The story about her seashore house appeared in the Press of A.C. about a week ago. The Summer House Grand mom’s house was located just steps from the bay and a few blocks beach, which in my day had huge sand dunes where we built forts and made good hiding places for necking when we got older. I slept in the attic on the cot against the back wall, which was under the small window at the back of the house that looked out at the bay if you wrenched your neck. The attic roof was peaked and slanted all the way to the floor on one side so you could only stand in the center, so it was a good thing that no one in our family was tall. There wasnt any bathroom in the attic so when Jack and I were kids we kept pee- jars under our beds that we used during the night and serious problem was not to get confused in the dark and miss the bottle. The best feature of the Wisteria Rd. house was its large wooden porch. The porch was elevated about 5 feet above the street and wrapped right around the side of the house. It was filled with worn to the form old wicker rocking chairs that had been painted dozens of times over the years, usually either green or red, but sometimes blue. The layered colors could be seen where a rocker was chipped. It also had a big Tennessee Williams swing suspended on one side that provided a lot of fun for everyone over the years. I can recall Grand mom frying corn fritters by the hundreds but nothing was as exciting as the preparation of a crab cake dinner. The crabs were boiled live in a large pot and in an effort to avoid the boiling water, some of them would make a living ladder and wind up on the linoleum kitchen floor where they would run all around like crazy before we could captured them. To supply her kitchen there was always someone from our family in transit between the house and the grocery store two blocks away. I would pass Jack on my way home with the milk because they sent him for a bag of flour and on his return he passed one of my other cousins who were on their way to get something else they needed but forgot to tell us. It never ended-- there was always someone from our house either coming or going to the store from early in the morning to until after dark. Somehow in the middle of this confusion my Grandmother kept her composure and sanity while our parents fought and we raised hell day and night. It was great to see her on the front porch in her special rocking chair that had been shaped to her exact size for comfort over the years and to have played pinochle and other card games with her on the dining room table on rainy nights.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 15:47:53 +0000
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