Moving to the House in the Woods

When I was about 17 months old, my father and grandfather had completed enough of our house that they were building so that we could move into it. At about the same time, my brother Patrick was also ready to be born. In fact, my mother was painting the back hallway of the house that led from the kitchen to the back door when she went into labor! So she cleaned her paint brush, cleaned herself up, dropped me off at someone's house (either my grandparents' or my aunt and uncle's house) and went to the hospital to give birth to Pat.

This was in the days of oil-based paint that had terrible fumes. The paint took what seemed like forever to dry, but the worst part was that no one wore masks the way they do now, to protect their lungs from the toxic fumes from the paint. So my mother (who smoked heavily as well) had been painting in an enclosed space with no protective equipment as she was pregnant. People today would be horrified if anyone did this, pregnant or not, but people just didn't know any better back then. Oh--and the paint had lead in it! It's amazing that more children were not born with birth defects at that time.

But our new house was "a work in progress," and would remain in that status for quite a long while, because now my mother (the painter) had two small children to care for and would have three within another 10 months--my sister Joanne. When we moved into the new house, only the first floor of the house was finished enough for us to live in. Our first floor consisted of a large (for that time) eat-in kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, my parents' bedroom, and another bedroom, which Pat and I (and later Joanne) shared. It would later become a "den," a sort of sitting room. It was directly across the hallway from my parents' bedroom with the bathroom in between. We had a small foyer by the front door, but rarely used the front door, and then there was the long hallway from the kitchen to he back door, which also led to the cellar stairs.

The first thing that had been built on the land was a huge two-story garage, with room for four cars, but it served as a workspace for my father for large projects. The upstairs of the garage was used as a storage area. In the house, my father worked each night and weekend on the upstairs bedrooms and the upstairs bathroom. We had a full cellar. That meant that the cellar was as big as the first floor of the house. It ran completely underneath the house. In the cellar was a washer ( we didn't get a dryer until much later), large wash sinks, a smaller workspace for my father, and in an space covered by earth (not under the house itself) was a large rootcellar where my mother kept the fruits and vegetables that my father grew in the garden and on the fruit trees surrounding our house and then my mother canned using a pressure cooker so that we would have fruit and vegetables all year round.

That was our cozy little house. The outside of the house was still quite unfinished, particularly the stonework around the twin picture windows. With only one bathroom and our water coming from a water well that my grandfather had located with a divining rod ( a willow stick split partly in two, which the "diviner" held and when the single branch moved downward as he walked the grounds, it "told" him where there was enough water to dig a water well). Since we had to conserve water, my mother bathed my brother and me (later also my sister) in the same tub together. That's how I found out that boys and girls are made differently.