Author: Linda DuVal

Mother was never happier than when she was “fooling” Daddy. She loved to pack something crazy in his lunch box, especially on April Fools day. And, of course, Daddy was never happier then when he could pretend the joke, whatever it was, didn’t work.

One of the longest-running tricks she played on him was her secret charge accounts.

It started small. 

She took us school shopping and he had, as usual, not given her nearly enough money. So she charged some things at Sears – after all, blouses had gone up to $1.99 — a far cry from what we used to pay at Atlantic Mills. It was super easy to get that Sears credit card. Fill out some paperwork and walk away with free clothes!

Now you have to understand that Daddy was 100% against using credit, for anything, at any time. So the daily delivery of mail, with that impending bill from Sears, became a thing.

She admonished us to be sure to get the mail every day before Daddy came home so he wouldn’t see the bill. This wasn’t a one time event, by the way. Once she learned she could buy things and then just chip away at paying it off, she became quite good at it. She’d secretly send small cash payments through the mail.  

One sunny summer day, we were all playing out in the yard and forgot to get the mail. Mother burst out of the back door.

“Daddy’s coming! Get the mail!” she hollered, and we dropped our hula hoops and started racing down the driveway to beat him to the mailbox.

We lost.

He pulled over, got the mail and came to the house, came into the kitchen and dropped it on the table while he went to wash up.

Mother kept eyeing the stack of mail, hoping the Sears bill wasn’t there.

It was. 

He started opening the mail and stopped.
 “What the hell?” he said, a little loudly. 
“What’s this?” He held out the Sears bill.

Mother stammered and told him she ran out of school clothes money and had to charge a few things. “But it’s OK,” she assured him, lying straight-faced. “I got a job and I’ll pay for it right away.”

The next day she went over to the Wonder Alls Factory and did just that. Wonder Alls was a children’s play-clothesline and the factory in nearby Buffalo was always hiring. It was miserable work and paid poorly.

Did I mention she hated sewing?

And the first day on the job, one of her co-workers ran a big industrial-sized sewing needle right through her thumb. She had to go to the emergency room. Mother was terrified of the machine. 

I don’t think she was too good at her job. Employees got to buy their mistakes at a deep discount. So lets just say that summer, we wore several outfits with crooked appliques on them. We didn’t care. They were new!

Mother quit that job as soon as she paid the bill.

And believe me we were sure to get the mail after that.(No, she didn’t stop charging, she just got better at getting the mail.)

And then there was The Fake Fur. A story for another day. And many other things over the years. 

But her biggest charge came some years later, after our older sister, Andrea, was married.

She and her husband, Ron, had bought a parcel of land on Highway 55 on the otherside of Maple Lake. Like many young couples in Minnesota those days, they built a basement house and lived in it until they could afford to build the upper part. It was a common practice. They didn’t have much except a new baby and lots of bills. Mother wanted to get Andrea a nice rocking chair for her and the baby, so she bought (I should say charged!) one and arranged to have it delivered right before Christmas. Unfortunately, the delivery guy showed up on a day when Andrea had gone into Minneapolis to do her own Christmas shopping and was planning to spend the night at her in-laws.

The delivery guy, being conscientious, saw a storm coming in and didn’t feel right about leaving the rocking chair just sitting on the exposed back porch, so he drove into town and asked Len Driscoll at the garage if he knew anyone else to contact. Len knew I was working at The Record Shop (Another story) and sent him to me. I told him I’d take care of it.

Unfortunately, Mother was also in the city, shopping, so I hatched a plan. Cindy and her boyfriend, Mike.

Also unfortunately, Cindy came home from school sick. A high temp and sore throat. I told her what our dilemma was, and my plan, so she pretended to feel fine and we told Daddy that Mike was taking us to the basketball game that night. He said fine and we took off. 

The storm was rolling in, so Mike and I carried Andrea’s oversized and vary heavy rocking chair, wrapped in slippery plastic, across their icy, slanted back yard, slipping and sliding all the way to the shed. But we got it in and then headed home. Daddy was surprised to see us but we told him that Cindy was getting sick (she was always getting sick) so he didn’t seem suspicious.

When Mother got home later form Minneapolis, I tackled her, dragged her into her bedroom and told her what happened. She was grateful at our cleverness!

Now, the reason Mother bought Andrea the chair was because Daddy had pissed her off. A few weeks earlier, she had said to him: “Andrea’s refrigerator is on its last legs. She had to hold the door shut with a broom handle. How about you give her the model you have for sale up a the shop. Nobody’s going to buy that thing.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “That’s a perfectly good refrigerator. Someone will buy it. I’m not giving it away.”

Thus, the rocking chair.

But about two days before Christmas, one morning at breakfast, Daddy said “I guess I could give Andrea and Ron that refrigerator. It won’t get full price anyway.” (Daddy wasn’t a long range planner.)

Mother nearly dropped her teeth in shock. Because she hadn’t wanted Daddy to get suspicious so she had bought Andrea a new lamp.

So that Christmas, Andrea and Ron got a new lamp. A new rocking chair. And a new refrigerator. Andrea still says it was her best Christmas’ ever!

EPILOGUE by CINDY:  Many years later I was living in northern Idaho with my husband and a small baby. Mother had to have surgery so I went home to help out, and mainly be there for her when she got out of the hospital. After her surgery, they let me go in and sit with her in the recovery room. As she slowly came out of the anesthetics she opened her eyes, motioned to me to come over, and whispered in my ear: “Did you get the mail?” THAT was my Mother in a nut shell.

I should add that around that same time, while Mother was in the hospital, Daddy noted my heading to the mailbox every day and said “You know that I know that your Mother has credit cards, right? And I said, “I don’t think she knows you know!” And he said “Yah, I just like to watch her run to the mailbox every day.” THAT was my Daddy in a nutshell.

People look at me oddly when I say, quite nonchalantly, “Oh, I grew up with a ghost.”

But it’s true.

Not long after we moved into The Place, it became evident. We had been told the stories about the original and longtime owner, Charlie Sykora. We were told that after his kids grew up and moved away and his wife died, he became so depressed that one day he went out to the large oak tree at the edge of the woods behind the stable and hanged himself. True or not, the story came to mind when strange things began to happen.


Mother had turned the little back bedroom off the dining room into a sewing room. She hated sewing, as I might have mentioned, but it was a necessity if we were to have school uniforms and she an occasional new dress or apron. And that woman could go through aprons! So one day she was back there sewing when Daddy came home for lunch, as usual, so she put down her fabric and laid her pinking shears on top. After she made his lunch and he went back to work, she returned to her sewing. No pinking shears. Well. Nobody else was in the house but Dale, who was just a toddler. She searched the entire room and then the kitchen for the shears. Nothing. 

On Sunday, when we set the table for Sunday dinner (always in the dining room with the good dishes and silverware she had inherited), we opened the drawer in the china cabinet …and there were the pinking shears. Strange.

Mother laughed. “I was nowhere near that cabinet. It must have been Charlie,” she joked. And so it began. Whenever anything strange happened, we chalked it up to Charlie. (He also was a convenient scapegoat for a few things we kids did.)

Sometimes, at night, Mother would hear the stairs creaking. Thinking it was one of us coming downstairs for some reason, she’d get up to see what we needed. But nobody was there. OK. It was an old house, so . . .
Andrea complained that Cindy and I wanted the hall light on between our bedrooms. It kept her awake. So she’d shut her door tight and go to bed. A few minutes after she got into bed, the door would open just a few inches. Exasperated, she’d get up and close it again. This time it always stayed shut. We teased her that Charlie was spending the night in her room, because it probably had been his, with the big closet and all. She didn’t think that was funny.

And there was the time that the whole family went into town for some event (not a Catholic thing or Daddy wouldn’t have come!) We left during daylight hours, and came home after dark. When we got to our driveway, we could see that every light in the house was on. Every light. And, of course, none of us had left a single light on much less all of them. Could it be Charlie?

But the most concrete proof we had of the presence of a ghost came one chilly winter afternoon when Dale, was still a toddler. The sewing room also had a twin bed in it, which Mother used occasionally when she said Daddy’s snoring got too loud. It was the warmest room in the house in the winter because the morning sun shone brightly into its large window. Rather than take Dale upstairs for his afternoon nap, she’d place him on the twin bed to keep an eye on him.

But one such afternoon, she walked into the sewing room and it was freezing! She checked to see if a window was not shut tight, and it was. There was no explanation for it being so cold. So she carried Dale upstairs to nap in his own room.  She came back downstairs, went into the kitchen and BOOM!

The thick plaster ceiling in the sewing room had given away and dropped its deadly weight right onto the twin bed where  Dale would have been sleeping. The heavy plaster could have killed a small child.
We truly believed Charlie had made the room cold so she wouldn’t leave him there and that he saved Dale’s life. We forgave him all his pranks from then on. 

After a few years, everything stopped. It was at about the same time Daddy paid Grandad the last payment on The Place and it was now truly ours. We believed Charlie was at peace, knowing a family was going to stay here and love his home.

Epilogue: Years later, when our aging parents sold The Place and moved to a lake home, a couple from Minneapolis bought it. Their names were Paul and Polly and they loved The Place almost as much as Mother had, taking good care of it. Not too long after they moved there, Polly was diagnosed with a fatal form of cancer and was dying.
Mother had told Polly the Charlie stories and Polly said she’d always wanted to see a ghost, but Charlie didn’t come to her.

Well, not exactly.

The couple were lying in bed one winter night when Polly was close to the end. Paul said the room suddenly got very cold and the thought maybe the furnace had gone out. He was just getting ready to get up and check, careful not to wake Polly. who was sleeping soundly from the pain medication. Then Paul had an unsettling experience.
He’d laughed at the Charlie stories and wasn’t a believer.  But there, on the far side of the room, he later told Mother, a sort of mist rose up out of the floor. It was shaped like a man and it moved to the foot of the bed. He said it seemed to look at Polly, and he suddenly felt a profound sense of sadness, but when Paul made a movement, it vanished. He was truly shaken.

Paul became a believer. After Polly died, he sold The Place and moved away. But I’m pretty sure he took the Charlie story with him.


After two winters on the Elseneter Place, including a near-death experience for the entire family when Daddy incorrectly vented a gas heater upstairs where we slept, (and hadn’t he gone to plumbing and heating school?) Grandad Mares got fed up with our living situation. He generously bought an old farm, about two miles out of Maple Lake, to provide us a safer living situation.

It was a rundown, 30-acre farm that everyone called the Sykora Farm. Grandad told Daddy he could pay him back as he was able to.

The farm was located on County Road 37 (paved! Unlike the dirt road we lived on at the Elsenpeter Place) and had a long dirt driveway that slightly curved up and around the back of the dirty, white two-story farmhouse with rotting shingles.  There was an old barn, leaning precariously to one side, which was literally falling down. An abandoned granary stood behind the house on the other side of the driveway and at the end of the path was a garage that stood about 25 feet from the back door. Convenient. There was also an old corn crib and a stable on the edge of the woods, which lay beyond.

We were told not to play in the ruins of the barn because it was dangerous, and for once we obeyed! It swayed and creaked in the wind and that was enough for us to actually mind for a change.  
Grandad and Daddy tore it down and built a garage there, somewhat more convenient, even though still far from the back door.  Gravel was put on the driveway, which now ended at the back door of the house. We only used the garage in dead winter.

Butting up against the highway, either side of the driveway was flanked by two alfalfa fields which gave way to huge front and side yards. The front yard was home to giant oak, maple and elm trees and a huge lilac grove that looked like a good place to hide from Andrea or visiting cousins we didn’t like.

The granary was a tall building intended for loading and unloading bales of hay and sacks of grain, so its floor was maybe six feet off the ground. Double-wide doors accommodated its utility. Cindy and I found many treasures inside that granary, including boxes of vintage clothes, which we used to play dress-up. They smelled funny and sometimes fell apart when we handled them, but scraps of worn velvet and antique crocheted lace also make fun disguises. 
Eventually the granary was torn down to make a large kitchen garden plot for Mother to plant and do her magic. Behind these buildings –beyond the corncrib, stable and a ramshackle outhouse—there was a lush, overgrown woods, some succulent pasture for grazing, and endless opportunities for creative play. We couldn’t wait to explore!

There was a giant apple tree near the end of the driveway, next to the alfalfa field, and an orchard with apple and plum trees. Plenty of trees to climb (and fall out of). We loved sitting up in the apple trees in spring. The tree would be full of blossoms and smelled good enough to eat. 

We always entered the house itself by the back door, because that’s where the driveway ended, I guess. An enclosed back porch became home to the washer and dryer (when we eventually got them) and a freezer for harvested produce. It had an old, dirty linoleum floor, as did the kitchen, which came next. It wasn’t exactly a gourmet’s delight, let’s put it that way. Off the kitchen were two small rooms – one had apparently been a pantry and storage room, which was turned into an indoor bathroom after year or so, and the other was a small bedroom to which Daddy, being the plumber that he was, added a small sink for washing up when he came home from work. 
Through the kitchen was a formal dining room with a beautiful built-in china cabinet, then another small bedroom and finally a living room with a staircase leading upstairs to three more bedrooms off a hallway. 

One of the bedrooms had a small walk-in closet and a balcony, which was so rotted, Daddy tore it off before we could do something dangerous on it (which we most certainly would have!). Andrea got the room with the big closet. There was a small pass-through closet between her room and the one across the hall – which Cindy and I shared – and it opened on both sides. Unluckily for Andrea, because as we filled our side full of our treasures, they started spilling out onto the floor beside her bed. The third bedroom went to Dale, who was still quite small.

Peeling wallpaper, scuffed paint and rough floors all screamed: WORK TO BE DONE.

Mother fell in love with this farm at first sight. From day one, we never called it the Sykora Farm. It was HERS. She called it The Place (or occasionally, The Farm) because to her it was the place she had been looking for all her life. It was hers to shape and color and craft into something beautiful. Which she did. It became a showplace worthy of a garden magazine and she loved every minute she toiled. Lucky us, to benefit from all that love and energy, not to mention the warm apple pies, crisp sweet corn, fresh garden peas and ripe tomatoes.  It didn’t take us long to forget that vegetables also came in a can (sometimes without labels).


EPILOGUE: The adventures Cindy and I had living on The Place until we both left for college were some of the most precious moments of our lives.

Eventually, after all of us kids had left home, Mother and Daddy would sell The Place and move to a smaller home on Maple Lake. Fortunately, for all of us, Dale bought a section of the woods and built a home, and a life, there so a small piece of those wonderful years has been kept intact.
 
 

Who knew we were Catholic?

In Oklahoma City, where we were born, we were too young to know that. In Wichita, where we lived when I was 3 and 4, we lived nowhere near a Catholic Church. Mother walked to the nearest one all dressed up in her high heels every Sunday that she could, but we never went with her. It was way too far. She didn’t drive yet, and Daddy didn’t offer to take her. He stayed home with us while she went.

In Missouri, where I was 5, the nearest church was several towns away, in Kirksville, so Daddy drove Mother to Sunday Mass about once a month while he did errands there. Again, we did not go with her.

But when we moved to Maple Lake, well, WHOA!

We were always told the town was 95 percent Catholic and I believe it. The town was dominated architecturally by St. Timothy’s Catholic church, by far the grandest and tallest building in town.

All the kids except a handful went to St. Timothy’s Catholic school. A handful attended the small public school.

It was my first experience with nuns.

My first day of school in second grade, with Sister Michelle, I was introduced rather rudely to the class.

“Class, we have a new student, she said. “Her name is … Linda … Pigg.” Emphasis on the last name.

And the classroom erupted in laughter.

I was shy to begin with and had no idea why they were laughing. In Missouri, the were dozens, no hundreds, of Piggs. It was a common name. There’s even a Pigg Family graveyard – no kidding! My dad was later buried there and the headstones attest to it.

Their laughter caught me off guard and I blushed fiercely and held back tears as kids oinked like pigs and pointed at me.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

She went on.  “And her father is NOT Catholic, so if she doesn’t convert him before he dies, he will go to hell.”

Sudden silence.

I nearly fell through the floor. I wanted to run from the room but there was nowhere to go. Sister Michelle, not a very nice person despite her calling, finally quieted the class and went on with the day.  

That night, at home, I burst into tears and told Mother and Daddy what had happened. Daddy was furious, but Mother said she’d talk to the nun. I guess she did because the good sister never humiliated me like that again, but the damage was done. It wasn’t the last time Mother would berate a nun on our behalf.

At first, nobody played with me at recess. I was the “new girl” which I think I still remained until about fifth grade. It was a small, clannish town and it was hard to break into its closed ranks.

My only friend in second and third grades was a chubby-cheeked girl with auburn hair (that gorgeous dark red color I envied). Her name was Colleen Conlin. She was the only person I invited to my birthday ‘parties” and she once gave me a small ceramic figurine with the words October Angel across the skirt. I still have it.

At the beginning of fifth grade, she didn’t show up for school. For years, I didn’t know what happened to her. (Many years later, I tracked her down and found out her parents had lost their farm and moved away, that she had become a nun, eventually left the sisterhood, married a man with children and raised a family.)

One good thing about going to Catholic school is that everyone wears the same uniform. Nobody knew how shabby my real clothes were and how few of them I had. Mother bought us the 19 -cent white blouses at Atlantic Mills to wear under the navy-blue jumpers. Even if a button was missing, who knew?  You could buy the uniforms ready made or you could buy a kit and sew them yourself. Because the latter was so much cheaper, Mother opted to sew then herself. She particularly hated sewing the little blue beanies with a covered button on top. Tedious work, at best. As I might have mentioned earlier, she hated sewing!  

One of the downsides to going to Catholic school was eating lunch there. The food was disgusting. Sloppy Joes were a smear of orange-red grease with a few crumbs of hamburger meat on a stale bun. Yum. There was a particularly nasty thing with a viscous, almost clear gravy with fine shreds of pork and slimy slivers of onion over stiff mashed potatoes. I don’t know what it was called but I could think of a few unflattering names.  Oh, and I can’t forget the Minnesota staple – hot dish – a weekly regular. Overcooked macaroni, a few chunks of tomato and crumbles of some kind of meat with more big slimy chunks of onion. Mmmm.

And you had to take something of everything and a nun stood by the trash can where we scraped our plates to make sure we ate it. I got good at hiding food inside a crumpled napkin or inside my empty milk carton. My stomach often rumbled during afternoon reading time.

The town was so Catholic, the local little movie theater only showed movies approved by the church, and whenever there was a religious one, like “Ben Hur” or “The Ten Commandments,” the whole school went. It wasn’t far away, so we’d march in double file from the school a few blocks to the theater. We did a lot of marching from school to church, and this wasn’t much father.

Grandad and Grandmother Mares lived right across the street from the church, and Grandad often remarked that every time he looked out his front window, “those dang kids are marching to or from church.” He wanted to know when the teaching actually happened. 

But being the staunch old German Catholic, he never voiced his reservations to anyone but Mother.

We did like going to the movies, though. Way better than catechism class anyway. 

The movie that left the biggest impression on my sister and I was “The Miracle of Lourdes,” about St. Bernadette, who reputedly saw a vision of the Blessed Virgin.

One night, not long after we saw the movie, Cindy and I climbed into our double bed, turned out the light and I turned over to face the door.

And there she was. The Blessed Virgin. Standing behind our half-closed door. Blue mantle over a white dress, hands folded in prayer.  I froze. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I shivered. Felt frozen in place. I stared and stared, thinking it must be a mistake.

Finally, I rolled about halfway over and nudged Cindy.

“Cindy, Cindy,” I whispered. “She’s here.”
 “Whaaa?” Cindy mumbled, almost asleep already. “Who?”
 “It’s Mary, the Blessed Virgin,” I whispered, frantic.

Cindy rolled over and froze. “Holy cow!” she whispered back. We lay there, not knowing what to do. Could not believe our eyes.

But the vision never moved, and that seemed strange. Finally, I slowly, slowly reached up and turned on the lamp. I mean, visions never like the light, right?

Whew!

Cindy’s blue robe was hanging over my white one on the door hook, and the belt area was crumpled in a way it looked like folded hands.

We almost wept with relief. I mean, we had no clue as to how to talk to a saint!

Well, if we didn’t have that early indoctrination into Catholicism like our peers, we were fully indoctrinated now. We were Catholics.

It’s hard to imagine life without television now, but we did not have one until about 1955. The small black-and-white TV that daddy brought home soon became the center of our universe. We were fascinated and there were so many good shows on.

Mother liked “Queen for a Day,” where women told their sob stories and won things like a new washer and dryer so they didn’t have to hang their clothes outside on a line in freezing weather — and she had nine kids and lots of laundry! The sadder the story the more likely she’d win. We only had three kids then, but Mother muttered that she could sure use a washer and dryer herself.

Dream on.

Daddy like to watch Saturday night wrestling and his favorite character was “The Crusher.” Cindy and I watched for a while, decided we could put on a better show, and wrestled our hearts out on the floor in front of the TV to get Daddy’s attention. Sometimes we got it and made hm laugh.  Worth the effort.

Cindy and I especially loved Casey Jones Noontime Express, when the venerable Casey in his engineer’s cap came on to share his lunch and show some cartoons – usually Merrie Melodies and Popeye. He always told us what was in his lunch and we’d compare it to ours. He also did birthdays and would call out “Happy birthday to Josie, who is five years old today,” and such. We always hoped he’d recognize us, but he never did.   I guess it was because we only got to watch him in the summer and days when there was no school, and our birthdays landed on school days in October and February. Yeah, that was it.

One show we did get to see a lot was Axel’s Treehouse, a goofy guy with a black Beatle haircut long before its time, a black mustache, and a whole slew of cartoons. He had a puppet dog sidekick and told really terrible jokes.

These were both local Minnesota shows, but we assumed kids everywhere got to see them. The one show everyone did get was Howdy Doody, and we adored the kindly Buffalo Bob and the cast of puppet characters. Cindy and I had a favorite marionette – Princess Summerfallwinterspring. She was soooo pretty!

Bob Keeshan, who played Clarabelle the Clown, also had his own show, Captain Kangaroo – an early version of Mr. Rogers, He told stories, sang songs, had fun guests and generally was a perfect segue to the Mickey Mouse Club, which we watched afterwards. Every day had a theme and we knew them by heart. The best part was that they showed Disney cartoons — Mickey, Donald Duck and Goofy. Our favorite Mickey Mouse Club characters were Annette and Darlene. We also loved the Spin and Marty series – it had horses! (Not to mention Spin and Marty).

And speaking of horses, Saturday mornings offered a bonanza of shows featuring them. We never missed the Roy Rogers Show, with Roy on his palomino Trigger and wife Dale Evans on the less glamorous Buttermilk. It was a little confusing, though, because they rode horses but their sidekick, Pat Brady, drove a Jeep, Nellybelle.

(Imagine my surprise, many years later, when I spotted a Jeep going down the street in front of me with the name Nellybelle stenciled on the back. Yup, a much older Pat Brady was driving. He spent some of his retirement in Colorado Springs, where I then lived.)

Our other favorite Saturday morning shows were Gene Autry, with his gorgeous horse, Champion, Fury (a big black stallion), My Friend Flicka, Annie Oakley and an array of old cowboy movies. But my secret crush was on The Lone Ranger. He rode a beautiful white horse, Silver, and his sidekick, Tonto, had a pretty pinto named Scout.  I so wanted to see what the ranger looked like under that mask!

These shows inspired Cindy and me to turn the banister of the stairway into our own horses. It was an L-shaped staircase with a short part (4-5 steps) and long part (maybe 8-9 steps). I, being older, got the top part and Cindy, being prone to falling off things, got the shorter bottom part. The flat-topped newel posts were our “saddles” and we used baling twine (where did we get all that baling twine?) wrapped around the rails for reins. We’d make up stories as we rode along, herding cattle or chasing rustlers. Of course, I was Roy Rogers and she was Dale Evans (or so I thought). Later, she told me she pretended she was Roy, too, because she thought “Dale was boring and had an ugly horse.”

It wasn’t all kid and cowboy shows, though. We were fascinated by a show starring Robbie the Robot.  We tried to pretend we were robots, probably not very successfully, and one day we tried it out on our cousins, Billly and Randy. They came up to the attic, where we were playing and when we saw them, we adopted a stiff legged pose, stuck our arms straight out in front of us and wobbled toward them, saying, “Wel. Come. To. Our. Plan. Et” in our best robotic voices. They looked at each other, told us we were weird, then ran back downstairs and outside. I mean, they really said, “You guys are weird.”

Maybe so. But we also were liars. We didn’t welcome them at all. We liked living on our own little planet. And that’s the way it stayed for many years.

(Side note by Cindy Adams: A few years later I would chase my brother around the house claiming I was The Electric Man with my arms straight out in front and walking stiff legged. Scared the pee out of that little fella!)

When we were little and would get bored, especially on freezing winter days, Mother would tell us, “Make your own fun!”

Much of the year, that was easy. Little sister Cindy and I had endless ways to have fun outdoors.We even turned an ant colony in the sandy ditch by our driveway into an ant farm of sorts. We watched the ants work for hours, building ant hills and carrying things. We even named the two biggest ants Queen Ant and King Ant and used sticks to create “roads” for them – which they refused to use properly. Ants are hard to train.

But the saving grace of the Elsenpeter house was the huge attic. It was one large expanse without walls, the size if the floor below. Its only occupants were a few boxes of old clothes, which we used for dress-up. It became our indoor playground. The only problem was Andrea.

Our older sister had enjoyed the perks of being an only child for four and a half years before I came along. Then Cindy followed so closely, I’m sure she thought she was being overrun by hordes of babies. She resented it. But she found ways to make it work for her.

A lot of the time, she ignored us. By the time we started to evolve into people, she was in elementary school. By the time I entered school, she was approaching puberty. By the time I entered high school, she was graduated and living away from home.

In the meantime, she loved to boss us around, and if we didn’t comply, torture was her backup plan.

Sometimes, she got us into trouble. The old farmhouse was so cold in the winter, Daddy bought long batts of brown-paper-clad pink fiberglass insulation and stuffed the batts down between the studs to help insulate the second-story bedrooms. Andrea decided these batts would make good horses. We thought that was a pretty good idea! So we pulled them up, tied baling twine around the “neck” and behind the “saddle,” slung the twine over our shoulders like suspenders, mounted up, and galloped them around the attic like a charging cavalry. When winter came and the upstairs was still bitter cold, Daddy went up to the attic and found our insulation “horses.” He was not pleased, and we got a good scolding at a very loud decibel.

Andrea even tried to do away with us once – at least once.

Mother never left us with a babysitter, but one day she had to drive to a nearby farm to buy eggs, and left Andrea to babysit us. Andrea was about 11 that summer, so I would have been 6, and Cindy was 5. Mother told us to behave for our sister, that she wouldn’t be gone long, and told Andrea to do the lunch dishes.

As soon as Mother left, Andrea ordered Cindy and me to wash and dry the dishes for her. We refused.

Andrea got a butcher knife out of the drawer and chased us with it. Cindy and I raced out the back door, headed for the “swinging tree.”

You know how, when a tree is cut down, sometimes it sends up lots of smaller saplings from the cut stump? Well, there was a tree out back of the Elsenpeter house like that. Its branches were spindly, but quite tall, forming a hollow ring around the old stump. It was fun to swing on them. Cindy and I clambered up like squirrels. Andrea was too big, and the branches bent when she tried to climb them.

She tried snapping the branches to fling us off, but we held on like caterpillars. She tried cutting them down, but it was going to take a while with a butcher knife, so she went back into the house. Cindy and I prayed for Mother to come home soon!

Andrea came back out with a sly smile, a trash can and matches. She dumped it on the stump and struck a match!

Luckily, it took her quite a few tries before she got the fire started. Cindy and I were choking on the smoke, ready to come down and take our wrist burns or whatever punishment our big sister had in mind, when Mother came home. Our prayers were answered!

She didn’t leave us with Andrea again, that I recall.

It didn’t matter. Andrea found other ways to torture us behind Mother’s back.

Cindy was seriously claustrophobic. One day, when we wouldn’t be horses and pull Andrea around in her “carriage” – an old red wagon – she stuffed Cindy in the doghouse and sat in front of the door. Cindy screamed and I clawed at her until Mother came out and made us “quit all that racket.”

“She wanted to get in there,” Andrea said, pulling Cindy from her smelly prison.

Andrea was good at looking innocent.

Years later, after we moved, Andrea got a real horse. She saved her money and bought a palomino quarter horse and boy, did we have to fetch and carry for her in order to get a ride!

Mother would say later that Andrea kept us so busy, she could never find us to do chores for her.

Well, busy and scared.

Afraid of her threats, we rarely told Mother about the tortures we endured – or thought we did – at Andrea’s bigger, stronger hands.

Next: A Baby Brother!

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.

From earliest memory my little sister, Cindy, was part of me. I was sixteen months old when she was born, like me, in Oklahoma City. Daddy, who was selling real estate at the time, did what he usually did. He dropped Mother off at the hospital entrance to have the new baby. He never was with her during any of our births. He didn’t like “stuff like that.” So he took a couple of days off of work to take care of big sister Andrea and me, then picked Mother up at the hospital with Cindy when it was time, dropped us all off at home, and immediately went back to work.

Mother says I stood in my crib, my dark eyes peering over the top bar, staring at her blonde hair and blue eyes in the bassinet next to me. When Mother fed Cindy, I climbed on her lap, a rubber nipple from my old baby bottle stuck on my thumb and my Blankie tucked under my chin, to snuggle and watch them.

“You took possession of her right away,” Mother used to say. “Like she was your baby.”

I tried to help feed her in her high chair, getting as much food on me as in her, and probably helping myself to a few bites of baby-food pears along the way. I helped her take her first steps, and one of her first words was “Ninda.”

All our names were too elegant – Andrea, Linda and Cynthia – for the last name that accompanied them. I always felt we should have been named things like Wanda Jean or Billie Jo. She had high hopes for all of us. You’ve got to give her that.

She had toyed with the idea of naming us after movie stars because, as I have said before, she loved the movies. We thanked our lucky stars that she hadn’t named us after Hedy Lamarr, Myrna Loy or Merle Oberon – none of which goes real well with Pigg. Like anything did.

So as much as we came to bemoan our last name, we at least kind of liked our first names, and eventually all married and dumped the maiden name. No hyphenating for us!

As soon as Cindy could walk, we went everywhere together, holding hands much of the time.

By the time we moved to Wichita, Kansas, I was 4 and supposedly old enough for kindergarten. I wasn’t ready. I was bereft to be separated from my kid sister. I cried myself to sleep at naptime each morning. Miss Kinkaid, the crabby kindergarten teacher, finally just left me asleep when the other kids woke up, and told Mother I wasn’t ready for school. So I was a kindergarten drop-out, and happy to be one.

It was also about this time when I took to hiding.

One summer day, Daddy was working in the garage, Mother was in the kitchen, and Cindy was taking her nap. I was playing outside with our dog Queenie and noticed a sliver of dark, shadowed space behind a sheet of plywood standing up against the studs inside the garage. I slipped behind it and stood there, enjoying the cool spot.
Mother came out of the house.
“Have you seen Linda?” she asked Daddy.
“I thought she went in the house,” he replied.
They began searching for me, calling my name, casually at first, then more frantically.
Soon, the next-door neighbors became involved. They wandered up the street, calling my name. The more they searched, the more frightened I became. I didn’t want to be discovered. I began to sweat, and wanted to cry, but I couldn’t come out.
I don’t know why.
Soon, lots of people were calling me and looking for my little body, doubtless drowned in a ditch or hit by a runaway car. Finally, Daddy pulled the sheet of plywood away from the wall, little expecting to find me there, and I burst into sobs. Tucked between the studs, itchy and sweaty and crying, I don’t think he knew whether to hug me or spank me. While he was deciding, a frantic Mother snatched me up, hugging me and crying all the way to the house.
“You scared us!” she kept saying.
A few months later, during a family gathering, I got bored. Cindy was sitting on Daddy’s lap and Andrea was playing with our cousins. So I wandered away from the boring adult chatter and went into my parents’ bedroom. I never went in there by myself. The closet door stood ajar, and I peeked in. There I saw Daddy’s tall leather hunting boots. I loved those boots. I squirmed my way past long winter coats and Sunday dresses, and stepped into them. They came up to my hips. The clothes fell shut in front of me like a theater curtain. I was trapped. Yes, I could have just as easily gotten out as in, but now I was hiding.
Soon, Mother began searching for me.
“Where’s Linda?” she asked aunts, uncles, cousins.
No one had seen me.
The search was on.
This time, they were as much angry as scared.
“Where are you?” Mother’s voice had an edge to it that said I was in trouble.
I surely couldn’t come out now.
I stood in that hot, suffocating closet for at least an eternity. I sweated, silent tears rolling down my face, wiping at my snotty nose with my fist, afraid they’d find me, and afraid they wouldn’t.
Several people looked into the closet; it wasn’t till my father finally parted the clothes to find me standing hip-deep in his tall leather boots that the search was over. I cried so hard, I got the hiccups.
“Why do you keep doing this?” Mother asked.
I didn’t know then and I still don’t. But I quit hiding after that. It was just too stressful!

It was the same with having my picture taken.

One of my earliest memories is getting spanked by Daddy because I wouldn’t pose for a Pigg family portrait. An extended set of relatives had gathered for some event – perhaps one of my grandparents’ birthdays. All the adults and children – maybe 30 or so of us – were going to be in a photograph.
I’m the only one crying. Cindy has her head tucked, shyly, into my shoulder and she’s holding my hand.

Cindy and I spent our days playing with our dolls, exploring our neighborhood and following Mother around asking questions. Once, we made mud pies in the back yard after it rained. They looked pretty good, so we tasted them. And we got pin worms. You don’t want to know the details!

One day, I spied workmen in the street lifting a lid right out of the pavement. They sent a hose down the hole it left to do some other mysterious stuff. I wanted one of those lids. After they left, Cindy stood guard while I went out and lifted the manhole cover out of its moorings and carried it the few steps to our driveway. Then I dropped it on my big toe. Hey, it was heavy and I was a scrawny kid.

Cindy cried as hard as I did, as if she, too, could feel the pain. We did that a lot. My toenail turned black and fell off, eventually. Mother and Daddy never did figure out how I did it.

Mother always said Cindy and I had a silent form of communication. Without a word, we’d just look at each other, both jump up and head to our room at the same time.

But Wichita was just another stop on Daddy’s search to find … something. So we moved again. And we heeded to Missouri, his home state. As usual, he left Mother behind to sell the house, pack everything and move it all and three little girls to our new home.

Cindy and I didn’t know we were poor. Andrea, four years older than me and always more observant, figured it out but apparently didn’t tell us.  So we happily basked in our ignorance.

With little money coming from Daddy, whiling away his time in Missouri (supposedly putting a bathroom in his parents’ house), Mother hoarded every cent to make ends meet. She sewed our uniforms for school, and showed us how to cut cardboard to plug up holes in the soles of our shoes.She was a pro – having done that herself as a kid.

We went shopping at Atlantic Mills, a super-cheap outlet store in Minneapolis. My Aunt Jeanne, mother’s sister, had told her about it. We could get 29-cent white blouses to go under our school uniforms, and cheap underwear and socks, too.

Food was another problem.  But a fairy godfather fixed that.

Mother’s Uncle Ed, who worked for Libby Foods in Minneapolis, was able to get us free cases of food – dented cans that the stores couldn’t sell. (Nobody seemed to think that was dangerous in those days.)

Problem was, the labels had been removed. So we got good at guessing what was inside. We knew from the sound they made when shaken and the shapes of the cans which were fruits and vegetables, and how to spot the occasional can of corned beef hash (taller than the vegetables, skinnier than the fruit). We never once got botulism.

Mother turned dinner into an adventure.

“So, what are we having tonight?” she’d ask as we gathered around, shook and guessed and, when we finally opened cans, saw what had been chosen. Pot luck at its epitome. It might be green beans, peaches and hamburgers. Or corn, pears and – hamburgers again. We ate a lot of hamburgers.

Sometimes, on a Friday night, she’d say: “Should we have a nice dinner tonight or should we just have hamburgers again and go to a movie?”

Well, guess what we always picked. Mother loved movies.  She’d worked as an usher in the Maple Lake theater as a teenager and always bragged that she got to see “Gone with the Wind” seventeen times!

But I digress … back to dinner.

No matter how poor we were, though, Sunday dinner was always fried chicken. We could make a chicken last for at least two meals for all of us, maybe more. And hers was the best. Dipped in flour and fried in bacon drippings and butter – well, yum.

One stormy November night, as we were eating a mysterious casserole of leftovers, there was a loud thump that had us all dropping our forks and scrambling out the back door.

The wild autumn wind had blown not only early snow, but also a full-grown ring-necked pheasant, into the side of the house. It was dead. Pitiful, lying there in the accumulating snow. We all crooned, “Poor thing,” gazing sadly upon its broken body.

Then Mother snatched it from the ground, held it up by its limp feet and did a little dance.

“Meat!” she cried, and we girls danced with her, like heathen hunters around a bonfire.

The next night our canned peas and plums were served with roast pheasant, thank you very much.

By Christmas, we were so destitute, Mother waited till the last minute to buy a scrawny tree for a dollar and we girls sat around making paper-chain ornaments out of cut-up magazines or the Sunday funnies (courtesy of our grandparents). On the last day of school before Christmas break, we arrived home to discover a marvelous thing.

Mother, a child of the Depression, had learned to be clever and creative. She had scrounged through the junk in the basement and found partial cans of paint – including red enamel and metallic gold. She had painted the wall behind the tree scarlet and dabbed it with shimmering gold dots. She set a small lamp on the floor behind the tree to illuminate her art work.

It was gorgeous!

Once again, I wondered later if the bulldozer operator who razed the house right after we moved out stopped to admire its uniqueness – and wonder who the heck had lived here.

Daddy had come home briefly for Thanksgiving, arriving on the train one frosty Saturday afternoon, but didn’t stay long. He cursed the cold and left again the day after Turkey Day. I think he just wanted a good meal. He didn’t come back for Christmas and he didn’t send presents. 

Somehow, Mother found the means to get us each a new doll. Grandmother Mares (her mom) always sewed us new pajamas. And our Aunt Olive (Daddy’s “rich” sister) always sent us new slippers. We needed them in this house for sure!

Through the long winter, Mother turned hardship into a game. We huddled in the kitchen at night – it and the adjacent dining room being the only rooms with a source of heat. 

We got really good at the game of “Let’s Pretend.”

“Let’s pretend …” she would begin, and we’d all lean forward in anticipation.

“We’re in a giant cave during a blizzard,” Motherwould say, setting the stage. Or, “We’re on a ship at sea during a storm.” It became a lovely game, the cold seeping into our bones to lend a remarkable touch of reality.

But even Minnesota winters come to an end.

Easter and spring were welcome, as they always are in the North Country. The frozen ground seemed less stiff beneath our leaky boots. The smell of thawing earth scented the still-chill nights, and birds we hadn’t seen in months were making their way back to our part of the world.

Mother made us ruffled organdy Easter Sunday dresses, using fabric our grandmother had given her. I don’t know why – she hated sewing.  Mine was blue; Cindy’s was pink. Andrea said she was too old for organdy, and wore a hand-me-down navy-blue polka-dot dress from our cousin, Dixie Pigg.

We walked into church that Sunday so proud of our finery, too proud to wear the bulky sweaters the chilly day demanded. Our slightly cracked, too-small patent leather shoes were Vaseline-shined and displayed nicely the white 9-cent socks with tiny ruffles on them. (A bargain-bin buy at Atlantic Mills.)

That morning, we girls had been thrilled to find the Easter bunny had visited our waiting baskets, and had added sugared marshmallow bunnies, jelly beans, even a piece of chocolate, to the hard-boiled eggs we’d colored the night before.

After church, Mother stopped to talk to Mrs. Sherman (not her real name), who lived down the road from us. When we got in the car, she said our neighbor had been crying, because the Sherman kids were disappointed that the Easter bunny hadn’t come for them.

Silence permeated the old Studebaker as Mother navigated the rough, rutted road home. When we got there, we girls knew what she would want us to do.  We each took part of the candy from our baskets, and made up a shoebox of goodies, complete with wisps of shredded green paper grass, for the neighbors’ six children. 

We took it over to their house, about a quarter mile up the road, and Mrs. Sherman cried once again at the kindness. The children were shy, but their eyes shone brightly at the rare treat. Mother explained that the Easter bunny had accidentally left their candy at the wrong house.

“We don’t have a lot,” Mother said, on the drive home “but we’ve got more than some people.”

And she wrestled the blue car down the rutted, muddy lane toward home.