A Free Range Childhood

I had never been into kids very much until my oldest daughter was born, so I wasn’t paying much attention to other people’s kids. I didn’t know what the norm was for dressing babies so I just dressed her in what seemed sensible. 

Frilly little dresses didn’t seem sensible on a baby who couldn’t walk. She was born in the middle of winter and I thought her legs would be cold in dresses. So I mostly kept her in little sleepers or something practical. 

But Grandmother was of a different mind so there eventually were frilly dresses available. 

As soon as my daughter was old enough it was the frilly dresses she always wanted to wear. She was a cute little kid and it was fun to dress her up like that. I had always liked dolls, so I relented and let her be frilly. ‘Prissy’ her little sister and I came to call her. 

When the little sister came, her big sister and I had great fun dressing her up as our little doll. And as soon as she was old enough she too had her own mind. Frilly was never her style. When she was two years old she asked Santa Claus for a pair of blue jeans and an alligator. I managed to find her a little stuffed alligator that year for Christmas. 

 I still have that alligator somewhere. It’s a reminder that children are not our creations, but gifts.

My Creative Awakening

Early in my life, I discovered that I could draw. More specifically I could draw the Campbell's Soup Kids, those cute, round-faced cartoon characters used by the Campbell's Soup Company to advertise their products. When I learned I could reproduce those faces it was an ah-ha moment for me. Then I began to see if I could reproduce other objects.

I soon learned that Campbell's Soup Kids were easy to reproduce compared to other things. Just draw a circle and put the cute little eyes, nose and mouth on and you had a Campbell's Soup Kid. No worries about shading or perspective. Other things were a little more complicated.

These difficulties didn't stop me, however. I kept trying. Give me some pencils and a sketch pad and I was a happy kid. I even sought out books and materials to help me learn about shading and such. Then when I was about eleven or twelve I got a Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw book. One of the best Christmas gifts I ever received. And I practiced and practiced and practiced using that book.

Over time, I got a little better. I never thought I was great. I just thought I loved drawing.

Achieving a Little Recognition....

When I was in high school, my school added art to the curriculum for the very first time. I signed up, of course, but so did many other students who had no interest in art but thought this would be an easy class. Our teacher, who was a novice at teaching, was a good instructor but not so good at controlling the students' behavior, so the class was often bedlam.

In spite of the bedlam, I still loved this class. I was learning about art.

Our poor teacher left teaching after that year, but at the end of the year before he left he sent in a recommendation for me to attend a workshop that was being offered at our state university during the summer break for art students with promise.

....and Failure

I was excited to attend this workshop that was being taught by a couple of award winning artists, but I was a shy little teenager and more than a little nervous about being there. I had been the best art student in my small high school, but I was in class with other 'best art students' from across the state. Right away, I began comparing myself to these other students and came out on the losing end.

By the time I left that workshop that summer I was asking myself, "Why did I think I was any good at art?" I decided I was wasting my time pursuing art. I quit drawing. It was one of the worst decisions I ever made. I still regret it.

Moving On

During this period of my life, though, I was dealing with interests other than art. Besides dealing with the normal teenage angst about dating and fitting in, I was returning to high school to finish my senior year and begin thinking about college. And there were other high school classes besides art that appealed to me.

I may be biased about this, but it seems to me the best high school teachers are often the English teachers. That was certainly true in my case. My English teacher, Mrs. Fraim, was a pleasant, intelligent, long-time teacher with a genuine love of literature, the English language, and her students. Some students complained because she could also be quite demanding in her requirements. One of her requirements was that we write a paper almost every week while in her class.

Mrs. Fraim's requirements never seemed demanding to me. I took to the writing the same way I had taken to art. It was definitely more fun than conjugating verbs. And if Mrs. Fraim liked your writing, she was good aboout singing your praises. That always helps.

I suppose it was good there were no summer workshops for writing students in our universities because this enjoyment of writing stayed with me and served me well all through my university years. I even liked the essay tests in college that most students complained about.

The culmination of my writing career in college was the Advanced Composition course my last semester before graduation. Our professor in this class audaciously asked us to take the articles from The Atlantic magazine and see if we could improve them based on the principles he was illustrating. I loved it.

I Need to Be Alone

I was 2 1/2 years old when my younger sister was born and knew nothing about what was going on. During my mom's delivery of the baby, I went to stay with Granny who lived just up the road from us.

After the baby was born, they brought me back home, and I was very surprised to find this small unknown creature in bed with my mom.  So, sitting there beside them I began to cry and told my mom, "I want to go back to Granny's house". 

I didn't return to Granny's house, and eventually adjusted to this new creature who had joined out family. I learned, not just how to tolerate her, but also how to help her out. Since she had a limited vocabulary, I would often have to talk for her and to tell other family members what she wanted, like another cookie. 

As a result of my talking for her, she was a little later in talking than I and my siblings had been. But she eventually learned to talk for herself, and we remained close throughout our childhood. We also had two cousins living nearby who were close to us in age. There were four of us. I was the oldest of the four, and my younger sister was the youngest, so there was always someone around to play with. Loneliness was not something I experienced very often. If no one else was around there was always little sister Ann to play with. There were times, however, when I just wanted to be alone.

One day when Ann and I were out playing in the woods beside our house, I decided I wanted to climb the tree beside the area in the woods where we were playing house. We had made us a little house there at the bottom of the tree.

The tree was a tulip poplar tree with limbs close together making it easy to climb. Even though I was small, hiking my foot up to the bottom limb was easy enough. We had climber this tree so often that the bottom limb was broken off leaving just enough room to place my barefoot. All the limbs up the tree were close enough together that I could reach them easily.

When I got to the top of the tree, I held on to the trunk as the wind blew the trunk back and forth. 

I was holding on to the trunk and enjoying the thrill the tree was providing when I heard my little sister whining for me to come down. 

I can still remember many years later, the thrill of the sway of that tree and my annoyance at my little sister whining.

I learned that day that I can be very close to people but still value my independence.

PORCHES AND PEONIES

 I'm swinging on the porch at my grandparent's house, sitting with my cousins trying to remember all the words as we sing  "How Much is That Doggy in the Window".  A hot summer day and we begin here.

Later in the day, after supper, we gather again in this front yard to continue our play. Hide and seek this time.  Home base is the wide concrete steps on the front porch that stretches all the way across the house.  One by one we sneak home, sliding toward the steps and yelling, "Home free," trying to avoid Pa's peony bushes.

As the light fades, Granny switches on the  porch light and we change games, moving closer to the porch, playing Capture the Flag, maybe even getting some adults to join us, cautioning each other again not to run over Pa's peony bushes.

After we  finish playing, we gather around Pa's lilac bush while he hand-cranks the ice cream freezer, chipping ice off a huge block that he keeps covered in heavy tarpaulin.  I hear the ice  in the freezer sloshing and  the movements slowing, getting harder and harder  to crank.  The ice cream is finally ready, and I sit shivering while eating  it, even in the warm summer evening.

These are my memories.  This is my reality. I share this with my older sister, and,  like one of those commercials that interrupts itself, the sound grinding to a halt, she says, "You know, that ice cream was really hard to make.  Granny didn't like doing it, it was so much trouble.  They had to go all the way to town  to  get the ice.  Then she'd have to make up the ice cream  and you  know how Granny was so slow about  everything."

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So realities differ.  This is my memory of that time and that place.  All good.

Me and the UPS Man

I can sometimes be slow to accept change.  I'm of the opinion that not everything needs changing. I'm not into being trendy and the older I get the less trendy I want to be.  I only recently got a smart phone. And I didn't have a cellphone or answering machine until I met John and he bought them for me.

I’m not a big fan of the social media sites-- unless someone is posting pictures of one of my granddaughters.  I especially don’t like the internet slang and refuse to use the slang terms like LOL, OMG, or LMAO.

But computer and internet use in general I have always wholeheartedly embraced.  I think the internet is monumentally important in many ways.  

This time of year I’m especially interested in the advantages of internet shopping.  I’ve never been really fond of shopping the way some women are.  A good shopping trip for me was one with friends, where we oohed and aahed and discussed new decorating plans and then went to eat.  I never got much shopping done like that but it was fun.  

When I actually want to buy something on a shopping trip, I need to go alone and spend time looking and thinking and comparing prices.   And what better place to do this type of shopping than the internet.

Now that I live in the boonies where the nearest shopping center is miles away, I do most of my holiday shopping on the internet.  Then the UPS man gets to travel miles to get to my little country lane and bring his big brown truck up the winding driveway to my house in the woods.

I’ll still go to the mall some.  I actually enjoy the hustle and bustle of the crowds during the Christmas season, and Christmas wouldn’t be the same without a trip to the mall to hear ‘Silver Bells’ and ‘The Nutcracker’ playing in the stores—and then go out to eat.

But for actual shopping, I’ll do most of it online.  Me and the UPS man are becoming very familiar.  He’s here several times a week during the Christmas season.

Digging My Own Holes

When the Son of Sam, who was Jewish, was arrested, I heard a Jewish person tell about feeling shame, believing that the bad behavior of one of his own reflected poorly on him.  This is a common feeling among minorities and may explain, for example, why an African-American feels anger or shame toward an Uncle Tom.  It may also explain my feelings toward women who act helpless, believing this perpetuates the stereotype of women as the weaker sex.

So when a friend complained to me that her son-in-law would not help her daughter with landscaping chores by digging holes for her I said, “Well, tell her to dig her own holes.  That’s what I tell my daughters.”

I was a single mother of two daughters for a number of years and “digging our own holes” became our mantra.  One of my daughters later admitted, however, that she sometimes coquettishly asks her husband, “Will you dig my holes for me?”

When I met my husband I had been single for a number of years.  At the time we met I had just purchased some land and was getting ready to build a house, acting as my own contractor and doing some of the work myself.

John soon started joining me when I would go to work on my land.  It was in the country and a lovely place to visit.  After I got my building permit, we were there working one day when I picked up a shovel and said I was going to the bottom of the hill to put up the post for the building permit.
“May I join you,” he asked, “or do you need to dig your own hole?”

I said he was welcomed to come along, but, shovel in hand, when we got to the bottom of the hill, I began to dig.

This is a rural, sparsely populated area, so we were alone, working beside the road, John silently watching me dig.  The ground was very hard and I was about ready to let him dig when I looked up at him.

He was standing with his arms crossed over his chest, smiling at me.  “You know, if anyone comes along, I’m going to have to take that shovel out of your hand.”
He’s been helping me dig my holes ever since.

Blue Highways

In 1982 American travel writer and historian William Least Heat-Moon wrote a book called Blue Highways: A Journey into America about his 13,000 mile journey across the United States, as much as possible on secondary roads, trying to avoid cities.

These secondary roads were called blue highways because on the old-style maps they were drawn in blue and the main roads drawn in red. 

Living out of his van, William Least Heat-Moon traveled these secondary roads to find places untouched by fast food chains and interstate highways, "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."

Interstate highways have made travel much easier in this country, but for this convenience we have paid a price.  Food chains and motels along the interstate are very similar in all states.  A Big Mac tastes much the same in Connecticut as it does in California.  We often see little of the local people, the local customs, the local food unless we get off the interstates.

I live very near what would have been a red highway on the old maps.  It was a main thoroughfare from points north to Florida not too many years ago.  Now it is seldom used by any except local traffic.

When I travel in our country I still like to get off the main highways, to taste the local food and see the local culture.

Quote is from Blue Highways