Crim. This year I could only find black cherry tomato plants so that's what I bought, along with some Cherokee Purple that seem like black tomatoes to me. Next favorites are the big pinks and deep golden yellows. This isn't to say I don't like reds! But these others are pretty much only available to us in summer, so I really look forward to them.

Our house at 514 East Quarry St, later renumbered
as 8807 Quarry Road, in Manassas, VA. We were
hard on that old place! You can see the attic window
in this photo.

I remember when I was 11, I would sneak down to the garden and get a half dozen tomatoes at a time, hide them in my pockets or wherever I could, then go up into the attic before Mom caught me. It was a trick to get into the attic because there was no ladder and the ceilings in our house were 12 fet high. First I had to position the bedroom door just right. Then I would get my feet on the doorknobs. From there I could pull myself up to the top of the door, and from there stretch to reach the attic opening. I would get my hands on the sides of the opening, and pull myself up until I could get a foot on top of the door trim. I could lift the attic trapdoor with my head, and then pull/push myself up and inside to fall on the floor. Now as I read this, it seems impossible, but at that age I was agile and strong and it seemed easy once I figured it out.

Once inside the attic I would tiptoe carefully on the boards that spanned the rafters, being careful not to let my foot slip and go through the lath-and plaster ceiling of the room below. That would have disaster! I'd have been in bad trouble and even worse, I'd have given away my hiding place in the dark, unfinished, hot attic.

There were three secrets, I discovered, in the attic: First, if I stretched out on the floor in front of the half-circle window at the front of the house, there was a most delicious, steady breeze. It was cool there even on the hottest northern Virginia days.

Me, at about the age I was in this post.
I remember Mom trimmed my bangs, and as she tried
to even them up, they just got shorter and shorter!

Then there were the boxes and boxes of old books. These books had belonged to my grandparents and when they moved a lot of their things ended up in our house, and up in our attic. There I discovered Janice Holt Giles, an author I still enjoy re-reading. There were many other books, all best-sellers from the 1930's, 40's and 50's. I read all that summer, eating tomatoes or sometimes Concord grapes when those came ripe.

And the third secret: from that half-round arched window, I could just barely see, if I positioned myself right, the blue Bull Run Mountains. I would look at them as I read Giles' The Enduring Hills, imagining myself living in a cabin in the mountains. How little I knew then that that is exactly what would happen.


Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Cherries and Childhood

It's cherry-picking time! I managed to get Larry to wait until most of the cherries were ripe. He gets impatient and wants to pick fruit before it's ready and all you jam-makers know that for the best jam, the fruit has to be dead ripe. This morning was the day, though, and he picked me 3/4 or a two-gallon bucketful.

I sat on the porch to pit them, and the task brought back so many memories. When I was a child, our yard had five or six sour red cherry trees. They were loaded with cherries every year; the biggest tree was the parent of many smaller seedlings, and Dad planted some of those and gave small trees away to several people.

I wonder now what my mother thought as she watched us scamper across the yard with our buckets. She would send us out immediately after breakfast. Each of us had something to pick into, and we would dump the cherries into a large dark-blue granite canning kettle as our containers filled. But imagine the sight of five or six children running across green grass in an old Victorian neighborhood, buckets in our hands and our high voices filling the air with chatter. We were probably wearing shorts, and some of us had our hair in braids.

Mom was most likely standing in the kitchen in front of the sink, watching her brood and thinking...what? How fortunate she was to have such a large family? How noisy we were? How lovely the yard was with flowers in bloom and the vegetable garden showing early promise? Did she enjoy the slant of the sun through the large maple where we had our treehouse, or the distant glimmer of red against green at the end of the yard where the ripe cherries awaited our arrival? Did she worry about us falling out of the tree? Or did she simply go about her work, taking the morning's excitement as routine and not something she might have noticed for what it was, an iconic moment in time, a still-life of a simpler time that she could call back to memory when we were all grown and scattered and even the cherry trees were no longer hers?

I thought about these things as I sat alone on my porch, 300 miles away from my childhood home, pitting the first real crop of cherries from my tree. Red juice squirted on me and on the floor as one by one the cherries moved from colander to bowl and the seeds pinged against the pottery bowl set on the floor to catch them. I have a cherry stoner and it works quite well, but this morning I wanted to do it the way I remembered, to savor the sweetness of memories, to hear again the lost children's voices, and to see the tree bending under my impatient, scabby knees.

Copyright 2012 Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

1958

I am seven. 

My bike is passed-down, passed around, bent up and beat up 

but it rolls

And when you’re eight that’s all that really matters.

Golden broomsedge ripples in heat,

shimmers in the vacant lot;

blue-flowered chicory

lines the road and closes its petals in resignation.

It is August.

I am riding around our block,

along the sidewalk in front of the houses 

and kept gardens and trees bending 

under the weight of ripe damsons.

Tar bubbles glisten like my mother’s jet earrings

and pop under my tires,

like hot applesauce on the Tappan stove 

in Grandma Compton’s kitchen.

I pass behind her house, 

her orchard of apple trees as old as she is,

Then to the gravel road and the old dump

Where concrete chunks provide habitat for dragonflies and bamboo,

a hiding place 

for girls with sweaty hair and bare feet.

I watch the dragonflies skim over algae-green puddles

And dream of flying, cool in the water’s reflection,

Into the shadows of hidden places where my mother’s voice

Will not reach me. 

Back on my bike I ride

Into the shadow of mulberries, maples, apples and ash.

Dust turns me golden, ghost-like, 

a mirage that shimmers 

in five o’clock heat.

It is 1958.

On a back road in a small town all that matters

 is flying, flying, 

my sunburnt hair streaming behind

my face pushing eagerly ahead

while all the world is rushing by.

This poem was inspired by pulling words out of a bag of paper strips. Each strip contained a different word or phrase--in this case the words I pulled out were blue-flowered chicory, damsons, heat shimmers, bamboo and tar bubbles. Immediately I was back on my rattling bike, riding on a dirt road in mid-August. Funny how words can do that.

Secret Hiding Place

Tipper at Blind Pig and the Acorn wrote a post about her children's "camps" made with sheets on their Granny's porch. Her post made me remember things from my childhood and the ways we played, especially in the hot summer months of the pre-air conditioning world.

When I was little we lived in a tiny house in the woods that offered opportunities of all kinds for play. Pine forest, a crawl space under the house, sheds and ditches and a rose arbor were all perfect for the kinds of games we played. I was only 5 when we moved, but my memories of the little house are vivid. I remember well my first secret hiding place; it was in the woods, surrounded by bushes and not visible to anyone passing on the path nearby. A perfect place to hide.

(photo below was taken in Centreville, before we moved to the big house in Manassas. Apparently a game of cowboys and Indians was in progress.)

Our next house was big and old with large rooms, high ceilings, tall windows, and cool plaster walls. In summer, the windows were open and sliding adjustable screens let in any breezes that might stir the mimosa in Mrs. Blakemore's yard or the old silver maple in our back yard. A large fan on a stand rotated in the dark downstairs entrance hall and often we'd put our fingers through the open cage and let them rat-a-tat-tat on the blades as they whirled. Sometimes an unfortunate child would get their fingers in the wrong place and get whacked hard by the spinning blades, but I don't remember any cuts from the fans.

Dad made schedules for his thirteen children in the summer, and created to-do lists with incentive prizes for doing certain chores. This worked well to motivate us right after school was out, but after a while we'd get tired of the lists or we'd have developed a game we liked to play. So we'd do the assigned work but the incentive lists usually languished after the end of June. Dad's strategy was probably to keep us busy while we adjusted to being home--and to keep us out of Mom's hair while she adjusted to us being home.

By July one or two games were usually in full swing. We didn't play games like most people think of them; for us, games went on for days or weeks, even all summer. Our favorite was the Town we created in the back yard. There was little grass in the area immediately to the right of the back porch steps. We kept it worn off with our play. In the bare dirt we used our little beach shovels or Mom's garden trowel to create roads, dips, curves, intersections, shopping centers, schoolyards and farms. Each of us had a role to play--farmers, mothers, fathers, shopkeepers, teachers, doctors. I was usually the orphanage keeper and my name in our games was Uncle John and Aunt Susie (dual personality, I guess). Many an emergency, conflict, injury, death, wedding and party happened in the course of an afternoon ---who needed General Hospital with all the drama we had going on in our yard?

When it rained the fun moved indoors. Upstairs would become a Wild West town. We'd raid the attic for clothes, Joe would wear his play gun and holster, someone would have the popgun, and always we'd have a dance with Joe as the caller, standing on the dresser and singing ("I belong, I belong, on the lo-o-o-ne pray-er-ee"). Indians would raid, cattle stampede, gunfights were many and bloody and bodies often littered the floor. Joe or Tom played the sheriff and would pronounce guilt or innocence and generally keep the peace. When the town got too rowdy, the real boss--Mom--would make us settle down.

We played long-running Monopoly games that resembled some of the pictures I've seen of poker games--intent faces, piles of money, deal-making and breaking, occasional fights and tears. A single game once lasted almost a month, with money changing hands as quickly, and probably as crookedly, as on Wall Street.

When we got tired of each other's company, we all had our secret hiding places. I had several: the attic was best for reading, and there was always a breeze through the little half-moon window in front with the far-off view of the Bull Run Mountains. Under the front porch was cool and damp and kind of scary, and a good place to go with Judy if we wanted to be alone. The cherry trees were excellent in June when they were filled with cherries and a girl could climb into the branches and eat to her heart's content. There were plenty for me, the birds and for mom's jam-making. The side yard with my redbud tree and bluebell garden was fairly sheltered and if Miss Mary, who lived next door, wasn't home I could climb up into the redbud tree where I would be out of sight and could spy on brothers and sisters who played on the swingset. Why did I want to spy on them? I have no idea. Maybe I should blame it on Nancy Drew, since I read every one of those books and all of the Hardy Boys too during my attic visits.

I wonder if children still play games like these, and if they still have secret hiding places? As an adult, I sometimes long for the redbud tree and the sanctuary it offered when my little life felt too tumultuous and overcrowded with siblings.

Tipper's daughters still have that magical gift of childhood, the gift of play. I hope there are many other children out there with the same gift, touching the past and inventing futures to suit themselves. I am afraid that today's children are losing the magic of creative play. I hope that in some small town in America, there is a child building a castle under the dining room table or a fort behind the sofa. I hope a little girl or boy is exploring under a forsythia bush and finding a hidden-way world that only he or she knows. I want to believe that children are still chasing birds with salt shakers, looking for four-leaf clovers, lying on their backs and finding shapes in the clouds, catching tadpoles in puddles and finding wild berries along the sides of dusty roads.

I hope childhood is still the place of possible hopes and inspired dreams, where anything can and will happen for the child who imagines it into being.

Granddaughter Haley in the yellow apple tree--one of her hiding places at my house.

Sugar Cookies

The cherry trees are to the right behind us. That's Judy on the left, then Maggie, Theresa, me and Stephen, the littlest one in the photo.

We ran away from home. We ran all the way to the cherry trees at the end of our yard at 514 East Quarry Street in Manassas, Virginia. Our mother had wronged us. We packed our favorite dresses and dolls into brown paper grocery bags and ran away to our usual running-away place--under the cherry trees. But this time, the story didn’t end there.

It was so unfair! How were we to know that our mother would want a cup of tea that afternoon? She had tea every afternoon but children do not pay attention to the habits of adults. Judy and I took the sugar bowl and hid under the front porch to eat sugar one spoonful at a time, taking turns, letting the granules melt into liquid sweetness in our mouths.

The missing sugar bowl pointed immediately to the culprits because we were the only ones missing when Mom made her tea. She knew where to find us too. On a small town lot hiding places are few and there are not many places that escape notice. We had eaten just one spoonful each when Joe stuck his head under the porch and yelled, “Here they are!”

Ah, misery. We had to crawl out, hand over the bowl and be sent to our room. We felt wronged. All we had done was eat a little sugar; the punishment was surely greater than the crime.

“Let’s run away!” I suggested. “No one loves us here anyway.”

Judy sniffed and nodded. She grabbed her doll and pushed it into a brown paper grocery bag. “What are you going to take, Sue?”

I grabbed a bag and began packing too. “They’ll be sorry they were mean to us. We’ll show them.” We slipped down the stairs and out the door.

Mom spotted us from the kitchen window. “What do you think you’re doing? I sent you to your room.”

“We’re running away,” I said defiantly.

“Oh, in that case don’t let me keep you. Have a safe journey, and do write to me when you find a new home. I shall be so anxious about you.”

I felt Judy slow down and tugged on her arm. “Come on! She’s trying to make us feel bad.” Mom waved and returned to the kitchen.

“Where are we going, Sue? I’m scared. We’re not supposed to cross the street.”

I stopped under the cherry trees. “We can stay here.”

“It’s not running away if we stayed on our own property, is it?” Judy plunked down her bag and looked around. Where will we sleep?”

She was right. We would not make our point if we stayed under the trees. I looked up the back street and saw Mr. Knox working in his rose garden.

Mr. Knox was tall, thin and ancient. He had been in the “Great War,” as he called it. He had a German soldier’s helmet in his hallway. There was a bullet hole in the helmet, just above where the soldier’s ear would have been.

Mr. Knox lived alone. His rooms were spotless, the floors shining and the kitchen, old-fashioned as it was with its high-backed enamel sink, gleamed white. In the living room colored light streamed through the stained glass panels to paint the floor with soft hues. He always treated us like ladies when we visited, courteously inviting us to sit on the tapestry sofa.

“Judy, there’s Mr. Knox. Let’s go see him.”

“We can’t. We have to ask Mom first.”

“Silly! We’re running away. We don’t have to ask Mom. I bet he has some of his sugar cookies just waiting for us.”

I could tell that Judy was tasting Mr. Knox’s sugar cookies, just as I was—white, coated with sugar and a single raisin in the exact center, crisp on the outside but surprisingly soft when bitten.

“Okay. I guess we could visit for a little bit.” We watched Mr. Knox climb up the steep steps to his back porch and disappear into its latticed shade.

We crept out of our hiding place beneath the cherry trees and darted into the darkness of Mr. Knox’s garage. After checking to be sure the coast was clear, we ran the short distance to Mr. Knox’s front porch. I felt like a hero, a spy on a mission.

Mr. Knox seemed surprised to see us. “Come right in, ladies, come right in. I was just about to have a glass of sweet tea. Would you like some?” We nodded, not sure what to say now that we were here.

Mr. Knox tottered to the kitchen, talking as he poured tall glasses of cold amber tea that created immediate sweat on the cut crystal. Ice clinked as he talked about the lack of rain and his roses. I tried to look interested but I was not thinking about roses. I was thinking about how much our mother was going to miss us.

“And how is your mother?” he asked. I nearly fell off the couch. “A fine woman, your mother. Certainly does an excellent job with you children. I’m sure she must be very proud of you.”

I stared at Mr. Knox. “She’s fine, sir. She was just having tea and we told her we thought it would be nice to visit you.”

His eyes danced. “Oh, indeed. I’m surprised she didn’t call me, but perhaps I missed the phone while I was in the rose garden. You probably need to get on home before she worries about you. Tell you what, though …” His voice trailed off as he walked back to the kitchen. “…made these this morning and can’t eat them all. Why don’t you girls just take this bag home?” He held out a brown paper bag with grease stains beginning to seep through its sides.

I took the bag from him with mumbled thanks. What were we to do? The bag of sugar cookies would tell our mother exactly where we’d been.

“Thank you, Mr. Knox. Thank you for the tea.” When the door closed behind us, Judy grabbed my arm. “Mom will know where we’ve been. We’ll be sent to our rooms for a week!”

“Why does Mom have to know? We don’t have to give these to her. We don’t have to tell her.”

“But what will we do with the cookies? Where can we hide them?”

“Right here!” I patted my stomach.

Understanding dawned. “I don’t know. What if Mom finds out?”

“She won’t. If he says anything to her about it, she’ll think he’s talking about some other time when we visited him. Old people get confused, you know.”

“Well, all right. Where should we go to eat them?”

There was only one place, of course—under the front porch. I opened the sack. Fourteen three-inch round sugar cookies gazed back at me with their single raisin eyes. I could not believe a day that had been so sour had suddenly become so sweet.

We nibbled our cookies around the edges, leaving the raisin center for last. I grinned at Judy with my mouth full. “Isn’t this great? All these cookies, just for us!”

We concentrated on the task at hand. Judy ate three cookies and then stopped.

“I don’t want any more. I want to go inside. I need to go to the bathroom. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“You have to eat your cookies! I can’t eat them all! If you throw up, everyone will know. Don’t go!”

“I don’t care. It was your idea anyway.” She crawled away.

“Wait!” I yelled, but she was gone. I sighed and continued to eat. Twenty minutes later the incriminating evidence was safely stowed in my bulging belly. I crawled into the late afternoon air and walked to the door. It opened before I touched the knob.

“So there you are, Miss.” My mother did not look pleased. “Where are the cookies?”

“Cookies? What cookies?”

“Mr. Knox called to tell me you girls were on your way home. He said he hoped that we would enjoy the cookies. Where are they?”

She didn’t need to be told. Upstairs, I could hear Judy tossing her cookies into the toilet. I looked down to see that I still held the stained paper bag in my hand.

“Mr. Knox said you left two brown paper bags at his house. He wondered if you were running away.”

I burst into tears. “I’m sorry I ate the cookies. I think I’m going to be sick!” I dashed upstairs and joined Judy in the bathroom.

It was so sad. All those lovely cookies gone to waste. I cried myself to sleep. When I woke, there were voices in the downstairs hall. I sneaked onto the stair landing and listened.

“It was a pleasure to see your girls yesterday, Mrs. Connelly. I was afraid they might need their bags so I brought them over. By the way, I had quite a few cookies left from my last baking. Brought them over for the children.”

I heard my mother’s surprised thanks and peaked over the rail to see Mr. Knox hand her a bulging, grease-stained paper bag. He glanced up and before I could scoot out of sight, he caught my eye and winked.

“Be sure to tell your girls to visit anytime,” he said. “They don’t need to be running away to come see me. I’ll always have cookies for them. You’ve got some good girls there, Mrs. Connelly. You raised them right.”

“I’ll tell them,” Mom promised. She added, “You’re right. I have some very good girls. But I don’t think they’ll be wanting cookies any time soon.”

Ice Crystals

Photo from wikimedia

My grandson shows me how it works— hold the can six inches from the window and spray.

A frost appears,

just like Jack Frost painted

years ago

on the windows in our big drafty house with single-paned windows that let in every puff of winter's breath,

funhouse windows that provided a waved and bubbled view

of Quarry Road and the houses across the way.

Icy fronds and furls etched in delicate ice

glinted pink with the first rays of a December morning sun

as we dreamed of faraway snowy places like Russia,

and the Snow Maiden and Silverhoof.

Sometimes the ice would be thick
at the bottom of the window,

mounded in ribs like a frozen tree trunk

spreading into branches with icy fern foliage

until finally it was only a thin sheet of clear ice

that we licked with warm red tongues,

or melted with our fingertips,

lifting off in pieces with fingernails to eat,

delighted at the taste of winter
and frozen window grime.

The can of spray in my hand lists directions,

but nowhere on the lable does it mention

how to dream of Russia, ice ferns or magic.

Lead Memories

I wrote this in response to a thread on the Storytell listserve, but my family read this blog and probably share this same memory:

When we were children, my father would melt lead in his little smelter pot and pour it into molds to make lead soldiers for us to play with. The molds had been his father's, and were for WWI-era soldiers. We loved those soldiers, but now I wonder if we were harmed by playing with them. Too late to change it.

One of my sisters, I believe (or was it one of my brothers?), got the molds and the smelter when Dad died. She won't use them of course. It's the memory of being in the basement with him as he melted the lead and carefully poured that molten silver metal into the molds that she cherishes. As do I. Like so many other things, we now know the hazard of what seemed simple enough when we were young.

(To illustrate this story, I googled "lead soldiers" +"World War I" and up popped these little fellows on eBay. Guess who owns them now? They're not the ones Dad made, but very like them. They'll do. )

Nehi and New Shoes

Some of you may remember collecting pop bottles for spending money when you were young.

When I was a girl, that’s how I got most of my spending money. I was the fourth child in a family of 13 children, so allowances were something we read about in books. But pop bottles—there was spending money free for the finding. All I had to do was go out with my wagon and pick up bottles tossed by the side of the road by those who evidently had more dollars than sense, as my father would say. I could redeem those bottles for two cents each, and since orange Nehi pop was a nickel and so was a Hershey bar, five bottles got me a real treat. But the year I was in fourth grade I turned into a pop bottle tycoon.

My mother believed in “good” shoes—strong, sturdy, supportive Buster Brown oxfords. They weren’t pretty but they lasted and lasted. Wear cheap shoes, my mother believed, and you’d have foot trouble when you got older. I’m not sure what “foot trouble” she meant, but since my feet are still in fine shape 40 years later, her strategy must have worked.

I was in fourth grade when I had my first real crush on a boy. He was tall, dark and handsome in my eyes, the local pharmacist’s son. Imagine how I felt when my best friend said, “You’re wearing the same shoes as Clark.”

“Am not!” I said. “Mine are girl shoes!”

“Are too,” my friend said. “Look.”

I looked. Sure enough, there on Clark’s feet were Buster Brown oxfords exactly like mine. I was mortified, and for the rest of that school year tried to keep my feet out of sight under my desk as much as possible.

In June the Sears Roebuck catalog arrived, and I saw a pair of shoes that stole my heart. They were made of patchwork pieces of leather, shades of brown and green and gold, and I thought they were just the classiest things I'd ever seen. They were $3.89 +shipping. Shipping was sixty-two cents, so for $4.51 I could own those beautiful shoes.

“Cheap,” my mother said. “They’ll never hold up.”

I didn’t care—I wanted those shoes. What did my mother know about that deep craving in my heart? She hadn’t seen Clark’s shoes. How could she ever understand?

Now I’ve never been very good at math, but this time I figured it out like a Math Bowl champion. I figured that if I collected bottles all summer, I'd have enough for the shoes. I needed 226 bottles. I had ten weeks to collect the bottles, order the shoes, and wait for them to come in. The lady at the Sears Roebuck catalog store said it would take two weeks to get them. So I had eight weeks to find enough bottles. Two hundred twenty-six bottles in eight weeks meant that I had to find at least 26 bottles each week. No problem, I thought.

I mapped out a route around my neighborhood and as soon as school let out for the summer, I went into the bottle business. Every day, I'd take the wagon and go out on the hunt. I broadened my collecting area as the pickings got leaner, until finally my route included the road in front of the high school. Now that was a gold mine! Teenagers evidently had lots of money, and since summer school was in session, there were always a few bottles to be found.

Then one day I found it: the mother lode of bottles. The ditch that ran alongside the school property and into a culvert. On one side of that culvert were over 60 bottles! All dirty and muddy, but they were mine--if I dared to wade in after them. And I did. I took off my shoes and socks and jumped in. Visions of those patchwork leather shoes were in front of me as I picked those bottles out of the muck. Of course, when I hauled this bounty to Manassas Market, the clerk took one look and said go home and wash them. I washed the bottles, got my money, and in just a few weeks I had enough to order those shoes.I took my pile of change to Sears and placed my order.

The two-week wait for the shoes to arrive was excruciating. Was I ever proud when I finally picked up my package! The School couldn’t begin soon enough for me, for I was determined that I would not sully those shoes by wearing them before school started. On the first day, I put on my shoes and walked slowly to the bus stop.

They were glorious. They were stylish. They were mine. I wore those shoes every day, carefully taking them off and putting on the old Buster Browns when I got home.

My mother was right, of course—those shoes were poorly made. After two months the stitches began to come loose, and the soles wore out soon after. I was wearing my old Buster Brown oxfords again before Thanksgiving.

These days, every time I see a Nehi bottle in an antique store I think about those Sears and Roebuck patchwork shoes. I remember the many miles I walked in my sturdy Buster Browns, bent on my goal of 226 pop bottles. Nehi bottles remind me of that summer of hope, when happiness surely rested on the purchase of a pair of cheap mail-order shoes.

The Old Homeplace

Wow. It never looked like that when we lived there. 514 East Quarry Street became 8807 Quarry Road. EMPire 5941 became 368-5941. Mrs. Blakemore, the next door neighbor, used to be the operator who answered when we dialed 0. The house was worn and lived in from the play and busyness of 13 children who searched for dead bodies behind the plaster, tried to hibernate turtles in the basement, slid down the bannister, and climbed in and out of windows to cross the porch roof.

I'm sure we gave our elderly neighbors heart failure daily. We climbed in the redbud tree, had a treehouse in the silver maple, ran up and down the block on roller skates and bikes, shot wooden arrows from our bows made from branches and string. It was only quiet when we were all in bed. My wedding reception was held there, several of my sisters were married in the main hall. Memories, memories.

The house has certainly been restored, and it is beautiful to judge by the 360 tour. Someone has loved it dearly in a way we did not. We used it, abused it, lived in it to the fullest every day. Now it's in retirement, a lovely lady dressed for company. Both incarnations are good. I hope someone buys it who will love it. I hope their memories of that old house are as long-lasting as mine.