Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom (And Whimsy)

Posted on June 4, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with 4 comments

It’s good to be back home again!

 

“Our house is a very, very fine house,

With two cats in the yard,

Life used to be so hard.”

Our House – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

I was out for my daily walk last week. There was a time when I would have chosen a walk in the woods but with the infestation of ticks in recent years, I tend to stick to paved and graveled roads. There is one exception. On the campus of St. Francis Xavier University, there is a lovely trail system that was originally designed for cross country running but has become a popular walking trail for locals. The path is well trodden with no high grass where ticks can lurk.

As I exited this trail, I found myself in the backyard of the home where I spent my early childhood. The house has been a rental property for some years. There were three men on the back deck chatting. They were doing some renovations. I walked past the house and then spun around. I asked the men if it would be ok if I took a walk through the house.

And just like that, I found myself in a place I last inhabited 64 years ago. Of course, the memories poured out.

Here is an excerpt from my upcoming autobiography:

Three bedrooms. Nine bodies. You do the math. There was a bedroom for Mom and Dad.  That left two bedrooms for the seven of us. The boys’ room (for 5) had two bunk beds and a single bed while the girls’ luxuriated in a small room with a single set of bunks. No wonder we all became lousy sleepers. At the top of the stairs, leading to the bedrooms, there was a large floor grate to allow heat to travel upstairs from the living room. Of course, this provided an excellent opportunity for me and my siblings to occasionally eavesdrop on our parents’ conversations.

I attribute the punctuality gene to the above-mentioned bathroom. Our mom ruled the house like a sergeant major. If you happened to be playing in the woods behind our house and supper was at 5:00, then 5:00 it was. Nothing stood (knelt) in the way of the rosary. And when it was your turn to use the bathroom on a school morning, pity help the poor child who didn’t march down the hall on time. With so much demand and so little time, you either showed up for your turn in the bathroom or you were shit out of luck.

It is astonishing to think about the workload of our mother and the other mothers on the street. Most of them rose long before the sun made its appearance. With store bought bread expensive, most of these women made homemade bread every day. Arriving home from school, the wonderful smell of bread just out of the oven wafted throughout the house. How discouraging it must have been for Mom to watch several loaves of toil vanish in a heartbeat.

Laundry was another thankless job. Automatic washers and dryers hadn’t appeared in stores yet, so clothes were laboriously processed in a wringer washer and the clothes were hung out to dry in all seasons. The wringer washer served another purpose. When not in use, it was used as a wheelbarrow, as one of the smaller kids were placed in the tub and wheeled around the living room. On bitterly cold days in the winter, the clothes stood stiffly at attention on the clothesline. Trying to match socks must have been a challenge.

Never far away from the washing machine was the diaper pail. There were no such things as disposable diapers back then. Every home had a shelf dedicated to cloth diapers. When one of the children had done their “business”, the soiled diaper had to be rinsed, by hand, in the toilet. The wet, soggy diaper was then tossed into a large pail to be stored in safe keeping for next laundry day. With several little ones in diapers at any one time, the diaper pail was always overflowing. It is a miracle that none of us were asphyxiated with the malodorous smells emanating from the pail.

We weren’t Pampered, literally or figuratively.

Because there were so many of us crammed into such a small space, when an illness struck, it roared through the house like a California wildfire. The small den downstairs was the unofficial sick bay. I can still remember lying there with the smell of Friar’s Balsam emanating from a hot plate to assist with croup. When we had chicken pox, Mom would toss us in the bathtub filled with water and corn starch and pour this itch- reducing potion over our bodies with a plastic measuring cup. And who can possibly forget the cure-all for a bad cold: a large dollop of Vick’s Vapo Rub with a towel wrapped around our necks. The towel was fastened with a large diaper pin. The one Mom used had a pink tip. The smell of the Vicks and the comfort of the towel was offset by the abject terror of the diaper pin. Firstly, considering where that pin was normally fastened, one wondered if the pin might transmit some germs. The bigger fear was that the pin would snap open while we were sleeping, piercing our jugular, bringing us one step closer to God. Anxiety, disease, paranoia, and insomnia wrapped up into one neat package.

After completing my brief tour, the thing that surprised me the most was how small this house was. I simply can’t imagine how 9 people could inhabit such a small space without grievous bodily harm inflicted.

As I was leaving the house, I stopped to chat with one of the workers. He came from a family of 13 and he grew up in a three-bedroom house with no central heating. When winter set in, the children would write their names on a frost covered window. The signature would remain there until spring.

Yes, “Life used to be so hard” but ask any child growing up at that time and they would tell you, “Those were the best days of my life” (Bryan Adams).

Have a great weekend.