Last week we went on a picnic… Our financial advisor held a picnic outdoors under a tent in the parking lot. They handed out box lunches, and had a duo playing guitar and singing quietly in the background. It was nice.
We were first to sit at our table. Then we were introduced to a local pastor and his wife who sat down across from us. As we chatted, the places where we grew up became a topic of conversation. They spoke first and they said Columbia Heights and Fridley.
McKinley Street Northeast Minneapolis
I immediately responded I was familiar with that area because I grew up on 35th and McKinley… then Gordon, the pastor, said with much surprise, that he did too, until he was six years old! We discovered we lived four houses away from each other. He is four years older so I would have been two years old when his family moved away, but he did remember playing with my older brother and all the neighborhood boys his age. There were seven or eight of them!
He also said he remembered my mother, and her name, Ruby.
What a serendipitous moment. We were excited to discover this fact, and had fun reminiscing about that great neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis.
Later I asked my brother if he remembered Gordon, and he said yes… playing ball together.
Recently, in my writing session, I learned about a new (to me) writing pattern… syllables crescendo up and then decrescendo back down. In my poem that follows, I started with two syllables in the first line, and worked up to seven syllables, then repeated seven, and worked back down to two.
The house my dad built in northeast Minneapolis, where I grew up.
The prompt: Describe a day in the life of your childhood.
Get up.
Eat breakfast.
Do a few chores.
Go outside and play.
The neighborhood gang waits.
Play until it’s time for lunch,
then go out to play some more.
Go inside for supper.
Go out until dusk.
Then in, once more
Go to bed.
Repeat.
Obviously, this is exaggerated, but I do look back with fondness and gratefulness for my childhood. Which was so very different than my husband’s, who grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. His was a happy childhood, too.
My friend wrote a story about ants, which prompted a memory from my childhood involving ants. I grew up in northeast Minneapolis. Across the street from me lived my two best friends: Donna and Diane. This story, and many childhood memories, involve them. I don’t have many pictures of the three of us…but I found a couple pictures from Christmastime with the three of us and my brother.
This photo was taken in 1958 of my brother, Donna, Diane and me (L to R).
Here’s my story: Ants
I don’t remember whose idea it was to sneak treats up to the cabin, but we thought it would be a fun thing to do. My “partners in crime” were my best friends at the time, two sisters who lived across the street from me, Donna and Diane. Our parents were good friends…they met when there was a surge of families moving into a new neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis, in the early 1950’s.
We moved into the house my dad built when I was six months old, and I grew up there, with the same neighbors for the most part. There was a huge gang of kids in the neighborhood. And it was a fun place to grow up. I didn’t move out of the house my dad built, until after high school.
My parents had a large group of friends (with young families) that connected on a regular basis. They had coffee together, played bridge together, went camping together and rented cabins at the same resorts together. It was a family of friends. And Donna and Diane’s family, as well as mine, were a part of this group from the beginning.
Donna, Diane and I played together daily. We played outside, we had overnights, we played dress up, we played games, we had fun together, we grew up together. So, going up to a lake resort was a common outing for us. I now understand what a privilege it was to go to the resorts…but I guess since our family didn’t have a cabin – yet my parents wanted the cabin experience – the next best thing was to rent one.
As our parents planned another trip, we three girls planned our own shenanigans. I’m pretty sure we had enough to eat on these weekend get-aways, and probably more than enough snacks, so why we thought we needed to buy more snacks to sneak up to the cabin on this trip is a mystery. I know, at the time, we thought we were so clever and sneaky.
We must have pooled our allowance to get money to buy a few treats…maybe chips and cookies …I don’t remember anything other than the watermelon. And it was a half watermelon. Cut and wrapped in saran wrap. That’s a hard thing to sneak into a car, but we were determined.
When we got home from our grocery shopping excursion, we needed to hide the goods until the next morning when we were to leave for the cabin. So…we hid the snacks, including the half watermelon, in the bushes in Donna and Diane’s backyard. It made sense at the time…
Until the next morning when we took our pillows along to retrieve our treats and hide them in our pillow cases. What we discovered was a half watermelon, full, blackened even, with ANTS!
And we were so surprised!!! Little did we know the ants would show up. We learned a lesson that day…do not leave watermelon outside overnight under a bush – or anywhere!!! It’s a fun childhood memory.
This photo was taken in 1969…me, Diane, Donna and my brother (L to R).
Unfortunately, all of our respective parents have died, so we cannot get their take on this story.
I bought this orange art glass piece for my parents in the sixties.
A writing companion and I meet monthly. We assign exercises and come prepared the next month to share our work. One recent exercise was to write about a color, specifically it was: Blank is the color I remember.
I am posting my essay below…with photos. I went back to look for evidence of what I remembered….so I’ve included some pictures that I found.
The slide viewfinder surrounded by a few slides.
There were a couple of slides in the mix and I wondered how I could post them…then I thought to put them in our slide viewfinder and try taking a photo of the image inside the viewer. Much to my surprise it worked fairly well. So here goes…
Blank is the color I remember…
I have always loved color. And I enjoy collecting colored glass. There is evidence I liked it when I was younger too…In our living room I display an orange glass art piece I remember buying for my parent’s anniversary when I was a teenager…at the JCPenney store in Apache Plaza. It was on a glass shelf in the back corner of the store, by an outside door. It’s interesting to think I remember those few details so vividly.
However, what came to mind when I read the assignment “ Blank is the color I remember” I thought of the house I grew up in on McKinley Street in Northeast Minneapolis. My dad built the house and we moved into it in 1953 when I was six-months old. Of course, I don’t remember moving into it, but from when I can remember our house was painted a rose-pink color. How that color was decided I’ll never know, and unfortunately I can’t ask my parents anymore. I do know my mom always loved reds and pinks so I’m sure she had a lot of influence as to the color choice. I remember telling friends, when giving them directions to my house, “it’s the rose color one.”
Our rose colored house in the background. This is a picture from my confirmation. I am standing between my two grandfathers.
The color of our house never bothered me, and I really didn’t take notice if the color was out of place in the neighborhood but I think it must have been, especially when I remember the houses surrounding us in the new neighborhood. I would not choose to paint my house that color today.
Thinking of my rose colored house prompts a memory of the house directly across the street from that house; next door to our good friends the Soderman’s. It belonged to an old man and, as children, we thought is was kind of a scary place. There were tall bushes that lined both sides of his property and he lived alone in this shack; an old, scary, unpainted, one-room house (as I remember it).
The old one-room house in the background. It doesn’t look so scary in the photo. It must be getting ready to be demolished. The bushes on each side of the property have been taken down in this photo. That is me and my childhood friend…apparently going somewhere with large suitcases! This is a photo from the slide viewfinder.
The one-room house was off to one side of the property and a ways back from the street. I think we always subconsciously picked up speed when we walked by it. At one point in time the bushes were removed and the shack was torn down and a new house was built in its place. I wonder what happened to that man? Did he die? Did he move away? I don’t even know his name.
Which prompts me to remember the old play shack my dad and brother built for a playhouse in our own back yard. It was much smaller than our neighbor’s house across the street. It had a big open window (no glass) in front (and one on the side?) and a front door. The roof was slanted and it had a built-in ladder on the back where we could climb to the roof and sit and watch the neighborhood. I don’t remember the color of the shack but it wasn’t refined. I wonder if it was even painted? I wonder if there is a picture of it somewhere?
I found this slide showing the shack in our backyard. It was painted to match the house. This photo was taken from the slide viewfinder. In the foreground is my childhood friend and I sharing a rain coat!
The house of my childhood eventually got re-painted but I don’t know what year. My parents changed the color to gold. That was a little more conventional. With that gold color they also painted the wooden crank-up camper, my dad made…which matched the new 1965 Ford Galaxy my parents owned. It was a big deal getting a brand new car.
Me in the back of our house, painted gold.
The ’65 Ford Galaxy is the car we took (pulling the heavy wooden camper) on a road trip in to Yellowstone National Park. I remember feeding the bears (legit to do back then I guess) and one stood up on the car door with its paws inside the window nearest me (!) and left a scratch mark on the black, interior fabric…hmmm…
The bear through the window at Yellowstone National Park.
The bear in my window at Yellowstone National Park. I can’t believe I took a picture…well maybe I can. HA!
So the phrase “blank is the color I remember” took me on a fun, crazy path down memory lane and I found a few pictures to go along with the story.
