Saratoga

Enid was about two years old when we moved to Uncle Benny's little yellow house in Saratoga.  We were desperately poor and had no way to pay  rent.  We didn't have much money for anything including food.  That spring it was so bad that we had virtually nothing.  While Dad searched for work, Ma scoured the fields for plants we could eat.  She became and expert on wild foods.  We ate dandelion greens, milk weed greens and anything else she could find. 

One day she only found a few small milk weed leaves.  She boiled these up for the baby while the rest of us looked on in envy.  The next day we went to town to try to get welfare.  It was very hard to do this.  They were very nasty to our parents.  Years later, Ma said she was really glad when one of us who couldn't wait any longer peed on the woman's floor.  We didn't get much.  I think she gave Ma twenty dollars,  but Dad found work shortly after.  It wasn't much, but it held us together for awhile longer.

I   was six and a half, maybe seven the summer before I started school.     It was on top of a hill at the edge of the woods.  I loved those woods and the sand dunes behind the house.  We were warned constantly to be wary of the snakes.  I think I saw a grass snake once, but never the huge timber rattlers that were supposed to live there.

Besides snakes the woods were full of wild flowers.  It is the only place in the world where I have ever seen brown throated violets.  There were trillium, wake robins, purple and yellow and white violets as well as the brown ones, adder's tongue, Hepatica, may apple, butter and eggs, Dutchmen's breeches, and if you looked in the right spot you could see a pink moccasin flower. 

Along the side of the house and in the dunes, you could find the usual buttercups, Indian paintbrushes, daises, asters, Timothy and snake grass.   We had a lot of fun with the Timothy.  We played horsie with anyone dumb enough to cross our path.  We'd tell them to chomp down on the stem of the hay and then we'd pull it through their mouths so fast  that all the seeds and hairy stuff remained in their mouths. 

A long time ago, Uncle Benny left an old blue pickup truck parked in the sand dunes.  Over the years, inch by inch it filled with luscious woodvine, brilliant green in early summer changing like the maples to vibrant yellow, orange and then red in the fall.  It was so beautiful when I visited there ten years ago, that I took a photo of it, just an old blue truck with a little rust and a lot of big green leaves growing out of the motor and bed.

One particularly hot afternoon that summer, we were returning from Fort Edward with the groceries.  Dad drove an old blue car.  For some reason Dad always bought blue or green cars.  The car died at the bottom of a hill.  No matter what he tried, and my Dad knew everything about cars and he tried it all, the car would not start.  We were three steep hills from the nearest gas station and four steep hills from home.  We had no money left to get it fixed anyway.  So we left everything in the car and trudged homeward, an old man, his wife and five little girls.  I think my dad must have been born old because I don't remember him any other way.

Walking was very tiresome after the first hill.  We trudged onward.  There was nothing else to do.  Dad carried Sue when she got tired and Ma carried Enid who was the baby at the time.  This was over forty years ago and there weren't many cars on the road so we walked mostly in the road to avoid the snakes.  I don't think a car passed us at all that day.

I worried most about the soda.  In New York it's soda in Ohio it's pop, but right then it was Pepsi.  It came in twelve ounce glass bottles in a six pack with three packets of paper straws tucked inside.  Two straws came in the packet and we shared.  That Pepsi was so cold and buzzy, we loved it.  We liked to take a mouthful and hold it without swallowing, enjoying the tingly feeling as long as we could.  I hoped we locked the doors so nobody would steal it.  We fell asleep that night dreaming of the Pepsi we didn't get to drink.

The next day, Dad got a neighbor to take him back for the groceries and to push the car home.  We put the bottles in a galvanized wash tub of cold well-water to try to cool them.  We didn't have an ice box.  They called them Frigedaire's then, although that's really a brand name.  I don't think we even had electricity in that house. 

Dad fixed the car himself.  Back then you could take car parts apart, clean them with gasoline and fix them your self if you had any brains at all.  My Dad could fix anything.  He knew every part on his cars.  He had probably had to fix them all at one time or another. 

Now, you take it to a mechanic who tells you that you need a whole new expensive part and he's going to charge you thirty dollars an hour to put it in, because you are probably too stupid to do it yourself.  You wouldn't be that stupid, but by not fixing your own car, you lose the knowledge of how things work.  Car manufacturers have planned it that way.  Remember, they make those parts and sell expensive books to mechanics explaining how to make the most money off a repair on their cars.

One day in the early fall, just before school started, a fire truck pulled up our hill followed by a dozen or so cars.  They told us the other side of the woods was on fire and they had to enter this side to put it out.  If it got this far, we'd have to evacuate. 

I saw a woman grab two teenage boys, each by an ear and twist them while they screamed and turned red.  She ordered them to quit rubber necking and get home.  I told ma.  She said people got excited when there was a fire.  The firemen got it out before it got to our side.  There were so many cars in the driveway, we couldn't have got out anyway.

We ate outdoors a lot.  We had a big old round worn out oak table under the trees.  It was cooler there.  Ma usually made macaroni salad with tuna fish and peas.  We played games on the table.  Sometimes I just sat there for hours daydreaming and swatting mosquitoes until it would get too dark or the bugs too fierce.

Ma got pregnant while we lived there.  It was a boy, but he was stillborn.  Mama almost bled to death on the way to the hospital.  She bled all over the backseat of our neighbor's new car, but he said it didn't matter.  His wife brought us over a beautiful cake the next day.  I remember it because it had blue flowers on it.

 Mama said the baby died because that night when she got to the hospital, the doctor told the nurse to give her a shot to stop her labor.  He said he didn't have time to bother with her now because he had promised his wife to take her to the theater.  They told Ma  our brother drowned in her blood about an hour before he was born.

  They wouldn't let her give him a name.  He had one because I remember Mama embroidering tiny nightgowns and shirts. The name she put was Dan'l. It was after a character in the Tarzan comics. He's buried at the feet of Uncle Jimmy Baker who was killed in WWII.  They are in Union Cemetery in Fort Edward.

In the late fall, Dad set trap lines to make money.  He would bring home muskrats mostly, but occasionally a mink or an ermine.  He'd skin them and stretch their hides on wire frames to dry in the sun.  One time he didn't get to the skinning till after supper.  He couldn't find one of the muskrats.  Ma found it in our doll carriage dressed in a nighty and hat.

I remember an older woman and man with a young boy who used to visit.  I don't remember their last names, but he was Dick, she was Pearl and the boy was Bobby.  They lived in Saratoga at this time, but I remember them visiting us on the farm.  They were Dad's friends. 

Pearl took the picture of us girls lined up in the pasture with me sitting down contemplating my feet.  I had one hand behind me with a bag of marshmellos held fast.  If I didn't hold tight to them Bobby would eat them all and we wouldn't get any.  Bobby was one of those kids who got whatever he wanted. 

His father was the same way.  We always had to take him to some place in the country where he could get condensed sweetened milk for his coffee.  You couldn't buy it in stores then.  I remember listening to the car radio playing Mockingbird Hill and singing along.  Ma used to sing then, too. 

I thought they were rich because they bought whole rolls of cold meats, not just a pound or two of slices.  When we visited them, they would say they were sorry they didn't have anything to offer us to eat, while Bobby was sneaking in the kitchen to cut great slabs of meat that he stuffed quickly into his mouth.  He knew we were watching and he laughed at us while he did it.

The Christmas we spent at Uncle Benny's was not too memorable.  We didn't have much, but the welfare gave us each a pair of red rubber boots that Ma wrapped up in newspapers and put under the tree for us. 

We still had to eat that traditional bowl of oatmeal before we could open our meager gifts.  A fly lit in mine and swam around in the milk.  Dad said we couldn't afford to waste it and he made me eat it, the oatmeal, not the fly. 

The week before Anna and Millie took me to school with them for the Christmas party.  I hadn't started school, yet and it was a wonderful time for me. The teacher let us take the tree home with us, because we couldn't afford one. 

I started school that fall.  It was a one room school house down the road, just off the main highway.  Our teacher's name was Miss Sparling.  By spring, we had moved to Fort Edward to a different kind of life.