In 1953, just as we were getting used to Wichita, Daddy finished his night school to learn plumbing and heating – and decided he didn’t like his boss at Boeing – so we moved again. This time, we headed to Green City, a tiny town in northern Missouri, near my paternal grandparents – the Piggs. There were lots of Piggs in Missouri in more ways than one. So when I started first grade the next fall, at age five, nobody made fun of me.
I loved my first-grade teacher, Miss Fetters, and had a crush on her nephew, Dennis, who also was in my class. At first, I missed Cindy terribly, but was so excited about learning to read, I was content. Also, Mother and Cindy walked me to school each morning – we only lived two houses from the schoolhouse – and fetched me for lunch, then met me again after school. The big bonus was, I got to read books to Cindy.
We found a box of children’s books in the old corncrib behind our house (yes, it was in town) and soon became avid readers. Well, I read. Cindy listened.
Previously, Mother and Daddy and Andrea had lived in Missouri after the war, before we little girls were born. They had lived in the Flea House, the Mouse House and the Bedbug House. You figure it out. We called this place the Crooked House.The house was so slanted, when Mother set food on the kitchen table for dinner, she had to set it on damp dishtowels, so the bowls wouldn’t slide from one end to the other.
Friday nights were special. It was Daddy’s night to go to the local saloon with his farmer friends. And it was our night to play! Mother’ s fascination with films had never relented. We saw every movie that came through town. Cindy and I loved “The Gypsy Colt” and “the Littlest Outlaw,” both movies about horses. But Andrea’s obsession with horses made her the biggest fan of all. Mother especially loved the singing and dancing movies and for weeks afterward, she’d grab one of us girls and dance us around the kitchen, singing at the top of her voice. We joined in, of course. We knew all the words to all the songs.
One of our favorite things to do was to visit Wilson’s Café. Willie and Jane Wilson were the nicest people you would ever meet. Mother would give Cindy and me a nickel each to go get an ice cream cone. It was near our house, so we would walk, hand in hand, into the café and scoot up to the bar stools by the counter. Willie would see us coming and quickly dip out one vanilla cone for Cindy and one chocolate for me. He would never take our nickels. For years after we moved, I wrote to them every year at Christmas, regaling them with stories of my fascinating life. Willie always wrote back. One year, when I was in college, no letter came. They had both passed away. But I still cherish the memory of them.
We spent a lot of time on the farm not far from town with our grandparents. We especially loved being near our Grandad Pigg. He always had a big smile and a hearty laugh and he genuinely liked us. would play the harmonica – “Little Brown Jug” was his specialty – and Cindy and I would dance what we thought an Irish jig might look like. We hopped around a lot, anyway. He’d laugh and play some more. He also let us ride on his gentle old bay mare, Lady.
Andrea loved Lady with a passion that never died – later in life, she raised Arabian horses. Sometimes, Grandad would put Cindy and me on Lady’s back and Andrea would lead her around. She only led us under the clothesline once. It was a long fall and my neck was scraped raw from the lines (I was up front). As I lay there looking up at a giant horse hoof dangling above my face, Andrea pulled me out so Lady could put her foot down. She was a good old horse.
Their little farmhouse was not far from the barn and every night the cows plodded past the back door on their way from the pasture to the barn to be milked. As a result, they left a clear trail of cowpies leading from the back door to the barn door. Most of them were dried up and made great steppingstones for two little girls looking for something to do.
“Let’s go cowpie hoppin’” one of us would say and we’d be off and jumping from one to the next (sort of a rural version of hopscotch, without the chalk). However, once in a while a fresh one LOOKED like a dried one and we’d land … squish! Good thing we were barefoot. Grossed out, we’d run through grass, hollering for Mother. She’d come out and have us put our feet under the pump (no indoor plumbing) and she’d wash them off with a few mighty splashes. Then we’d go back to hoppin’ again. Seems we were slow learners!
We seemed to be accident-prone, especially Cindy. One Friday night, when Daddy was uptown – two blocks away – Cindy took it in her head to pretend to walk down the arm of a big, overstuffed chair arms stretched wide for balance. (She had this fantasy that she wanted to be a tightrope walker in the circus.)
Mother, looking over her shoulder while doing the dishes, called out, “Cindy, if you don’t look out, you’re going to fall off and break your arm!” Which she promptly did. Andrea ran to the saloon to get Daddy and we all went to the doctor. We did that a lot with Cindy.
We had just settled in, and were liking our new lives, when Daddy decided we couldn’t make a living there. Mother’s parents – Grandad and Grandmother Mares – said he could get a job using his plumber’s license in Minnesota. So we packed up once again and moved north. This time, though we were in for the long haul. (See Chapter 1: The Elsenpeter Place.)
Cindy and I both got car sick and threw up all over Iowa. If we’d known what awaited us, we might have saved it for Minnesota.
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