Chapter 3

RETURN TO EARL UNION

 

For some reason unknown to me now, the time came when my parents were no longer needed in helping Grandmother Martin and we returned to our home at Earl Union. A number of times I have lived in the same NEST more than once, even four times in one house, so in returning to this house my parents set yet another precedent for me to emulate.

 

This period was only three or four months long; from about May of 1913 until my fourth birthday in September of the same year. Since I was too young to have recollections of our first term in that house, all my memories of living there must have been from that four-month period.

 

The lot, on which my father had built the new house, a few years earlier, had had another dwelling house that had burned to the ground before he bought the property, so there was a small stable and carriage house there when he built the house. 'When I was a little boy I thought this barn was big and far from the house. When I pass the place now I see that they are very near to each other. The wagon-shed side of this small barn had a rough plank floor with wide cracks between them. I know they were wide because I was paddled for dropping eggs, from the chicken nests, down the spaces between the planks to the ground below. I also remember watching the little pigs rooting around below that floor. I suppose they liked the eggs!

 

The garden was to the rear of the house and separated from the side yard by a narrow drainage ditch. The boardwalk to the garden was continued over this ditch by a wooden plank. Since I was less than four years old this plank seemed to be a real bridge. One day as my mother and I were leaving the garden and were almost at this "bridge," I found myself caught by the hand and literally swung across the ditch as my mother ran over the plank. I didn't know what was happening until I saw her run back and start chopping the ground with the hoe she was carrying. Only then did I see she snake she was killing. She sold me that I was just about to step on it. I suppose it was a harmless snake, but she was always afraid of them. Her fear made more of an impression on me than did the snake.

 

One day as I stood at a bedroom window on the second floor, and being just able to see over the sill and sight down along the slope of the porch roof, I said to Mamma, "If Naa would slide off of the porch roof Naa would land 'way out there in the field." I still at that time had not heard of Sir Isaac Newton and gravity!

 

One of the things I hated was the afternoon nap in the little storage room behind the stairway. How hot that room was on those summer afternoons with the sun shining on the western window! How the flies buzzed behind the pulled down shade! I was to sleep on Mamma's "ironing blanket," an old folded sheet that she would spread on the dining-room extension table. Those days poor people did not have ironing boards. The smell of scorched cloth still brings back memories of that room.

 

The above-mentioned extension table was a very unusual piece of furniture. It was a wedding gift to my mother from her father. There were very few of them ever manufactured. Instead of extending by the insertion of loose boards, with this table, as it was being pulled apart, a continuous surface of narrow slats from a rolled position under each end of the table came into view. The construction was similar to a roll top desk. Every place we lived I spent many hours playing under that table.

 

In this house this table stood against the wall enclosing the staircase. Above the table was a wall shelf about five feet long on which Mamma displayed her pretty treasures. I was forbidden to get up on the table, but sometimes I would crawl up to play with a pretty little, four-inch-high oil lamp that had a painted glass chimney. It ended up with more than the usual scallops around the top. It had nicks too!