This seemed appropriate since today is Halloween....
My family lived next door to my great-grandparents for many years. During the summers, my sister and I would spend the day with the great-grandparents. Often times we would wake and once ready for the day, we would ride our bikes along the path that led from our house to theirs. During the school year, depending on mom and dad's schedule, Dad would drop us off in the morning before school.
I remember freezing in the morning in my pajamas (so maybe it was during Christmas break), being driven in the black of early morning down the road to their house. The super-large snow-flakes coming at the windshield like a swarm of killer bees.
Once there, I recall mostly the basement in the winter mornings. Grandpa was up and waiting for us. Grandma still a-slumber in their warm bed. As a way to keep it quiet for Grandma, Grandpa would usher us down the narrow gray-painted stairs to the warm basement. After stoking up the wood furnace, the games would commence. Grandpa was always a good sport. For little kids, it seemed so easy to keep us occupied. Who knew that you could sit for hours in a heated competition with your Great-Grandpa trying to drop clothes-pins onto the rim of a Mason jar? He always won.
And who knew the finding of a little silver thimble could be such fun, especially when you found it inside the hem of Grandpa's pant-leg or better yet, inside of his hairy ear!
The basement was a kind of eerie place to play for my sister and I. "Play" in the sense that it might be fun to play as long as we were together. Alone - not so much. It was dark. It was damp. During the winter it smelled of pungent stacked wood and smoke. In the summers it smelled of earth and dampness.
The creepiness started at the top of the stairs. It was an old house, so to begin with, the doors were all wood, stained dark, with glass knobs - and the old-fashioned keyholes. The kind that took a skeleton key. The stair case seemed very long and narrow and as soon as you cleared the floor above, it was an open stair case with just a railing on one side. For us kids, the whole scene? Just. Plain. Scary.
At the bottom of the stairs, to the right, was another wooden door. This door was the freakiest in the whole house! The same wooden door, but not as well cared for, so it seemed dull and dirty. And I think this one may have had a metal knob. On the other side of this door.... there was no light switch. You had to pull the string on the fixture in the middle of the room, and though the room was tiny, and an adult could probably have reached the string from the doorway, it seemed to a small child as though it were miles away - in the dark. The floor was dirt, and the narrow wooden shelves were lined with canned fruits and vegetables and meat. (Side note: I love canned meat! Great-grandma made the best mincemeat pies!) This small room always seemed to contain more than its fair share of cobwebs, too!
The deep freezers were located in the basement. These weren't so creepy. Not unless you spent too much time thinking about what might be inside....
There was also a little gray school desk. The kind of desk you would find in a one-room school house, where you needed the desk behind you so you'd have a seat to sit on. The hinged lid lifted to an interior that I'm sure some child-sized apparition kept its invisible slate board in. Also on top, was a hole that seemed a mystery for years, until we finally discovered that it was once for holding an ink pot. It always seemed to me as though it may have a ghostly school-aged spirit that sat there with it, waiting for class to start. When I went to the basement alone, I never passed to closely to this desk.
Helping Great-Grandma and Grandpa with the washing was something I'll always remember as a fun time. The actual washing of laundry is kind of a blur. But I certainly remember helping to wring the clothes!
The clothes would slosh in the washer and drain through a hose leading to a drain in the cement floor. Though very carefully watched - and probably helped - I was then allowed to feed the wet clothes though the electric wringer. I loved that job! They would come out on the other side as flat as a board and we would have to get them into the clothes basket and not on the floor. Then, depending on the season, we would either help hang the clothes outside on the line or inside on the line. I could be wrong, but I think I was pretty good at it.
Great-grandma may have thought different; but if she did, she never said.
Maybe next #throwbackthursday I'll concentrate on the magic of the small yellow kitchen. Until then: Happy Haunting!
