Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: April 30th, 2014

In the middle of September, we moved into the new house in Kentuck.  The Barnes the same day moved into our old place on Date Street.  The place was a lot different from what we eventually became used to.  First, the Barnes had had a truck farm.  When I think of it, they were living from hand to mouth and so were probably glad to get a good price for the place.  They were getting too old for the life style.  The house at the time had five rooms.  You entered what we called the back door and into a small kitchen.  There was no refrigerator, the stove was a cook stove and used wood.  Next to it was a tiny door leading into the dining room and from there a small door leading into the living room or the front room.  The main entry was there into the living room.  There was a nice porch and the windows looked out over the lower fields and the bay, just as they always did.  Upstairs were two bedrooms joined by a hallway with the only storage place in the house for keeping bedding and so on.  Both upstairs bedrooms had walk in closets, although they were small.  There was no indoor bathroom.  The floor was rough planks.  The stairway to go upstairs and downstairs was a big set of stairs that ended up taking up about a third of the living room.  I loved that staircase because it had a neat bannister that you could slide down.  The house was heated with a wood stove in the living room, that never changed.  Naturally, in the winter, the living room was overheated and the other rooms were pretty cold so you had a tendency to more or less doze off in the living room.  Across the way from the kitchen was a small hut, the wood shed and then farther down in the direction of the creek was the outhouse.  It was quite a ways away and I can remember sitting there in the outhouse screaming all through, all through, and mom not being able to hear me.  One thing mom did demand, though, and that was toilet paper for the outhouse.  Most people ordered things from catalogues, the Sears and Roebuck Catalogue, referred to just as Sears, and the Montgomery Ward Catalogue, pronounced Monkey Ward.  I was pretty old when I found out that Monkey Ward was really Montgomery Ward.  So, instead of toilet paper, people used the pages of the catalogues.  That was OK as long as you were on the soft, yellowish page, but was pretty grim when you got down to the shiny white pages.

To get to the place, there was a road and half way down the driveway was a big garage.  That is where the car was left.  If you had to drive down to the house, there was a road that ended right at the house, muddy and miserable as it was, easy to get stuck in, and then you had to back up.  The first thing that mom did was have Uncle Dick come with his caterpillar and bulldoze out the turnaround and then she had the gravel people gravel the road on down.  That was much better.  The gravel cost a little but the bulldozing did not.  They did a lot on a shoestring and were willing to ask other people to help them out for free.

They did have electric lights, though.  Half the place was in vegetable gardens and when they left, they left all that.  On the North side of the house were two chicken coops and a large chicken yard with a small shed for keeping mash and chicken feed and so on.  Down over the hill, everything up to about where that row of holly trees (which at that time did not exist) were vegetables.  The Barnes left the place just after the harvest was over, except for the corn.  Right where those holly trees were, though, was a fence and on the other side of the fence is where the live stock was kept.  There was also a small barn with three stalls with electricity.  The stalls were for the horse, the cow, and a heifer.  The main area was where hay and oats were kept and just as you entered the barn was a separator for separating out the cream from the milk.  Just down from the barn was a pig sty where the big porkers were kept.  My recollection was that there were six of those big things, rather scary, too, for a little boy.  I liked the cows and the horse, but those big things bothered me.  We started to eat them right away.  The butcher in town, a Mr. Keltner would butcher and wrap pigs and cows and whatever else if you gave him the hide.  There were about two hundred chickens, too, and we immediately started to eat those.  I have no idea what the folks did with all those eggs, but mom did gather the eggs every morning.  Down in the pasture was the beginning of a house, it had been framed, that was originally intended as a place for the parents of one of the Barnes.  It was never finished.

I remember going down there with pop and Bob and we went in there and the bees and wasps came out and stung us like crazy and we were screaming and pop grabbed us, one under each arm, and ran up to the house.  Remember that nasty trap between those old golf greens, I think between the holes four and five?  Well, that was where the house was to be.  In the middle of the pasture was a big swamp.  This is also the time when we started to come up with all our names.  Going up the hill toward the East side of the house where the badminton court was became “up yonder” and down the hill became “down below”.  Pop once went across the crick and up where he could get a view of the place and that area became “over on the hill”.   Between the Selvors’ place and our place was an area that has now been condemned and it was called “the lost canyon”.  To the South of the place, way over, was an area that was not used and had been heavily logged but was growing up.  That became “the alder grove”.  Bob and I immediately started naming things.  So there was my cherry tree, my apple tree and his cherry tree and his apple tree and so on.  Early on, Don Perry shot a digger squirrel that was sitting on a stump and that became the gray digger stump.  We had names for everything.  So, that is what the place looked like and what the folks found.  To take a bath, mom got out an old wash tub, heated water on the wood cook stove, the washtub was in the living room, she poured water into the tub and onto you.  The creek was used as a refrigerator.  But I will tell more later.

To be continued.