Hans Nottestad

Hans Nottestad

I can remember Grandma Lill being so excited when we would drive up to Westby and see her parents, Grandma and Grandpa "two".  Her and Grandpa Lee would dress up almost like they were going to church.  The ride seemed to take forever for a little child.

Grandpa "two" had a real name, of course, and it was Hans.  It was pronounced as if to rhyme with "dance".



This is an old picture of Grandma and Grandpa Two.

Grandpa Hans was blind and I can vividly remember going up there around Christmas time.  He was sitting in his chair in the front room almost next to the Christmas tree, which was all decorated with colorful old fashioned ornaments.  My favorite was the string of "bubble lights", colored bulbs with extrusions like small test tubes about two inches long and filled with fluid.  When they heated up, little bubbles jiggled through the extruded part.  There was a time when Christmas trees were decorated with little platforms that held small candles.  What a fire hazard that would have been!

Especially with someone like me poking around.

Grandpa Two would be sitting in his chair, his eyes open but not seeing, and kind of whitish looking.

My uncle, John, and his cousin Ron have some great stories about Grandpa Hans.  He says that when he and Ron were young, Grandpa Two told them not to goof around in his wood shed, because he had everything where he knew just where it was.  Grandpa would apparently split kindling with a hand axe even though he was blind.

They were goofing around in there where they weren't supposed to be and Grandpa Hans made an appearance coming from the house.  They quickly hid among the stacks of firewood, but he walked in and right up to them and gave them a paddling.  He could hear their breathing, of course.

When he'd ushered them outside and gone back into the house, and when the sobbing subsided, Ron apparently proclaimed, bitterly, "He's not blind!"

By the time I was old enough to have many memories of him, Grandpa Two was pretty far along the sedentary curve and I remember him just sitting in his chair, very weak but happy to see everyone.  He seemed sallow, sort of dark and quiet, but imposing just the same.  But he pretty much just sat in his chair in the semi-dark front room.

I had no comprehension that he and Grandma "two" had raised four daughters and a son.  Their little house was sparse compared to the big house Lill and Lee had raised their kids in and to the house on the farm.

Grandma Two was still quite formidable, a clone of Grandma Lill, only just a bit older from the point of view of a young child.

The day came when Grandpa Two passed away and Lill and Lee got us dressed for the sad trip to Westby to attend his funeral.  I didn't really know what all this meant, but it was adequately explained to me that when people died, they never could come back and that we put them in a fancy box and buried them in the ground.

This seemed quite outrageous to me.  I must have been subdued enough for them to trust me attending the funeral.  I remember that a lot of people attended, including Grandma Lill's sisters.  The funeral was like any church service, but I don't remember misbehaving during this particular one.

When the time came to walk past the open casket, the grown-ups had a little debate about whether I should be included.  They decided that I should and I remember solemnly filing past the casket and peering in, much like I had peered into my cousin's bassinet when they brought him home.

Grandpa Two was lying on his back in there, among satin cloths with his head on a little mini-pillow.  His eyes were closed.  He looked good but he certainly didn't look alive.  It was as though he were made of wax.

It was the first time I had laid eyes upon a dead person.

It was also the first time I got a glimpse of my caretakers and relatives in so much pain and sadness.  We went to the cemetery and, sure enough, they put the box down into the ground, just like they said they would.

After she lost Hans, Grandma Elsie would visit the farm on occasion.  One time she brought me a gift, a little glass sculpture of a dog, which she insisted I would probably break before the week was out.  She was so certain of it, that she made me a little bet, which Grandma Lill would occasionally remind me of in the weeks to come.

The dog ended up in Grandma Lill's china cabinet along with her precious things and I could have it taken out so I could handle it whenever I cared to.  I still have the dog.

Grandma Elsie, or Grandma "two," was diabetic and took insulin.  I didn't understand anything about it, but it was an amazement to me that she would produce this little tiny bottle with an orange rubber plug in it, then pull out this hypodermic needle.  The needle scared me because I dreaded getting inoculations as much as the next little kid.  She would stick the needle right through the rubber stopper and turn the bottle upside-down, pulling back on the handle and filling the syringe.

Then, to my utter amazement, she would hike up her dress and pinch together some fat on her thigh and jab the needle right into it.  Deep!  Then she would depress the handle and the insulin would go into her leg.

Pulling it out and dabbing the spot with a cotton ball, she would proclaim, "There!"  She would then admonish me not to eat too much sugar all the time or I'd get sugar diabetes like she had.  I don't recall her warnings ever to cause me to refuse any cookies, desserts, or candy offered.

Years later, when I was a bit older, I stumbled upon a plastic phonograph record in a box of old letters and pictures that Grandma Lill was sorting through.  It was about the size of a 45-rpm record but it was thinner and had the small hole in the middle instead of the large one.  It did not look like a professional phonograph record.  I asked her what it was.

She said it had belonged to Grandma and Grandpa "two" but that nobody could get it to play.  She had a small phonograph and I put it on.

She was right.  It would not play.  The tone arm of the phonograph just clicked once every time the turntable rotated but it would not grab.  This seemed preposterous to me and I fooled around with it quite a while before realizing that if I rotated the turntable backward, the needle caught in the groove and would track inward.

Baffled, I played around until I realized that I could put the needle near the center of the record and that would be the equivalent of playing it backward.

Voila

The record played, but I had to stop it and turn the speed up to 78 rpm.  When I did this, a man's voice said some things and then, very clearly, "Hello Hans, are you still living yet?"

The record had been made at the state fair, or somewhere like that, who knows when.  No one could say who the voice belonged to.  The little record disappeared somewhere along the years and I have never seen it again.

Farmer Leland

Farmer Leland

While Grandma Lill was getting the house and the gardens under control, Grandpa Lee had several daunting tasks, and I marvel at the memory of how buff he really was in those days.  He got busy right away cutting deals with neighbors to pasture cattle.  There wasn't going to be any dairy farming and I certainly don't blame him.  That game is for people who have three or four strapping sons to help with the myriad chores that go along with it and with the unrelenting and never-ending schedule of tasks it entails.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Grandpa Lee could drum his fingers and drink his coffee while watching about fifteen head of young steers and heifers grazing on the sparse pasture around and above the barn.  They drank from the pond and licked on a block of salt up on the hillside.

Stretching from the house alongside the road to the property line was about a twenty acre field in which corn and soybeans could be alternated.

Across the road was about eighty acres which was cropped.  Some of it was flat, but the large hill was farmed as well, and that required some strip planting.  Grandpa Lee cut deals whereby he would buy the seed, the neighbor would cultivate and harvest the crops and they would have an agreement as to how the profits would be split.

Directly across from the house, there was quite a ditch with three large cottonwood trees growing in it.  There were black walnut trees here and there, and three of them bordered the road in front of the house.  The one nearest the driveway had been cut down and a large stump remained.

Up the road to the east of the ditch, there was a wooden corral which led to a valley which provided probably eighty more acres of hilly pasture.  Lee and a neighbor had probably twenty Holsteins roaming around it,  enjoying the graze.  Where the valley finally reached its southern limit, deep woods surrounded a natural spring which filled a tank for these cattle to drink from. 

I can remember Grandpa Lee fixing fences all the time.  They didn't yet have steel posts, so the existing fences were bolts of wood, usually medium size trees that had been cut and sized to about seven feet in length.  Lee would use a two handled post hole digger to replace missing or rotted posts.  Then he had to roll out barbed wire or pull the old stuff out of the grass and stretch it if it wasn't too rusty to take the strain.

Stretching the barbed wire was a job.  Every ten posts or so, and at all corners, a hefty post had to be put in and braced with diagonal posts going to the ground.  The wire was stapled firmly to one end and stretched using a "come along", a metal ratchet-lever, until it was very tight.  Then he would go along and staple it to each fence post in between.  The large, steel staples were pounded into the posts with a common claw hammer and it was not difficult to miss the staple slightly and hit one's thumb.

Cattle were always leaning and rubbing against posts and fences and trees would fall and take the wire down on occasion.  Cattle are notoriously fond of going to visit the neighbors and would almost immediately find any breach.  Then the phones would start ringing and poor Grandpa Lee had to amass a small army of people to herd them back where they belonged.

But the real killer job that Grandpa Lee had to do all autumn was to cut firewood.  The basement of the house had three big rooms with dirt floors.  The first room, upon entering from the steps that went down from the outside, was to be filled to the max with firewood.  The second room contained the furnace, a big octopus,  that sent most of the heat up the chimney.  Big tubes connected the firebox to a few registers on the first floor.

Heat rises, and this fact is what we relied on to keep from freezing in this huge house.  In the ceilings of the first floor were grates which essentially allowed the heat to keep rising up into the rooms upstairs.  They also served as little snooping posts for a young child, who had been sent to bed for the night, to watch and listen to the adults playing cards and laughing in the room below.

To keep the house warm in the winter, Grandpa Lee spent many days out in the woods cutting wood in the summer and autumn heat.

I can vividly remember Grandma Lill handing me a two quart canning jar filled with cool water and telling me to carry it across the flat, lower fields and give it to Grandpa.  I waddled through the stubble from the hay which had been cut a couple of weeks earlier and up through the higher weeds and sumac plants to the start of the woods below a big rock outcropping which could be seen from the house and for miles down the road.

Grandpa Lee had a small tractor with a hay wagon attached to it on which he had piled firewood.  He was working with a chainsaw, felling fairly large trees, mostly white maples, oaks, and shag bark hickories and then trimming up the larger limbs and cutting them into pieces.

It was blistering hot and he wore a light, but long-sleeved shirt which was soaked in perspiration.  He was happy to see me and shut down the saw.  When I gave him the large jar of water, he tipped it up and drained the entire thing.

He would work for days cutting and loading the hay wagon, bringing it back to the driveway, then throwing the blocks of wood down the concrete steps and into the basement.  Once enough of them had been thrown down to block the passage, he would work his way in there and stack them, slowly filling the room.

The wood smelled sweet and lots of the pieces were still slowly oozing sap.  When fall came and he had to build a fire you could hear the noises of the chunks of wood being thrown into the furnace echoing up through the registers in the house.  I can remember being awakened in the middle of the night to the shaking of the furnace grates and the clunking of more wood being thrown in.

Those sounds, the sounds of the whippoorwills and owls at night, rain on the tin roof at night, and Grandma Lill's radio playing the local news in the morning, are the sounds of comfort, safety, security, and love.  When we were under their roof and in their care, we didn't have a trouble in the world.

Grandma Lill's Gardens

Grandma Lill's Gardens

Grandma Lill had grown up in the country and had lived through the Great Depression.  She knew that to put a lot of food on the table she had to have a big garden.  In this effort, she had a good partner in Grandpa Lee, who saw to it that a large area was tilled up between the house and the old basement foundation.  It was probably an acre in size and Lill planted it with green beans, peas, beets, carrots, parsnips, radishes, turnips, potatoes, squash, and sweet corn.

Most people would consider this to be a large garden, but it was only the opening salvo of Lill and Lee Hanson.  In later years, they abandoned this zone and tilled up about two acres across the road in the corner of a field and planted a half acre plot just short of the pond, in addition to planting potatoes and sweet corn in part of the field west of the house and across the driveway.

I would toddle around in the yard, watching Grandma Lill weed in her garden and in her flower beds in various spots around the exterior of the house.  The large, bald hill across the road had a nice apple orchard on its side and she would gather bushels of them.  She would tirelessly cut them up and boil them down to make apple sauce, which she filled dozens of quart canning jars with.  In addition, she would store baskets of apples in the large basement room, the farthest one in.  It was the coolest and driest.  Ultimately, beets and potatoes would also fill bins down there, spread out on top of newspaper and separated to reduce the spoilage.

Once garden crops started maturing, Lill would begin preparing wonderful meals.  She would be very judicious in purchasing meat, and a few chickens or a ham would provide wonderful initial meals, followed by days of delicious stews and soups.  She quickly identified a neighbor who sold eggs and used these both for bacon-and-egg breakfasts with pancakes or waffles, and in her baking.  She was always either making bread, cakes or pies, and homemade noodles.

She would mix the ingredients for a pie or cake with device that she cranked by hand.  When she was done with that and ready to move on to the baking, she would hand you the mixer and you could push off the sweet batter with your fingers and eat it.

I fondly remember her making homemade noodles, rolling out the dough on a wooden board with a rolling pin and dusting it with flour.  She would then take a knife and slice the large, thin, dough into narrow slices about a half-inch wide.  Then she would fold the noodles back on each other a couple of times and let them dry.

I am sure that none of our family have ever forgotten those delicious noodles in a chicken soup or beef casserole.

Dinners were soon augmented by popcorn bowlfuls of green beans, fresh peas, mashed potatoes, or corn on the cob.  If I or another grandchild turned his nose up to a new vegetable, perhaps beets, Grandma Lill would plop some on the plate and tell us, "put salt and butter on them and they taste just like sweet corn."

She knew we loved sweet corn and she was right.  One of the greatest gifts Grandma Lill gave us little ones was that we loved eating vegetables.

She had hundreds of fruit jars and would can as much as she could for the coming winter.  She would also go on expeditions across the road and beyond the pastures and fields, picking raspberries and gooseberries, gathering hickory nuts and hazelnuts, and pear-apples that grew in the wild.  There were always jars and jars of canned jellies and sauces down in the cellar, waiting patiently beneath their paraffin seals.-

She and Lee would husk the hickory nuts and walnuts until their hands turned brown.  I can remember Lill filling a gunney sack three quarters full of walnuts, still in their semi-mushy husks.  Lee would then drive the car over the bag several times and they would pour the contents out and the nuts would be plucked out of the mush.  Then they would be dried in the sun in the driveway, but quickly transferred into metal milk cans to protect them from the squirrels and mice.  They had to dry all winter in these cans before they could be cracked and the nut meats removed.

A lot of work, but who could ever forget biting into one of Grandma Lill's many varieties of cookies and tasting walnuts!  And, once in a while, a piece of a walnut shell!

The Farm

                                                     The Farm


I was told by my mother that Grandpa Lee moved Grandma Lill and the family all the time.  He always was making a deal.  I don't remember a thing about it, but the day came when he sold the house on Cottage Street.  I have some fragmented memories of a large upstairs apartment, so I am not certain that they went immediately, but the next big venue was the "farm". 

The farm was located south of Sparta on the way toward Norwalk on Highway 71.  About six miles south of town, there was a little community hall on the right.  The road that crossed the highway at that junction was Farmers' Valley Road.  Taking a right on it bent you back toward the city of Sparta.  Turning left took one to the "farm".

Farmers' Valley Road was gravel which was graded after the spring thaw and perhaps one more time during the summer.  The car would raise a rooster-tail of dust unless it had just rained. In that event, the limestone gravel dust became very slippery.  The road was like a roller coaster, rising up and dipping down as it traversed a number of small hills. Because it was graded, the road had a "washboard" surface and if a car traveled at more than twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, it would begin shaking, and it was possible for the driver to lose control and be shaken off the road and into the ditch.

Slightly more than two miles brought one up over a little hill where the road curved as it went over, along about a quarter-mile straightaway to a big white farmhouse on the left with a tin roof.

The house was quite rustic when Lill and Lee moved there.  Lee was all excited for the new adventure but  I am told that Lill cried, missing her beautiful house in town. 

I will describe the house in depth because it became a sanctuary for all of Lill's and Lee's daughters as they recovered from divorces, as well as for their son John after he returned from his stint in the army and was going to college.

As one turned left and into the dirt driveway, it went over a little ditch that went through a small corrugated culvert beneath and petered out as it went west along the road.  What little drain water emanated from the house came only from the sink and the ditch was quite sufficient to soak away this "gray" water. 

The driveway made a right up a little rise to a rather primitive garage, very rough in construction, with support posts made from thin logs which were still round.   The outside was covered with some tar-paper siding that had grey minerals adhered to it.  There were two stalls capable of containing a car but only one was used that way.  The car fit in very snugly and it was always better just to leave it outside if weather permitted.  There was a wooden stairway in back for access to the loft of the garage, which was used for storage.

A long grainery, the newest building on the property, stood opposite the bend in the driveway.  It had about four bins, separated by walls, for holding shelled corn or soybeans, then gave way to a long open section with a large opening for machinery to go in and out.  An old Alice Chalmers tractor was parked in there and a huge old fashioned hay loader stayed in its parking spot spot forevermore, since the time had long passed that hay was loaded up on a wagon loosely.

On the side hill north of the grainery sat a full sized barn.  The uphill side of the barn had the large sliding door so that a wagon could be backed in, but the hay lofts were all empty except for a layer of loose hay on the floor.  Trap doors with ladders and a chute led to the first floor, which was a decrepit dairy parlor.  There were old rusty stanchions and manure troughs.  At each stanchion was a rusty drinking cup with the lever still inside. 

A shallow pond lying east of the barn in the direction of the house was fed by springs in the hill beyond it which was scarred by a small shale pit.  On the other side of the pond and uphill was a small pump house, the size of a modern day bathroom.  There was a cast iron wood stove in there and a square, concrete pedestal with a round cover under which was a cistern which collected water from the same set of small springs which filled the pond.

Water ran down from this cistern to the house below through an inch-and-one-half iron pipe buried only a foot to a foot and a half beneath the topsoil.  There was scraggly grass lawn from the driveway nearly all the way to the pump house.  In retrospect, the dairy parlor in the barn was even or higher than the cistern in the pump house, so in previous years, the dairy parlor must have been fed by a spring above the level of the barn.  The drinking cups for the cattle just wouldn't work any other way, unless water was somehow pumped or hauled to a cistern or tank higher than the dairy parlor.

To the left of this long yard stood two parallel arbors of purple grapes, each about fifty feet long.  Luscious bunches of purple grapes grew by the bushel basket full on these vines.

The house was accessible either through a front door, which led onto a long, narrow cement porch with no rail, a back door which opened to a primitive indoor porch, or a door which opened into the kitchen from a deck on the north side.

There were two outhouses in the yard on the east side and a third small shed for holding garden tools.  The yard was filled with mature walnut and elm trees, a few quite close to the house.  About a hundred yards further east were the remains of an old basement, which was about one third full of bottles, cans, and other refuse.

The deck and the indoor porch both led into opposite sides of the kitchen, which had a bay window looking north toward the pump house, pond, and barn and the hills above them.  The view was beautiful.

From the kitchen, one walked through a doorway into a dining room with nice windows which looked to the south, across the road to a bunch of fields, a ditch, an orchard, and a large bald hill and the high ridges beyond all of these.

To the right, another large entryway opened into a living room with a huge picture window which looked west at the road approaching from the direction of town, bordered by large fields on either side.

The other side of the dining room led to a small bedroom, the only one downstairs, which belonged to Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee.  They had two twin beds in there, a small desk, and a dresser.

A stairway went from a little landing in a corner of the dining room and up the west wall, next to their bedroom.  At the top and to the right was a nice upstairs bedroom above that of Lill and Lee's.

A hallway led to another even larger bedroom which was above the kitchen.  The hallway continued on through a door, turned left through a kink which would later become a tiny bathroom, and into a bedroom which was directly above the living room.

Another doorway led from this bedroom into a space the size of the large living room below.  A door led from this room into an enclosed stairway that went down and opened onto the deck.

This upstairs bedroom and living room became the private quarters of my mother and me.

Lill and Lee had difficulties with the water coming down from the pump house from the very start and I seem to remember Lee and even my uncle John digging the pipes up and trying to clear them or thaw them.  This problem was remedied very early when Lill and Lee had the space between the porch and their bedroom framed in, weatherized, and turned into a more modern bathroom, complete with vanity, toilet, and bathtub.  A well was drilled just outside their bedroom wall and the water heater and pressure tank were placed in the basement.

The outhouses and little garden shed were torn down and the pits filled in.

A toilet, tiny vanity, and stand up shower were crammed into the kink in the upstairs hallway.  A person coming down the hall from the two upstairs bedrooms had to open a door, walk through this bathroom, turn left immediately and walk through another door into my mother's and my bedroom.

A wall was stubbed in to cut the living room in half and a kitchen was installed, complete with a sink.  It was state of the art for 1952!

I think my mother must have found a secretarial job at Camp McCoy because it was with Lee and Lill that I spent my days.  Lill quickly filled the house with all her furniture and antiques and my mother put all of her possessions, which pretty much consisted of our clothes and a bookcase containing her prized volumes.  That was literally all she owned.  Even the bedding probably belonged to Grandma Lill.

I would run around the house getting into mischief all day and when my mother got home she would let me pore through her books while she unwound on the sofa in the little living room.  She had a hardbound copy of Dante's Inferno which was filled with elaborate and dark drawings showing what it was like in hell.  There were people being herded, by demons, single-file down a narrow stair cut into a rock wall to the fiery regions below.  There were skinny, depraved, near-skeletons of sorrowful, starving people reaching for apples that were just out of their reach.  There were drawings of people being tortured by demons with pikes, repeatedly having been poked and stabbed while standing in flames.  There were people standing in water with their ankles chained down and only their chins above the rising water.

I was fascinated by them and they probably traumatized me forever.

Lee would be given these little day-planners that were, in essence, a book about the size of a paperback but not as thick, that amounted to a calendar for the year.  There were lines on which to print appointments and such.  He would give them to me because he had a great big desk blotter that was actually a calendar and he used that.

I took a pencil and padded around the house, scribbling on all of the little lines.  It kept me busy and I'll bet Grandma Lill insured that he got me another when I had filled all the lines with curly scribbles.  I wouldn't stop until it was full.  Otherwise I was tipping over her lamps or knick knacks.  One day I was fooling around with a little table she had placed in front of the living room window.  She had a lamp that was filled with colored water, and it fell off and spilled all over the carpet, which was light green, and had just been put in.

She just sat down on the sofa and cried.

An indelible splotch remained in that carpet, right in front of the picture window that looked down the valley.  She had to put a throw rug over it because the stain would not come out.

This was the situation when my grandparents moved to the farm.  In addition to getting the house updated and livable, Grandma Lill immediately began gardening on a huge scale and Grandpa Lee began farming and pasturing beef cattle in cooperative partnership with a neighbor.

Jean Marie (Hanson) Sullivan

Jean Marie (Hanson) Sullivan

Aunt Jeannie was the next to marry in the Hanson family.  Like her sisters she was a beautiful girl and very popular I am sure.  She was a cheerleader in high school and always vivacious.  She married her sweetheart, Tom Sullivan, when I was about four years old.  I don't remember being at the wedding and it is very unlikely that anyone would have expected me to behave well enough to chance my attendance.

I may have noticed that she wasn't living in the house anymore.  I had my own problems.  Once in a while the time would arrive for me to have the much dreaded "appointment".  The adults would phrase it with special emphasis on the middle syllable.

"Bub has an a-POINT-ment today!"  Followed by chuckling or outright laughter.

An appointment might be anything but it was generally not good.  I would have to get cleaned up and have decent clothes on.  Grandma Lill would inspect my face and if she saw some dirt she would pull out a little handkerchief and spit on it, then rub the dirt off with it.

Then off we would go in the car.  There was a spectrum of misery associated with appointments.  The barbershop was the easiest.  I had to sit still for a few minutes, which was difficult enough, but then the barber would wrap a cloth around my neck and start messing with my hair, snipping here, combing there.  I hated it and would sometimes create quite a disturbance and I'll bet the other customers were quite entertained by it all.

I don't remember it happening but Grandpa Lee had a story he would occasionally tell.  He was walking with me in the tiny downtown when a fellow in a bear costume, for some event in a store, came walking toward us down the street.  I took off running, went down the street until I saw an open doorway and rushed inside, ran across the room and up into a chair.

Then I realized that it was the barber chair and I was in the barber shop.

"I'll be damned!" I supposedly exclaimed, to the barber's delight.

An appointment could also be to the dentist or to the doctor.  These were more miserable, since these guys were interested in prying my mouth open to inspect my teeth or taking down my pants and sticking their finger up my butt.  In addition, there was always the possibility of getting a shot.  These eventualities were enough to warrant a full blown tantrum every single time.

The day came when I had a new kind of appointment.  Lill and Lee talked about it as if preparing me for something really big, so I had a lot of trepidation when the morning arrived that I was going to go visit a place called kindergarten.  I didn't like the idea.  Too many uncertainties.

There is a lot of difference between kindergarten in 1952 and today.  What I was really going to for my appointment was about fifty years ahead of its time, a kindergarten screening, only in reverse.  This was a kindergarten play day and they were only interested in kids that were developmentally behind.  If you looked all right, you didn't go to kindergarten.  They just sent you home and you went to first grade the next year.

Now I don't know how I managed to impress them that I was doing all right, because the story of my entire life has been that I was about five years behind,  maturity-wise.  I can't imagine that I wasn't a little pain in the butt all day. A couple of syrupy women cajoled us to converse with them, scribble on some paper, and to try coloring a picture, all of which I pretty much refused.  I looked at all the other little children skeptically, with sidelong glances, as though we were about to be put in a kibbutz.

We took a nap, and I didn't want to do that, on principle.

I think they probably had their fill of me in one day enough to last all of kindergarten, so they told Lill and Lee and my mom that I should be all right just going to first grade the next year.  They sort of kicked the can down the street and hoped for the best.

So I didn't go to kindergarten.  I frightened them out of the idea. 

I can remember that when I was more of an infant, physically, not just mentally, when Lill and Lee obtained this little play pen.  It was made of sturdy wood with wire mesh sides that were inpenetrable.  There was also a top, which was also of wire mesh and supporting wood, which could be secured to the sides of the actual container with leather straps and metal snaps.

I had realized that this was a cage and I hadn't liked it.  I had noticed how the adults fastened the snaps and as soon as I got bored I started fiddling with them.  Sure enough, if I stuck my finger hard against the metal disc and pried like crazy, sooner or later the snap popped off.  Some of them were much more difficult to release than others, but no matter.  Once two of them were pried open, the top could simply be pushed up and over, using the other snaps as a hinge.

The adults had thought this to be quite amusing at first, hiding around the corner and giggling as I did my work.  But eventually they realized that I could not be contained in the playpen anymore, and were horrified.

I think that they viewed this kindergarten idea as another, more sophisticated, playpen and were somewhat disappointed it hadn't worked out.  They were stuck for another year with this tantruming little monster.

While I was around the house, rather than being in kindergarten like they had hoped, a momentous day arrived.  Aunt Jeannie and Uncle Tom had had a baby and were bringing it over.  The front door opened and people lugged in this apparatus that was like a coffee table with a basket attached to the top.

After all the commotion subsided, my turn came and the adults held the apparatus steady while I placed both hands on it, raised up on my tiptoes and peered inside.  Among some blankets, sure enough, was a gurgling little baby with a cloth cap on its head, a totally foreign concept for me.

I had a little cousin and his name, I was told, was Danny.  Unbeknownst to me, I already had a cousin because my dad's sister had had a baby even before I was born.  I am not even certain whether the oldest of my dad's brother's kids was perhaps born before I was, or at least before Danny was.

Danny was born in early April and I didn't realize it at the time, but this little intruder was now going to get his birthday party before mine forever more.  I had been born in May.

Aunt Jeannie would come in and out of my life many times with the result that Danny and I would be very close, almost like brothers at times, and like demons in need of exorcism at others.  Her marriage to Tom Sullivan mirrored my mother's marriage to my dad, dissolving after about a year, but as in my own case, Lill's and Lee's devotion and love did a lot to carry the day for our mothers and for us as well.

Just as I had a supportive and loving other set of grandparents in the Lathrops, so did Danny in the Sullivan family although the Sullivans were rather politically important in Sparta and Aunt Jeannie was a bit paranoid about them after the marriage ended.  Tom's brother Dave was the owner of a prominent tavern in town.  He was a really nice fellow.  When we were a bit older, Danny and I would wander around town and invariably go in to Sullivan's Tavern, if it was the middle of the day and less than a handful of customers were within.  Dave would be delighted and we got strawberry pop or root beer.

Nevertheless, the Sullivans knew judges and police chiefs and were themselves, at various times, county supervisors and board chairmen, so Jeannie was a bit afraid of their power.  I really believe this was unfounded and a mere result of her desperate love of her child and fear of anything that could pose a threat, unimagined or not, to her fitness as a mother. 

Unnecessary fears, I think.  Aunt Jeannie was one of the most loving and sweet mothers ever.