Parents set the stage for most of us. I was lucky. The life I landed in was filled with smart adults willing to share their interests and thoughts with a wide variety of friends. My sister and I became accomplished eavesdroppers, loving their laughter and their serious pursuits which included travel, history, mental health, good food, politics and civic leadership.
Dad enrolled in college, but didn’t finish. Mom married the only love of her life instead of college. Lack of academic education placed no limitations on their sense of adventure, their curiosity about the world and their abiding spirit of fun.
My father, struggling to make ends meet for his growing family, saved his lunch money to buy nails or boards for building a large flat bottomed house boat in their rental apartment’s yard. According to stories, the boat and I, two 9 month projects, launched together. Numerous friends became partners on the boat which traveled up the Ohio River at 3 miles per hour and, pushed by summer’s currents, raced home at the raucous speed of 6 MPH. I learned to swim in a large orange life jacket, tied to the anchor chain. Growing older, these friends of our parents morphed into Stu’s and my personal friends.
World War II changed our lives. Patriotism ruled the day. The boat was grounded. My sister, Stuey, 7 years older than I, reached the age of reason when my intrusions in her life could have made her hostile. With the advent of World War II’s gas rationing, we traveled by public transportation. She had to take me with her to and from school, to special events, even on afternoons when boys came courting. One of her admirers developed the habit of giving me a nickel to take to the local drugstore for 10 malted milk balls and his solid hour of freedom from my shadowing. How lucky was that for me.
Not only did it hamper Stu’s growing coterie of admiring beaus with my constant presence, we became experts at mixing orange dye into white lard to create fake butter. I collected a weighed ton of scrap metal with my little red wagon and kept a huge map of Africa on my wall where I marked the war zones attended by my beloved uncle who had enlisted in the army at age 41. Mom, Stu and I knitted dun colored scarves and socks for soldiers. Poor guys, mine probably raised blisters.
Best of all, one favorite couple, also neighbors, spearheaded a Victory Garden where old and young sweated, hoed, laughed together, cementing life-long friendships, and producing quantities of food, much of it given away to needy folks.
The years slipped by. College followed. I became engaged to a man returning from his years of Marine Corp duties in Korea before returning to college for my senior year. Like so many of my era, I married three weeks after graduation from college.
After he finished law school, we returned with our first child to live in Chicago. My husband joined an organization involved in Illinois political reform. It was a joyous community for me as well. Most of us were young parents with growing families. Meetings included heated discussions about priorities, pot luck suppers, laughter and the development of lifelong friendships. Our family bought land in the country with two of the members of the group, sharing a house with one of those families, the other preferring to live in tents. We three land owners invested in a pond. Thus began weekends of hiking, cooking and summers with a vegetable garden the size of a football field. Holiday dinners together, corn eating contests in the summers, swimming and canoeing on the Mississippi River, ice skating in the winters.
My husband’s life in politics took the family to Washington for ten years, returning to the farm for every holiday. Sixteen hour drives for the children and me, my husband usually too busy with work for the long drives. By my count, our station wagon made 60 trips with dogs and the girls’ snakes and eventually, a ferret who hid dog food under the seats found only years later and possum babies rescued by our youngest from the demise of their mother.
Our children worked through the summer months, baling and storing hay bales, interrupting but not forfeiting river excursions and pond swimming. One night, they stored hay bales into the hay loft, a hot and itchy job, until 10:00 at night, all to beat an oncoming rainstorm. When I brought dinner to my weary kids, they had fallen asleep without food.
When not haying, my husband liked clearing the valley of dead trees, wielding his chain saw while the rest of us stacked logs until the boys started wielding chain saws as well. Our house was partially heated by a wood stove, so the chain saw and stacking provided warmth in more ways than one. Idyllic years of our two girls galloping on farm horses, the two boys on motorized scooters and good hard work for all of us. The children are grown now with children of their own.
My luck continued in that a friend suggested I join the Illinois Humanities Council, (now Illinois Humanities) part of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The state councils held programs all through the state in small and large museums, state parks, community colleges, libraries, any place where local communities helped create topics for community discussions. Our Board met in towns all over the state, a learning experience every time. Furthermore, the Board was made up of scholars, professional people and lay people like me. It was a heady experience to sit and even occasionally argue with a published Shakespearean expert or the Director of the Field Museum or laugh over the spontaneous poetry of a Swift scholar from the University of Chicago.
After the birth of a grandchild, I began to want to write stories for her. Subsequently signing up for a two year program in Writing for Children at Vermont College, now the Vermont College of Fine Arts. With the guidance of inspiring authors and the spirited learning of fellow students, we were told to write and write and write some more, “Butt in Chair” as Jane Resh Thomas admonished. Plus every month, we would produce writing for a critique from one of the faculty. After Vermont College, I threw myself into NaNoWriMo with its challenge of 50,000 words written in the month of November. Since then, writing is my joy, my break from problems, my companion when the apartment is empty.