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The White House on Willow Brook Road

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Word of the Day:  “Chigger (chig’ er) the tiny, red larva of a family  (Trombiculidae) of mites, whose bite causes severe itching.”

“The White House on Willow Brook Road”–sounds like the title of a children’s book, doesn’t it?   When my family moved to the old white house on Willow Brook Road, it proved to be the best place ever to grow up.  Looking back, I realize that it probably wasn’t quite as glamorous as I thought at the time.  We didn’t have a furnace; the house was heated in the winter by open gas heaters with no outside venting.  I suspect that sort of heat wouldn’t be allowed today.  Even as a kid, I learned how to strike a match carefully and light the heaters.  In fact, I still have a slight scar on my right leg as a reminder of a close encounter with one of those hot devices.   As a safety measure, the heaters in the bedrooms would be turned off at night, but the one in the bathroom was left on.  I can still remember running into the bathroom on cold mornings and feeling the wonderful heat from that glowing heater!

Summers weren’t much better! We had no air conditioning in the hot, sticky Dallas heat, but we had a huge attic fan.  Sleeping with that fan running was somewhat like lying under a jet engine during take off.  It practically sucked the sheets off of the bed, but it certainly provided air movement.  One wonderful summer, we got one small window unit air conditioner.  My Dad installed it in the room we called the family room.  I think in the original design of the house it was the dining room, but we had no dining room furniture so it became the family room.  Ah, delicious coolness!  We kept the doors to the rest of the house shut and watched television in the wonderful cool air.  At night the air conditioner was turned off, and the mighty attic fan was turned on. I wonder why it never occurred to us to sleep on the floor in the family room?

Television in the family room was our main source of at-home entertainment.  Saturday morning were replete with Sky King, Rama of the Jungle, Rin Tin Tin, Mighty Mouse, and who recalls what else.  Our old farm-house was also a repository for bugs of all sorts.  Now, I hate bugs, and I think it stems from my lying on the floor in that family room watching television when a scorpion goes strolling past, right next to my foot.   Of all possible bugs, scorpions were the worst!  Worse than wasps, bees, mosquitos, and even the nuisance chiggers.  I was petrified of the scorpions, although I was never unfortunate enough to actually get stung by that frightening tail.

On one particularly horrifying night, I was reading in bed, and all of a sudden I saw a scorpion walking across the top of my book.  I let out a blood-curdling shriek and hurled the book across the room.  Loud footsteps down the hallway quickly brought my Mother, Father, and little sister, all of whom were probably expecting to see an intruder accosting me or at the very least Bigfoot!  The positively scary part was that we never found the nocturnal little creature.  The thought that it had climbed up on my bed and onto my book without my seeing it was what really upset me the most. For a long time, I never went to bed without doing a complete check of the covers, pulling back the sheets and looking under the bed.  To this day, I never let my arm or leg hang out over the side of the bed.  You just can’t be too careful; they might have tracked me down after all these years.

I think my Dad contributed to my hatred of scorpions with his tales of the scorpions in North Africa.  A Captain in World War II, he served in the North African campaign, the invasion of Italy, and the horrific battle of Anzio.  Although he seldom talked about his war-time experiences, he would tell us frightening stories of the scorpions in Africa, six inches long and pasty white.  He said the soldiers never put their boots on in the morning without carefully dumping them out just in case they had an unwelcome visitor in them.  I suspect that I would have found the stories of the actual battles less upsetting than those sneaky scorpions!  When the war ended, returning soldiers were expected to tough it out and get back into civilian life.  There was no such diagnosis as PTSD in those days, but the nightmares my Dad suffered from up until the time of his death may have been the aftermath of the awful realities of that war.  We three, my Mother, my sister, and I,  all quickly learned that when my Dad was sleeping and we needed to wake him up, we gave a quick shake or poke and then ducked.  He always came up with fists flying and arms flailing

Although scorpions warranted my greatest fear, chiggers probably caused me much more misery.  For those of you not familiar with these little creatures, they are some sort of little red mite, almost microscopic, that burrows under the skin, causing hundreds of red welts and itching like crazy.  Not much helped to shorten their obnoxious little life span beneath the skin.  People tried calamine lotion, mercurochrome, and even clear fingernail polish, apparently on the theory that the polish would suffocate the little monsters.  Prevention was somewhat found in dusting your feet, ankles, and groin area with sulfur powder.  My Mother had little cloth pouches of sulfur which we applied generously, turning our socks and clothes a bright yellow color.  I don’t know if she made them or bought them ready-made.  It does make you wonder if the prevention might have been more dangerous to our health than the creatures themselves!

The other prevention was in having a lawn of St.Augustine grass, that lovely viney grass found so often in Texas and the South.  St. Augustine turns brown in the winter and a deep green in the summers.  For some reason,  chiggers don’t like it, and neither do the awful goatshead stickers that I managed to step on so many times!  Unfortunately, our lawn in that old rental house did not have the cool, green St. Augustine.  We had a bit of Bermuda grass augmented by a wide variety of weeds and stickers, just waiting to pounce upon the unspecting bare foot.  And the chiggers loved it!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Join me next Friday for “More Tales from the White House!”

 

Another Move!

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Word of the day:  Arabian (ar-a’-be-en) “Any of a breed of horses raised originally in Arabia and noted for their intelligence, grace, and speed” Last week I chatted about our move to Texas. I had quickly settled in to the … Continue reading →

We move to Texas

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Word of the day:  Yankee (yang’-ke)  “a native or inhabitant of a northern state”

I found out I was a Yankee when my family moved from Long Island, New York to Texas midway  in my second grade year.  What in the world is a Yankee I must have wondered?  Little did I know I had just moved to one of those areas where the North-South designation was still alive and well! Dallas in the early fifties was not the cosmopolitan city of today.

Long Island when I lived there was a collection of sleepy little towns and villages, not the habitat of the wealthy and famous that it has become some fifty plus years later.  We lived in Glen Head, close to Glen Cove.  Today Glen Head is supposedly the wealthiest zip code in the United States.  It certainly wasn’t that way when we lived there!  Some people have extensive memories of their past in a completely linear fashion.  I find that my childhood memories of Glen Head are more like a series of old photos all mixed up in a box.  We lived in the top floor of a two-story duplex right across the street from my elementary school.  I always have a chuckle when internet security questions want you to answer, “What was the name of your first grade teacher?”  Excuse me, but I really don’t have a clue.  My most vivid memory of being in the Glen Head Elementary School was drinking an orange soda and throwing up at some school function.  To this day I detest orange soda!

My other outstanding memory of living on Long Island was making a trip into the “City” to Madison Square Garden to see Gene Autry and his horse Champion.  This was definitely one of the highlights of my young life!   I remember the name of the horse but not my first grade teacher; that tells you something about my priorities at age six.  My Dad even bought me a chameleon lizard to take home with me after the show.  Ahhhh, life was good!

Texas, on the other hand, was the land of the wild west, cowboys and Indians, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.  Maybe this move was not going to be so bad after all!  Alas, there was to be no ranch, no horses, and not even a glimpse of Roy Rogers.  We moved to a little house on another quiet little street in University Park, the poor little stepsister to the wealthier Highland Park.  I was quickly enrolled into the local elementary school.  What could be more traumatic for a seven-year old than to change schools mid year.  This school had a cafeteria where you actually went through the line and ordered your own lunch.  Being totally petrified of this new experience, I think I subsisted on a diet of canned corn and a slice of white bread for the first several weeks.   Apparently, I must have gotten tired of this limited diet after a few weeks as I gradually melded into the new environment, ordered a better lunch,  and made some new friends.

By the end of the school year,  I had settled in to my new life in Texas.  I no longer felt like the complete outcast of six months ago.  I had a new bicycle,  complete with training wheels.  It wasn’t quite the same as a horse, but then I had a totally vivid imagination, so it worked for me.  I also had a holster with two silver cap pistols and a seemingly endless stash of caps.  I can still recall the wonderful gun powdery smell of those caps.  I was Dale Evans, Annie Oakley, and occasionally Pocahontas on a rotating basis.

Summer stretched out into long glorious days of firing cap guns, swimming, and roaming the neighborhood.  In the early ’50’s the United States was in a state of post-war euphoria.  The economy was growing; the troops were home.  Parents had not yet become the helicopter parents of today.  We grew up with no organized sports, no lessons on everything from piano to skating to martial arts, and no checking in on a regular basis. We entertained ourselves all day long, settled our disputes with fists, rocks, or sometimes tears.

In the summer we headed off to the local swimming pool daily.  We had little metal tags that our Mothers sewed on to our swim suits.  These were our daily admission to the pool.  I can’t remember not knowing how to swim. Luckily for me, both of my parents were good swimmers, and I learned at a very young age.  During those long days at the pool with no parental supervision, I swam to my heart’s content and often put on my Esther Williams persona.  Besides saving all of University Park from a wide range of outlaws and ne’er-do-well’s, I was also the queen of synchronized swimming!  So many accomplishments at my young age.

On Saturdays  I often walked by myself or with friends to the local movie theater for the Saturday afternoon matinée, two shiny quarters clicking together in my pockets.  I loved all the movies but a good western was definitely the best of all.  There were so many heroes to delight me–Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, and, of course, my all-time favorite, Roy Rogers!  There was always a cartoon, a newsreel, a serial, and the feature movie of the day.  Those two little quarters got me into the movie, plus a Coke, a box of Milk Duds, and possibly a box of Junior Mints or popcorn.

I even had a tooled leather belt with my name embossed into the leather that I wore to the movies on Saturdays.  If I were to be struck speechless upon encountering one of my heroes, I could at least point to my name on the belt so they would know who I was.  After my Mother’s death, I actually  found that old belt among her things.  It gave me a feeling of fond remembrance, like meeting an old friend after many years, but  it must have shrunk over the years. It didn’t quite fit these days!

The scared little Yankee was quickly becoming a Texan.

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

The Great American Novel

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Word of the day:  Memoir (mem’-war) “a record of events based on the writers’ personal observation” I’ve always been an avid reader.  From the second or third grade on, I always had a book in my hand.  Like most young … Continue reading →

Welcome to the Eclectic Grandma!

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Word of the day:  Eclectic (i-klek’-tik) “made up of elements from various sources, as in an eclectic philosophy.”

So why am I doing a blog? Often I don’t sleep well at night because the words are all lined up in my head screaming to get out. As I lie there awake, I mentally keep composing little vignettes. Maybe getting all of this internal noise down on paper (of course, no one really does anything on paper these days) will help me get a good night’s sleep for a change. My muse is way too nocturnal! Hopefully, this blog will calm her down a bit.

I enjoy writing, and often people tell me that they enjoy reading my little narratives.  I even like the pseudo-modest annual Christmas letter, the adult version of “What I did on my summer vacation.”  Writing is somewhat like the sculptor working in clay.  Add a little here and there; shave off some extraneous materials there until just the right proportions are achieved.  I have heard that the sculptor in stone or marble often feels that the statue is already in the stone, and he just needs to chip away the excess to reveal it.  I guess writing is something like that.

I have several books tucked inside me just waiting for their release!  What you will see in my blogs will be excerpts from these little infants as I strive to bring them to life.  You may see some content from Black Dirt and Sunflowers about growing up in Texas in the 1950’s, The Irish Girls which focuses on my wonderful Irish Setters through the years, or Woman in a Man’s World, an account of my encounters with the glass ceilings in life.  From time to time, when I’m in more of a woo-woo sort of mood, you might see something from Home Again, A Spiritual Journey.

Remember, I said this was an eclectic blog!  In other words, whatever I feel like writing about might turn up from time to time.  Hopefully, you will have as much fun reading it as I am having writing it.  Do let me know what you think.  I have a pretty tough skin–I think.