Category: Vintage Memories

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The Library in My Woodland

My parents bought their 80-acre Butler Township Farm in 1952 from Elizabeth Ramsdell. Her husband, Ray Ramsdell had passed the year before, and Elizabeth did not want to keep up the farm herself. After selling the farm on land contract to my parents, she moved to a huge home on Washington Street with her sister, another widow or perhaps an unmarried woman. I simply remember them as “elderly” and looking back, I find they were younger than I am now!
 
I remember going with my mother every month to make the farm payment to Mrs. Ramsdell. The Washington Street house was a typical late 19th century, Victorian home. While Mother had tea with the ladies in the parlor, I was allowed to close the 10 foot pocket doors on two sides of the grand foyer and let my imagination run wild on each step of the massive open stairway and landings to the huge, probably unused, upstairs. Closed doorways throughout the wide hallways held stories I could only imagine, hopefully saved for another day. For about an hour a month, I visited airplanes and railroad cars, hospitals and hotels, and mansions and palaces. 

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I hear the Master whisper . . .

I drive past it nearly every day, on my way somewhere. Today, though, I pull over and park my car in the lot, now overlaid with weeds. I look at the church – an unkempt building that has been empty for many years now – and I listen. No music flows through its closed windows.  No children laugh or play on the rotted teeter-totter in its side yard. No pastor preaches from its pulpit. Instead, I hear the sounds of the country – the birds, the leaves kissing the breeze, a tractor in the distance,

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Mother’s Day

I remember when her mother died. Mom’s heart was broken, and I thought I understood.  Soon after, Mom and I and my daughters went to a Mother/Daughter Banquet to celebrate Mother’s Day. I was celebrating her – my mother, and I told her so. But Mom was not celebrating. Her heart was broken from the loss of her own mother, my Grandma Locke. And again, I thought I understood.

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Treasures from the Woodshed

Daddy and Mama bought the big yellow house when I was 13 months old. Surrounded by red barns, white board fences, chicken coops, and corn cribs, the house sat on 80 acres of fields, pastures, and woods, bordering a creek. They paid $10,000 for it. Grandpa Nutt said they’d never live to see it paid! But my Grandpa was wrong.

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