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Hung-Up on Hangers

Jun3

Stepping back, I scanned the closet with satisfaction. I’d drastically reduced the contents which had been hidden for so many years behind its two 1970-style folding doors. There were two piles of closet contents on the bedroom floor behind me. One pile would be gathered up and placed in the garbage. The other pile would go to Saint Vincent de Paul as a donation. All that I had left in the closet was sorted and neatly stored in boxes.

When they were little, my two daughters shared the bedroom with this closet. I smiled, remembering one summer in their childhood. I would tuck them into bed each night and they never failed to request that I shut the closet doors. When I asked them why having the closet doors ajar bothered them, they explained that a giant frog holding a huge trident was in that closet at night. They didn’t sound scared but were insistent that the doors be closed.

Before shutting the doors on the newly cleaned closet, I gave it one last satisfied glance. Something I hadn’t noticed before suddenly came into focus: high in the closet, all shoved to one end, hanging on a mounted water pipe was a huge collection of wire clothes hangers. I’d stopped hanging clothing in this closet years ago but kept the wire hangers.

There were two different types of hangers. One third of them had spring-loaded clips on each end, which was ideal for hanging skirts or pants. They were good, sturdy old-fashioned hangers made to last. The rest of the clothes hangers were all made of heavy gauge wire. No matter how heavy a coat is, the weight wouldn’t make the wire bend.  I couldn’t bear to throw any of them out. You can’t buy new ones of this quality anymore!

Later that day, I started to think about my obsessive determination to keep the old-fashioned clothes hangers. On a recent visit to a store, I’d seen sturdy plastic clothes hangers in various colors. It made me wonder if people color-code their wardrobes or match the hanger colors to their bedroom walls. Clothes hangers certainly aren’t hard to replace.

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Woolworth Treasures

May27

I stared, mesmerized by the small turtles climbing around in the display box. I wanted to touch the darling, small creatures. I reached out my hands but didn’t touch them because they didn’t belong to me. A sign by the box said the turtles cost 15 cents each. That wasn’t very much. I knew I had that and more in my piggy bank at home.

When we had entered Woolworth’s store a little while earlier, Mom stopped to look at the clothing and houseware displays. Impatiently, I scooted ahead to pass all that, plus the hardware section to get to the back of the store where they kept fish tanks and parakeets. I never wanted a fish or a bird but enjoyed looking at them. This store was so much more interesting than the dreadful fabric stores Mom spent most of her time at when we shopped in Marshfield.

My family lived on a farm twelve miles from Marshfield, and we very infrequently came to this town, since the small town three miles from our farm could supply most of our needs. About the time I was about to search for Mom to insist she come look at the turtles, Mom finally showed up. I immediately began begging, “I want a turtle! They’re only 15 cents! Aren’t they the cutest little things? Can I have one? Please?”

Mom watched the small, shell-clad reptiles climb over each other, as well as the damp sand and rocks for a minute before admitting they were cute, but emphatically stated, “No! We will not buy one! I’ve heard that people can get sick with salmonella from handling turtles.”

My heart was broken. The only thing that would have made me feel better would have been to sit and eat at Woolworth’s lunch counter. The smell of fried hamburgers and onions filled the store and called me to sit on one of the stools at the long counter which ran nearly the whole length of the store from the front to the back. The thought of eating somewhere other than at home seemed exciting. Mom quashed that idea even faster than my turtle idea. “No, we have food at home.”

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Applying Myself

May20

Recess was over. Instead of quietly filing back to their assigned desks, a handful of students got into a scuffle in the closet at the back of the room where we hung our coats and left our wet boots. Sister Florance called out the names of the usual classroom trouble-starters and the noise level dropped. The second time she called out the names, everyone returned to their desks.

Our teacher, a nun I considered elderly because she had a very wrinkly face, stood at the front of the classroom studying all 50 of her students, row by row before saying, “I’ve decided that we are going to do an art project for the rest of the afternoon. You need a rest from all the end of the semester tests you’ve been taking this past week.”

I sighed gratefully. I knew I had done well on some of the tests but felt ashamed of how poorly I had done on others. The tests that I hated the most were the story math problems. For example, instructions on how to figure the measurements of a room just by being told the room size were impossible to understand.

Forgetting all that, I threw myself into following Sister’s directions. She demonstrated each step. This was my favorite way of receiving instructions. As usual, a few of the students in the class jumped up from their desks to wander around the room like untrained feral children. Sister repeatedly reminded them to sit back down. They continued getting up to sharpen their pencils and poke their friends. Some of the students were doing the art, but not according to the directions.

That year when parents visited their children’s classrooms and talked to their teachers, my mother was told that, “Kathy has what it takes to get good grades in all subjects…if only she would just learn to apply herself.”

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Up-Close and Personal

May6

School had let out just a few days ago at the end of May. My newly minted summer vacation still felt cool and relaxed around the edges. While foraging in the kitchen for a midday snack, I heard the WDLB radio announcer report that a criminal had escaped from a Wisconsin prison. Mom looked up from the mixing bowl she was stirring and seeing my worried expression said, “That prison is a long way from here.” I shrugged and relaxed.

Continuing with his news report, the radio announcer explained that the criminal had family living in Northern Wisconsin and someone who looked like the criminal had been seen walking on a local road last night. When a car approached, the man disappeared into a nearby woods.

I liked listening to the radio that Mom kept on the kitchen counter and playing from sun-up to sun-down every day. The radio station played many different types of music and reported local and national news. It also had story programs for children, and soap operas like Helen Trent.  One of the things I liked about the radio station was it was located nearby, on the outskirts of Marshfield, and the announcers were men and women who lived in the area.

Usually, the news reported by WDLB wasn’t as scary as it was that morning. Even Mom’s nerves were jangled by the news. She didn’t want anyone to go for bike rides or walk far back to the woods. She didn’t have to tell me to stick close to home. I feared that the bad man would show up at our farm.

The next few days were hot, and the hay fields grew tall. Daddy cut his first crop of hay. He didn’t worry about the criminal because his focus was on getting the hay dry enough to safely put it in the barn before the next rain. Relief came to everyone in the family a few days later. Rain held off until the cut hay was tucked away in the barn, and the WDLB announcer reported that the escaped criminal had been captured.

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Spring Came Anyway

Apr8

The snow had melted, but the early April days remained overcast and dreary. In my brightly lit second-grade classroom Sister Michaeleen worked hard to prepare her large class of children to make their first confession and receive First Communion. There were prayers to remember, devout actions to memorize for a lifetime and a schedule to complete our preparations.

            For the Sunday on which we attended our First Communion, many of my classmates would wear an all-white dress and veil an older sibling had worn a year or two before for their own First Communion. A few classmates were getting a new white dress and veil. Every girl in class was atwitter with excitement. The boys just shrugged when they were told to attend First Communion Mass wearing dark pants, a white shirt and tie. Their mothers would take care of those details.

            “Now girls,” Sister Michaeleen reminded, “Be sure to wear your whitest stockings with your Communion dresses.” I looked down at the baggy, wrinkled tan stocking on my legs, and then across the aisle at Violet, a pretty girl who lived in town. She always wore white stockings.

            I hated how the tan stockings looked. It seemed to me that only girls who lived on farms wore tan ones. Tan or white, these stockings were held up with garter clips just above the knees. I had once told my mother that Sister Michaeleen wanted all the girls in class to wear white stockings every day. There was no fooling Mom with my ‘white’ lie. I was her seventh child.

            When recess bell rang, Sister sent us out into the parking lot playground next to the school with the instruction, “Practice your prayers!” My classmates and I paired off in groups and walked back and forth on the dirty blacktop under a glowering gray sky. Arm in arm we practiced saying our First Confession prayers, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” Our First Communion would be soon, but I was a little hazy about when exactly.

That afternoon it started to snow shortly before Daddy picked us up from school. Snow and a sharp blast of wind entered the car before I could slam the door shut. Mom had come into town with him to buy a few groceries. She pulled her coat up closer to her neck saying with a shudder, “The forecast says this storm is going to be a blizzard.”

From my snug spot between Mom and Daddy in the front seat of the car, I asked, “But it’s April, aren’t we going to have spring? Sister said, ’April showers bring May flowers’!”

Heavy snow and wind made it hard to see the barn from the house by evening when  the milking chores needed to be done. In the morning, Daddy didn’t drive us kids into school because it had been called off due to the inclement weather. I overheard Mom and Daddy talking about not being able to go into town for something the following day.

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Goats Go To Hell

Mar25
Kathy holding one of the baby goats.

The bright sun blinded me when I stepped out the back door of the farmhouse to go to the goat pen. My big brother who was keeping me company said, “Spring is here to stay. From now on it’ll get warmer, and then it will be summer.” I could hardly remember what a warm summer day felt like. I was so young that I was not allowed to wander around outside without an older sibling with me. Recently, the weather had been either cold and rainy, or mild and windy. The piles of winter snow in our yard had melted away. Our driveway looked brown, with gooey, muddy ruts.

As my brother led me toward the orchard, I noticed that the brown lawn behind our house was turning green and dotted with small yellow flowers. I wanted to go see the goats because Daddy told me that two of our nanny goats had babies last week when it was so cold that it rained slush.

The goat pen surrounded several of the apple trees in the orchard. As we approached, I could hear the deeper bleating of the big goats and the tiny, high-pitched calls of the kids. The babies were clambering around their mothers, stopping occasionally to suckle for a few moments. My brother opened the gate to let me in. I immediately scooped one of the inquisitive kids into my arms. It didn’t struggle as I hugged and kissed it.

Daddy kept goats on our farm for many years while I was growing up. When he wanted to breed the nannies, he hooked a small trailer to the car, and we visited a man who lived beyond the bridge which crossed the Big Eau Pleine River. I loved riding along with him to this interesting, magical place. The farmyard was near a cliff overlooking the river and was surrounded by lush trees and bushes. After loading the man’s billy goat in the trailer, Daddy and the man talked while I sat in our car. From under shady trees, behind banks of flowering bushes, I heard the spooky calls of peacocks and other exotic birds that the farmer raised.

The white billy goat we borrowed from the man smelled terrible. When he was at our place, Mom was reluctant to hang our laundry on the clothesline near the orchard, for fear that our clothing would take on the billy goat smell. My brother told me the male goat peed on his beard. I believed him because the animal’s beard was a dirty yellow.

I loved the goats because they were so affectionate when I played with them. Their strange, slit-shaped pupils made them look intelligent. These beautiful animals were curious and loved to climb and nibble on everything. Daddy provided a wooden ladder and stacked wooden boxes for them to jump on. The borrowed billy goat was so feisty that when Daddy went in the pen to milk the nanny goats, he would rear up onto his hind legs in a threatening way.

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The Call of a Dead Chicken

Mar4
SQUAWK!

Snow no longer thrilled me, especially the kind we had now that it was March. No longer soft and fluffy, snow from December and January lay in hateful patches of slick spots in the driveway where it had been packed down by car and tractor tires. On the back lawn old snow lay in dirt-stained, sodden drifts of grainy ice-pellets. The melting weather last week had reduced a snowman I’d made earlier in the winter near the backdoor of the farmhouse, to something that resembled a tree-stump made of ice.

I loved Saturdays because I didn’t have to go to school, but this morning I had a case of the late-winter blahs. We hadn’t had fresh snow for a couple weeks. Snow we had earlier in the winter was half-melted away. When I went out to play in the yard, not only did I get cold, but I got muddy, which I hated! The sticky mud was horrible. I stared mournfully out of my bedroom window at the farmyard below.

My apathy disappeared instantly as I noticed ice-ferns had grown in the corners of the windowpanes during the night. I reached out to touch the tip of one feathery fern. My warm fingertip melted a small round spot. I admired the beautiful, frosty designs. Then I realized that if we had a cold night, the mud in the farmyard would be frozen. I decided to bundle up and go outside.

Walking across the frozen mud-rutted yard made me wobble and almost fall the way I did when I tried to walk over a rockpile. My first stop was the barn. Daddy would be doing his morning chores. I loved to follow him as he worked. He was using a hay fork to put hay from the mow in front of the cows. The cows were conversationally mooing, snorting and flipping small tufts of hay with sassy tosses of their heads. The barn felt comfortable, but I knew there was no furnace. My brothers told me that all the warm animals in the barn made the air warm.

When Daddy left the barn to feed and water the chickens, I followed him. The chickens were funny to watch, but they didn’t fascinate me like the cows did. It was also my opinion that chicken manure smelled worse than cow manure. Sometimes the birds picked on each other. That morning Daddy found a dead chicken. He wasn’t sure why it had died.

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Snuggling Madison

Feb25

Awake, but reluctant to leave my warm, cozy bed, I rolled over and hugged my teddy bear. Betty and Mary, two of my big sisters who shared the bedroom were up and getting dressed for the day. I stared up at a window-shaped patch of sunlight on the wall above my bed. The wall had been painted a pretty color, but the bright sun and the dancing shade of a tree branch made it look even prettier. I smiled at my bear’s funny little face and kissed it.  I heard my sisters walking down the stairs and Mom asking, “Didn’t Kathy get up, too?”

I wasn’t stubborn. I just didn’t want to get up because I was comfortable. Last night when it was bedtime, I fought going to bed as usual. It was hard for me to say why I didn’t like bedtime, other than I disliked not being awake.

 “I’m not stubborn about bath-time, either,” I assured my teddy bear. Mom always had a hard time getting me to take a bath. But once she got me to sit in the warm soapy water, I loved it and never wanted to get out. I hated how cold my freshly bathed, damp body felt after a bath. That sort of cold was dreadful.

A surge of love made me hug the teddy bear and say, “I love you, Madison!”

One year ago, one of my big sisters on the verge of leaving for college became very sick. I was frightened and didn’t understand what was happening, or if she would ever get well again. I heard the grown-ups whispering things like, “brain bleed” and “…needs to go to the big University hospital in Madison.”

Weeks later, Mom announced that a miracle had happened. She prayed for my sister to be healed, and my sister ended up not needing surgery. She could now go home, but the University Hospital was far away from our farm, and Daddy was busy. My sister’s boyfriend said he’d take my mom and me to Madison to bring my sister home.

I liked my sister’s boyfriend because he was always funny and when I was around, he would pay attention to me. Despite the excitement of traveling and having Jim joking around with me, the trip to the University Hospital in Madison felt like it took forever. The hospital was so huge that while we waited for my sister’s paperwork to be done, we visited the hospital gift shop. Not only was I surprised that there was a store inside the hospital, but I discovered that it was better than my favorite stores in Marshfield: Woolworth’s and Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime.

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‘Hip A Hoola’

Feb4

I arrived at the nursing home while my mother was working with a physical therapist. Her nurse for the day encouraged me to go to the physical therapy gym to watch Mom doing her exercises.

Mom looked tired and a little red in her face, but she was using a walker correctly with the help of a staff member. In need of a perm, Mom’s white hair, straight and a little shaggy, covered her forehead. Looking up at me, she tried to joke as she had in the past when something hurt. She said with a dramatic sigh, “Oh! My aching pinfeathers!”

I laughed, despite knowing that she was having pain caused by arthritis. My family had a cartoon inspired vocabulary that we often used even when something bothering us wasn’t a laughing matter.

Comic books drawn and written by Carl Barks were a part of my family as I grew up. Daddy bought them each week for ten or fifteen cents apiece while in town to have oats ground for cow feed. Each member of the family read all the comic books many times, enjoying the funny pictures and storylines. Barks introduced his miserly character, Scrooge McDuck in 1947. Scrooge frequently suffered from ‘aching pinfeathers’. This mysterious ailment troubled him whenever his three-acre money bin was about to be broken into by the wicked Beagle Boys.

Another comic book word that entered my family’s vocabulary was ‘pixilated’. It came from Carl Bark’s story about a pixilated parrot who memorized Scrooge’s vault combination before flying off. The vault held “ninety tons of money”. Afraid the combination would fall into the wrong hands, Scrooge and his nephew Donald, and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie chase after the parrot. In love with another parrot, the troublesome bird manages to get the Ducks shanghaied and they end up in ancient Persia where they discover a lost city.

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New Baby Smell

Dec24

The baby lay on her tummy, with her head turned to the left. The fuzzy, pink bonnet on her head matched the pink, fuzzy, full-skirted dress she wore. Her sweet, small lips reminded me of a pretty rosebud. Peacefully asleep, her closed eyes displayed dark eyelashes resting upon her cheeks. I happily pulled her out of the wrapping paper to wrap my arms around her.

Mom allowed me to open my Christmas presents after we arrived home from attending midnight Mass. Daddy had gone to bed so he could sleep a few hours before having to get up to milk our cows.

A zipper all along the hem of the baby doll’s fuzzy, pink skirt opened to allow me to store my pajamas when I wasn’t wearing them. Mom said, “She’ll look so pretty in your bedroom on the bed.” The baby wasn’t really a doll. She was something pretty that a grownup girl could use and enjoy.

I fully understood that this was my last baby doll of my childhood. I was growing up, allowed to stay up for midnight Mass and even sing on the choir. Pressing the sleeping baby’s face against mine, I drew a deep breath. The wonderful smell of plastic that her head and hands were made of made me mentally revisit every new baby doll I’d ever received in past Christmases.

When I went to bed, I took my pajama bag doll with me. Curling up under the covers in my chilly bedroom, I cuddled and sniffed the perfume of the sweet baby. I was fine with no longer receiving dollies for Christmas, but there was something very nostalgic about the smell of this one. I laid there, awake and lingering at the outer edges of my childhood and sleep until the gray light of Christmas day’s winter dawn peeked into the windows.

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