Category: Writings

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.

McCall’s magazine, which Mother bought every month, had a paper doll in it. You could cut out cute little Betsy McCall and her themed or seasonal outfits, paste her on cardboard and …voila! A paper doll. We were hooked. Gone were the baby dolls and bride dolls – they only had one outfit (this was before Barbie). Paper dolls became our passion.

Once in a great while Mother would buy us a new paper doll booklet where you could pop out the paper doll and all of her clothes and accessories to play with. But that didn’t happen near often enough to sate our new appetite, so, being young entrepreneurs, we decided we could make our own paper doll clothes – to expand their wardrobes, you see.  We became fashion designers! Of course, the only paper we had to make these clothes was our blue-lined notebook paper from school. So, try as we might, every outfit had light blue lines running through it somewhere. Oh, well.

We finally knew we were getting too old to make these clothes when we started adding cleavage to the evening gowns.

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Our other passion was comic books.

The drug store in town was the only place we could get comic books, and they were expensive. At least 10 cents each… They had a whole rack! And there would be new issues once a month of all the good ones: Archie and Veronica, Millie the Model, Superman, etc. We couldn’t afford to buy many comic books, but we discovered a way to get them for free.

One Saturday morning, Daddy was making run to the town dump. It was about two miles from our house, but we (at that age) loved riding in his big purple Metro truck. So, we rode along just for fun.

When we got to the dump, we could not believe our eyes. There were PILES of comic books just tossed there on top, pages fluttering in the breeze. All our favorites. Little Lulu, Donald Duck (and his nephews and Uncle Scrooge), Richie Rich, Supergirl, you name it. A veritable bonanza of comics. Mysteriously, they were all missing their covers. 

We found out that at the end of each month Mr. Ertel (who owned the drug store) would rip off the covers of each comic and he’d then get credit for those not sold. The comics themselves went to the dump.

Ah-ha! (Picture a light bulb over our heads!)

So that’s where we headed. The first day of each month there would be a stack of unsold, coverless comic books at the dump. Daddy was all for this endeavor (he probably thought of us as little rats anyway) and we stopped begging for comic book money. He’d drive us to the dump and let us load all the comics into a box and take them home.

This mother-load of treasure took up every empty space in our room. We even had comics jammed under the bed, and to our older sister’s chagrin, in our joint closet (often spilling out into her room).

We not only had new comics to read (and we read them all) but we had duplicates of some comics so we could cut out a good picture of Millie the Model, paste her on thin cardboard, cut her out again in more detail, then start making clothes for her. All we needed was scissors, cardboard (shoe box tops were great), and Elmer’s glue. We went through so much glue!

It’s impossible to tell how many hours we spent doing this. The floor of our room was covered in scraps from cut-up comics, paste, and bad attempts at designing clothes. On Saturdays, the day Mother insisted we all clean our rooms, we’d try stuffing everything into the closet or under the bed, but that seldom worked. Sergeant Major Mother would come up for inspection and we would flunk, time and time again. It wasn’t pretty.

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But we can’t tell you all that without talking about the Purple Metro, Daddy’s work truck. Well, purple is maybe too generic. It was actually the color of eggplant. The fancy name is aubergine. It had been a laundry truck, but Daddy replaced the hanging clothes racks with bins for plumbing parts. It had a sign on the side that read:

Hillman & Pigg 
Plumbing & Heating

(Linda: I liked the truck when I was little. But I came to hate the Metro, as a teenager, when Daddy insisted on driving us to high school and dropping us off right in front when other kids were pouring in. He’d drive it right up onto the sidewalk and laugh at my embarrassment.)

(Cindy: I didn’t care. I loved it. The best part of the Metro was that the engine was inside, so in the winter when Daddy took us to school, we could ride on top of the engine cover and it would keep us warm. The second-best part was that it was purple! And, come on, who doesn’t love a purple vehicle?)

There are moments in life when the only reasonable response is laughter. I learned this lesson pretty early on. Humor has saved me from experiencing pain, public humiliation, grief, and even facing life-threatening situations. Without doubt, laughter has defined me as a person. 

Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, in a family with four children, a mother who loved practical jokes and a father with a dry sense of humor, laughter was our white noise. Some of my earliest memories involve sitting around the dinner table everyone telling stories of their day, the funnier the better. 

I was clueless that humor wasn’t a part of everyone’s life. Daddy used to tell the story about when I was three years old, at dinner one evening, he unceremoniously plopped a pile of mashed potatoes on my plate, which I guess I didn’t want, and I said “Dam you, Daddy!” And everyone at the table stopped what they were doing, and my father said “What did you just say, Cindy?” And I demurely replied “Thank you, Daddy.” Of course, everyone at the table cracked up. And so it began. Laughter became my drug of choice.

I didn’t realize when I started school that life wasn’t just about creating your own world (let’s call that Life with Linda) or jumping out and scaring people (Life with Mother) so I continued on my merry way, creating my own, often humorous, story as I went.

I made two good friends right away when I started first grade: Jane and Eileen – and we always spent our recess time together. Not long after my first few weeks attending school, I was starting to get bored and figured it was time to stir the pot. One afternoon recess, deep into fall, with the leaves from the maple and oak trees covering the ground, the three of us were walking along the fence that encircled the playground. I found a cockle burr plant, drying up, and the burrs were ripe for picking. Hmmm. So, of course, I picked a bunch of them, stuck them into a small ball, and headed back towards the school. (Did it hurt? Sure, it hurt! But that’s the price you pay for a good, practical joke.)

Jane and Eileen were saying “Cindy what are you going to do with that burr ball?” (Obviously they didn’t know me very well yet or they wouldn’t have asked, and they certainly wouldn’t have followed me.)I sneaked up, real quiet, behind Sister Bernadette (our first-grade teacher) and stuck the burr on her tail. Well, I called it a tail. The nuns wore the traditional black and white nun outfit which included a long, veil connected to their headdress, and flowed down their back. It was cool. Kind of like a cape. (But, trust me, she couldn’t fly.)Once the burr was secure, I walked away. Mission accomplished.

Jane and Eileen were both red in the face, and almost in tears. I thought it was funny too, but not that funny! I am not sure how the burr ball was spotted, or removed, but this little prank just got my juices flowing. The next day when we were taking our mandatory lavatory break, the three of us, and several others, were in the girls bathroom and I showed Jane and Eileen how you could wet a paper towel, squeeze out the water, add a few shots of soap, make it into a ball, and then throw it at the ceiling and it would stick! Now how cool was that?

Of course, they got all red in the face, and looked like they would cry (again, not THAT funny!) as I proceeded to prepare three or four soap balls and stick them on the ceiling. Unfortunately, we had been in the bathroom too long, and Sister Bernadette came in to see what was taking so long. 

“What’s going on in here?”she asked, sternly,

We all stood straight, arms at our sides, looking innocent. Well I was looking innocent, those two were now actually crying. Go figure. As she stood looking at us, the soap balls started to fall: plop, plop, plop. Right on the floor in front of Sister. Needless to say, that time I got caught and had to stay in from recess for two whole days. (Totally worth it.)

The best part of these two incidents was the dinner time story telling. They both got a pretty good laugh. But I had just begun my Catholic school adventures. There would be many more to come, some planned, some not planned, but in the long run they were all worth the effort.

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.


If you’ve ever watched The Little Rascals, you’ll have a sense of what my sister, Linda, and I were like when we were kids. I’m not saying we were ‘rascals’ per se, I’m just sayin’ those little rascals had nothing on us, that’s for sure!



My sister, Linda and I lived for summers. The minute school was out, we were literally free as birds for the next three or so months. To say we were unsupervised is an understatement. If we had died between 8 a.m. (breakfast) and 12 noon (lunch), or between 12:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. (time to get cleaned up for dinner) no one would have noticed. Daddy was at work. Mother was frantically busy taking care of a kitchen garden, our bigger garden and orchard (used for canning and freezing fruits and vegetables), keeping up a one-acre lawn that she mowed weekly, and maintaining several beautiful flower beds. On top of that she had a house to keep clean (I will say spotless, actually), three meals a day to cook for all of us, laundry that she hung on the clotheslines to dry, and watching after our baby brother, Dale. The woman never stopped moving. But keeping tabs on two young girls was not part of her day. She sent us off to “play” between meals, and “play” we did! 

Every now and then our play had unintended consequences.



For example, one beautiful summer day Linda and I headed out to the stable to find something to do. There was an old two-wheeled trailer parked nearby that Daddy would use now and then to haul garbage to the dump, or for some other hauling job. We decided that it would be fun to climb into the trailer and see if we could get it to balance by standing in the middle and inching our weight toward the tail gate (there actually was no gate on the tail) until the heavy end (the end with the coupler, tongue, and hitch ball) was up in the air. 

OK. Maybe not the smartest game in the world, but hey, we were maybe 8 or 9 and bored!

Now this was sort of fun, but then Linda had this idea (it probably was my idea but I will blame Linda). I was going through my “I want to be a trapeze artist” phase, and so she thought it would be cool if we could inch our way toward the open end of the trailer so the heavy part was in the air, then she’d jump off, and the trailer would flip me up into the air and I could do a summersault and land on the ground, and take my bow. Well, it didn’t quite work that way. Let’s just say I broke my arm (again), and Mother spent the afternoon in the emergency ward with me. 


We didn’t really think that one through!

Another lovely, summer afternoon, Daddy came home for lunch (he often drove home from his office/shop in town to eat lunch) and found Linda and me mooning around, complaining of nothing to do (never a smart move around Daddy). Before he went back to work, he called us into the garage where he armed us with two paint brushes and a can of aluminum (metallic silver) paint. He told us that the corrugated metal pump cover around the well needed to be painted to keep it from rusting. We probably didn’t even hear the rusting part of the instructions. All we could see is a big can of shiny paint and two brushes. 

Oh boy! 

Daddy headed back to work, and Linda and I headed over to the well and started painting. It was suchfun. But it didn’t take long, and we sure had a lot of paint left, so we decided to really help Daddy out and paint the pump and the pump handle too. 

Oooh, pretty.

Still a lot of paint left. Looked around and saw the metal flashing around the bottom of the corncrib was kind of rusty looking. So we painted that, too.

What else? Oh, the flagpole. There was a gray metal flagpole in the middle of mother’s rock-rimmed circular flower bed in the side yard. It looked kind of drab. So we painted that up as high as we could reach (not very). But when we started painting Mother’s rocks around her beautiful flower bed, she came out of the house, caught us red-(or silver)-handed and stopped us dead. No paint would besmirch her beautiful big rocks! But by then the paint can was almost empty anyway.

Daddy liked to tell the story that late that afternoon as he topped the hill on the road home, the sun was shining on our little farm, which, in his words “sparkled like a Christmas tree full of tinsel.” He got mad at us at first, then laughed, after he decided it was actually pretty funny. Mother was not so amused. (We had to clean the rocks we had defaced.)


Clearly, Daddy didn’t think this through. Maybe it’s a family trait?

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!)

For one whole winter I entertained myself by scaring Mother (see Scaredy Cat), and watching her get fat. By spring, when my sisters finished school, I was more than ready to jump into summer – climbing trees, getting ‘lost’ in the woods, and going fishing down at the pond not far from our house.

Mother would fix us bologna sandwiches and a jug of Kool Aid to take with us for our picnic lunch when we went fishing. My oldest sister, Andrea, would load Linda and me into our little red wagon, along with our lunch and fishing poles and she would pull us through a pasture, lift the two of us, our poles, and lunch across a fence, and we’d walk several hundred feet to the bank of the pond. There was a tree that had fallen in a storm and it overhung the water, so Andrea would sit me in the tree, with my fishing pole (worm included), and Linda would sit on the bank with her pole (worm included). I loved those forays into the woods, bugs and all (and believe me in Minnesota in the summer there were plenty of them).

Throughout the summer months, we watched as Mother just got fatter and fatter. Then, in early August, for some unknown reason, Daddy loaded us all into the car and took us to Grandmother and Grandad Mares’ house in town and dropped us off. Now this was strange behavior. I don’t remember ever having been at my grandparents’ house without Mother being there with us. But it was sort of fun. Grandmother gave us baths (in a tub with running water, which we didn’t have at home). This was our first encounter with a real bathtub, at least in my short memory, and I immediately started hatching plans for how we could turn it into a slippery slide. This would result, several years later, in another run to the hospital and numerous stitches in my chin, but that is another story.

The next day (or maybe two) Daddy and Mother showed up at Grandmother’s house, and they brought with them a little bundle that they called Dale. And, bingo! I had a brother. He was so darn cute I couldn’t stop looking at him. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Just like me! Both my older sisters had dark brown hair and brown eyes, and continually assured me that I was adopted, but now I had proof that it wasn’t true!

Maple Lake, the town where we attended school and went to church each Sunday was Catholic. Our grandparents lived across the street from the Catholic church. Mother was expected to appear, every Sunday, with her children curled and dressed up for Sunday mass. After church, we would stop in and visit for half an hour or so with Grandmother and Grandad. One Sunday, when Dale was only a few weeks old, we made our traditional Sunday visit. Mother put Dale in the middle of their big bed, and since he was only a couple of weeks old, she assumed he would stay there. He did. I don’t remember this story very clearly, but Andrea, my oldest sister, said we had a nice visit with our usual laugher and silliness, and then we all walked out, got in the car and drove toward home. About half a mile out of town, Linda popped up and said: “Mother, where’s the baby?” Mother made a quick U-turn in the middle of the road and raced back to town to rescue Dale. When Andrea ran into the house to get the baby, Grandmother was sitting in her rocking chair, rocking him. After another great bout of laughter, we headed for home, family intact.

When school started in September, I now had a little bundle of baby to play with while Linda and Andrea were gone each day. Mother was very clear from the get-go that I was not to try and scare Dale (which was a great disappointment because the kid was a sitting duck!) At one point, Mother was changing Dale’s diaper and said, “Oh, he has a boatload here,” which I thought was extremely funny, so I kept my eye on him and whenever his diaper began to sag I’d holler “Dale’s got a boatload, Mother!”

When Dale was about nine months old, he still couldn’t really walk but he could stand up if he held on to something. He had learned to say “bye-bye,” so whenever the Everly Brothers would come on the radio singing “Bye Bye Love,” if we stood Dale in front of the radio, he’d hold on to the end table, butt bouncing up and down, singing “bye bye” until the song was over. Too cute. But I always had my eye on his diaper, just in case.

Dale loved bananas. Mother had to buy them almost every day. She’d peel it down to the bottom and he’d hold it up to his mouth and start munching. He just kept feeding it into his constantly moving mouth until he got to the bottom – sort of like feeding wood into a wood chipper. (Hence the ‘boatload’!)

When she took him for a checkup to the local doctor, Dr. Raetz, she asked him if a kid could eat too many bananas. He asked her how many he was eating. She said “five or six a day.” The doctor was shocked. “A DAY?” – then he thought about it. “I guess it can’t hurt him, but maybe I’d cut him down to two or three.” But it was hard, when he’d finish one, hand her the limp peel, and beg, “More ‘nana, Mama.”

He still loves bananas to this day, but he’s cut it back to one. Or maybe two.

And, just in case you’re wondering I still scare him every chance I get.

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!