Digging Up Grandpa

Recently I drew a picture of my house; it gave me a telescope into my childhood. It was located on Garfield Road in Aurora, Ohio. No address needed then. The house had been a summer cottage thirty miles from Cleveland and from Akron. My father had butcher shops in both cities. As a boy Dad drove a horse and wagon from Cleveland, where he grew up, to Aurora through uncharted territory to collect the animals for slaughter from farms in the countryside for Grandpa and Grandmother’s butcher stall in the Old Central Market. Those thirty miles took him all day and when a wheel broke he had to cut a limb from a tree to repair it. So he knew the Aurora countryside well. He made friends wherever he went and often stayed at Ebenezer Sheldon’s home, the first resident of Aurora. When his parents, my Grandpa and Grandmother Poss, retired and moved to the country, so did we. I was two years old, it was 1925. Aurora remained a small town all the time I was growing up. There were fewer than five hundred people living there including a large community of Mennonite farmers in the countryside. I walked all over town and knew everybody’s name and the names of all their dogs, cats and horses. It was an intimate, friendly feeling and I’ve loved small towns ever since. I grew up with a sense of rootedness and connectedness and identity. Little did I know that this kindly town would years later turn against us and make pariahs of Cope and me. But more of that later. Mother and Dad had the summerhouse next to Grandpa and Grandmother enlarged and converted for full-time living. The house sprawled across the ground in its one-floorness with a huge attic and basement the full size of the house. These, along with Grandpa’s barn next door, were my favorite play areas. In the basement I was the teacher and queen of the stove. My parents gave me one of the large basement rooms for my own playroom. The walls were made of big building blocks. I painted them yellow and black, one yellow, one black, etc… as high as I could reach. The combination must have made everyone but me dizzy. I had a real electric miniature stove. It was black cast iron with nickel-plating and four burners and an oven, just like Grandmother’s. Children today have to pretend they’re cooking on plastic make believe stoves, not I! I made horrible concoctions on that stove. I had watched and helped my mother cook and bake wonderful things without recipes ever since I could walk, why couldn’t I? I think I invented Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I fed the little boys and set up a little school with workbooks and lesson plans that I prepared ahead of time. Later in life I founded and taught the first nursery school and kindergarten in Aurora when my children were those ages. I had majored in Child Study at Vassar, my preparation for family and early career as it turns out. In the large hay mow of the barn among the bales of hay and straw I was the Queen. My playmates were my courtiers. We were bandits, Indians, cowboys. The possibilities were endless. We moved bales around to construct a palace and a throne, courtyards and caves. We liked to sit around and smoke, “lady cigars,” catalpa pods from one of Grandpa’s trees. One time I thought it would be even better to smoke one of Dad’s Havana Havana’s to act as a punk to keep the catalpas lit. I stumbled out of the barn pretty green and sick. William, our gardener and my buddy, carried me into my bedroom past Mother in the living room giving a paper on India to her study club. She looked up as we passed by, but never dropped a word. I am horrified at this distance to think of how dangerous this was to us, the barn and the vulnerable animals I loved so much in the stalls below. Our attic was a treasure trove. Mother never threw anything away, so the attic was full of stuff we children could use for props for an infinite variety of games and dramas. Two big cedar closets of clothes to dress up in and boxes of photographs of ancestors to laugh at and make up stories about. The attic had a sloping ceiling and a pull-down stairway that we kids could pull up and be snug in our haven. It was a magical place, like a big elves house. There were no end of things to be discovered. I found one sock that Mother had knitted for a Finnish soldier during World War I. She apparently had never started the second one. I don’t know why this seems so poignant to me. But when I think of it lying in her knitting bag, I get a catch in my throat. The sock inspired us to set up a field hospital. I made beds for the wounded soldiers and gave them medicine. I became Florence Nightingale… Sometimes we just invented stories. Often we wondered to each other what our parents were really like. When we were a little older, we assured each other that our parents never had sex, but wondered how we got here. Or even what “having sex” was like. One boy said they did it standing up in the bathroom. As I write I appreciate the incredible gift Mother and Dad gave me in letting me express myself, even though sometimes in outrageous ways. For such task-oriented, hardworking Germanic people, it was truly a miracle that they valued my playtime and encouraged me to be fearless. I tried to pass on to my children opportunities like the playroom, the attic and the haymow provided for me, to grow into confident, imaginative adults through child’s play.