"Go play in the street!" I have heard an exasperated parent or two admonish their kids, providing a little comic relief for their frustrations. Back at the end of the nineteen forties, however, it was commonplace to have your toddler of two or three years' age go play in the street with minimal supervision, at least in Sparta, Wisconsin.
Grandpa Lee was gone on his route, driving all around some portion of Wisconsin, jobbing orders for the Pet Milk Company and Grandma Lill was in charge. My father was off trying to break into the business of working with Grandpa Lee and having a tough time of it. My mother was off doing something, probably going to classes to learn how to be someone's secretary. Aunt Jeannie was either doing the same or getting married or having just been married and on her honeymoon. Donna and John were likely in high school all day.
I was in the back yard and in the street.
This picture of Grandma Lill and me was taken at a cottage fishing. She wrote on the back of the picture that I was 2 years and 4 months old.
Grandma and Grandpa always had interesting back yards. Grandma Lill loved hydrangeas and there was always at least one big bush of them burgeoning with huge white flowers. She would dry them and put them in jugs and pitchers all throughout the house. She loved peonies as well, as did the little ants. When I related how the peonies always seemed to be covered with ants to an avid gardener, he told me that peonies attract the ants and that they will not open into a flower unless the ants gobble up the sappy fluids they secrete along the bud edges.
We have some of Grandma Lill's actual peonies growing alongside a deck. The ants still love them.
Grandpa Lee would order seed catalogs and it was an exciting week for him when they arrived. They were little magazines with pictures of all the little bushes, trees, and flowers that a person could order. He pored through them while drinking his morning coffee during the times that he was not on the road, circling many, many items and dog-earing pages. In the end he would order one or two things. He loved the planning more than the planting, I think.
When a couple of bushes would arrive, he would very meticulously dig the proper hole, line it with the proper amount of additives, spread the roots out and tamp everything down just so, before pouring several buckets of water over the whole thing.
Lee had been a scoutmaster when he was younger and was unrivaled, I am told, in his ability to supply the correct names for trees, bushes, and other plants in the woods. Lill just loved flowers and pretty, colorful things. She would plant flowers all around the house and in little spots in the back yard. At rummage sales, she would buy colorful little bottles, some the shape of violins, and place them on the window sills. She would sit and have her little glass of tea or Pepsi Cola while the sun shined through these little bottles and splashed colorful ripples on the window curtains, her serene smile revealing new windows into her kind, kind heart.
In the back yard was a crab apple tree. I don't know if Grandpa Lee put it there before I was born or if it had come with the place. The apples were little, about the size of an olive or a cherry and were orange-yellow in color. There would be copious collections of them all over the grass, long stems still attached. Of course I tried eating one and found no pleasure in that. They were bitter, as were all of the berries that grew on the bushes around the house. The birds would eat some of them, but nothing that I ever tried was palatable, and a toddler of two or three years puts everything he finds into his mouth at least once.
Across the street lived a little girl approximately my age. Her name was Jean, like my aunt, only they called her "Jeannie-girl". She and I would play in the street, which was rarely driven on. A lot of people didn't have cars and the ones that did kept them in the garage unless they were making a trip.
We could play in the street, ride our little tricycles in the street, and our caretakers wouldn't even be concerned.
Toddler memories are rare and fleeting and should be written down lest they be gone forever. One day I was toddling around in the back yard, playing in the little piles of apples which had fallen. Little "Jeannie-girl" from across the street toddled over and joined me. I don't know if we knew many words yet, we were only two years old or so.
After five or ten minutes of rolling around in the little apples, it occurs to a toddler to doff the plastic underpants and soggy diaper for the simple reason that it feels better to be rid of them. "Jeannie-girl" did the same, putting me and a female peer in a situation which was not to be repeated for decades. The scene began to take on disturbing characteristics of the story of the Garden of Eden in the Holy Bible. A boy and a girl prancing around naked in the piles of apples under the tree, giggling stupidly.
We gradually realized that some of the little apples would stick to us. The ones that had recently fallen were hard, but some of them had been lying around a few days. The ants and birds had injured them and they had started to decay and were just a little bit slimy. If you put one against your skin, it would stick a while, then fall off.
Funnier yet, when you lost your balance and sat down on the apples, a bunch of them would stick to your bottom when again you stood back up.
"Jeannie-girl" and I were laughing and sticking little apples on each other. I had probably just tried to pack a handful of them into her butt crack when her mother looked out the window from her daily chores to see what little "Jeannie-girl" was up to.
Our giggles were interrupted by her mom storming across the street, grabbing up "Jeannie-girl" in one arm and her little pants and shirt in the other. She paddled her and stalked quickly across the street and back home.
Confused, but fearing that she might come back for me, I meandered up and in the back door and asked Grandma Lill for a drink of water.
Just as an aside, see how the chemicals of the photo are being corrupted by time in the upper left? Get your old photos scanned and digitized because this is unavoidable.
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