Remembering our childhoods

Tonight E and I were discussing our very similar childhoods. There were some basic differences of course.  Her father was a farmer/sharecropper near Bakersfield, CA, and mine was the head librarian at a small private liberal arts college in Monmouth IL (pop 11,000 at that time).  She was born in 1915, and I was born 44 years later.  When she did the weekly ironing, she used a flat iron heated on the top of a wood stove, she sprinkled everything before ironing, and she ironed table linen, bedsheets and pillow slips, as well as her father's shirts.  Her sisters never had to do the ironing, but she enjoyed "doing it right."  (She still does for that matter.)

I too did the ironing, but my work was less arduous and was shared with my sisters (in fact, they did much more than I.) When it was my turn, I pulled ironing from a big basket in Mom's closet and brought it to the TV room in the basement,  There, I watched soap operas (Another World, One Life to Live, and Dark Shadows) while I plied the electric steam iron, which I filled with distilled water from a nearby jug. I only ironed the table cloth for holidays.  But, we both hung clothes on a line in the back yard.

And, of a Sunday. we both went for family drives to the river.

They took ice cream, home-made with a hand crank and still in its rock-salt-and-ice-filled container. They built a fire and roasted chicken pieces before wading out (in somewhat sketchy bathing attire) to the sandbar.  Diving and other deep-water tricks were reserved for the reservoir near the farm.  We went to the Lock and Dam 18 on the Mississippi and watched the barges go through, singing the old campfire girls song.  I remember going to a nearby tiny crescent of a beach and looking for the round mud rocks that were potential geodes.  Sometimes we went to the covered bridge near Gladstone (aka Happy Rock), and in the autumn we stopped by Weir's Fruit Farm to get Mom's favorite apples (Johnathans) and drink fresh cider from the keg, using those pointed paper cups that we also used in school for the milk breaks.

I told E about the July 4th picnic with the Buccholtz's, where we also had home-made ice cream. Instead of a bonfire, though, we brought a portable barbecue and charcoal briquettes, and Bob marinated the chicken in Italian salad dressing, which made the skin crusty -black and tangy.

She nodded.  "I had a wonderful childhood," she said, and she proceeded to talk about the long rope swing in the barn.  "You could swing all the way across the barn, 10 feet high."  I told her of the tire swing that hung from a tree near my Grandma's house in Minnesota:  we'd sit in the hole of the tire and use our feet to push back and forth; or we'd climb on top of the tire, clinging to the rope while a sister would twirl us until the rope would twist no more and then let us go with a push. We'd swoop back and forth, madly twirling and clinging while the centrifugal force pulled the tire straight out.

She said, oh yes, she visited her grandparents too.  Like me, though, she only visited one set.  Distance and expense restricted my family to the Minnesota kin.  In E's case, her father was 20 years older than her mother, and I get the impression that his parents were gone by the time she was born.  Her father, being a farmer, could only get away for a short time, but the rest of them stayed for one to three weeks.  Her grandfather worked on the SP railroad, which ran in front of the house near Fresno.  "My grandmother was a 5x5, She was enormous (arms held wide),  as wide as she was tall.  She couldn't walk very well, but she was always in the kitchen, cooking. Grandpa was a very skinny man, no taller than she, but somehow he could command the respect of the crew."  He had a crew of around 20 strong Mexican men, who worked on the railroad under his supervision.  They lived on the other side of the fence with their families, and E used to lean against the fence, watching the children "laughing and crying and singing" on the dirt space between the two rows of houses.  Actually, she specified that the houses were not really houses, but residences constructed of canvas and boards, etc.  They were arranged in two lines, facing each other.

It was her first real experience with The Other, and she wanted to join them, to understand what they were saying, to play.  But her mother wouldn't allow it. Why?  I asked, probably naively.  To her credit, E didn't say:  because that's what the relationship was at the time. She thought for minute, considering the question.  "I don't know.  Probably she felt it would be too much trouble."  She'd have to chaperone, something might happen, they might not be welcome.  And she didn't speak Spanish either.

So, E stood at the fence and wondered about the little community on the other side, so close, but so far.  At night, they could hear the laughter and singing of the adults, and the shrieking of the children at play.  Later, E would learn their language, among several others, and spend close to a year in Spain.  But, she never connected with the foreign culture in her own country, and when she was in high school, her grandparents were no more.