by Alice Fitzgerald Wood

Page 5

In the east farmhouse they had stored the bicycle which belonged to Grandma’s oldest child, James Bennett, who was drowned in the old Erie Canal back of the business section of Holley. He was boarding in the big house on the corner of State Street and Bennetts Corners Road. He went swimming after a big meal and sank to the bottom of the canal and never came up. Simon Downey finally located his body. Grandma never recovered from the tragic death of her two sons. Just before she died she made Aunt Edie promise to destroy the bicycle so it could never be ridden by anyone else. I can remember helping her take it apart, and we took it down into the woods and scattered it around in far flung places. They would tell of Uncle Benny walking in his sleep, and one time he rode this bike down the stairway, which had added to Grandma’s dread of it.

Out in the woodshed there was a corner cupboard which held the rattles from a Masasaga (Mississauga) snake or swamp rattler that Uncle Johnnie had killed in the swamp. The old square stove, the first my great grandmother ever had, was in this wood shed. It had been in the kitchen but Mother had put her newer model stove there. They always used the old one in summer to keep the kitchen cooler. Wood was the only fuel. I remember helping Daddy fill the woodshed in the fall for winter use. My toys were always kept in the lower half of the kitchen cupboard. I spent hours there playing. Sometimes Adah Lusk came and how she would hungrily eat the cream candy drops that were kicking around amongst my toys. I had all I wanted at any time and she seldom had any. I had so many lovely dolls and toys but when I was twelve I suddenly felt all grown up and foolishly gave them away to Linnet Jackson. How I have bitterly regretted it since. I also left my China headed doll there when Mother and I left. It has since disappeared. I was quite small when I came downstairs one morning, and espied a small white fuzzy teddy bear in Grand daddy's arms. How I loved it! I still have it. It is pretty dingy now but still precious. It was one of the original teddy bears named for Theodore Roosevelt. They are a collector’s item now.

Speaking of T.R., in later years one of his closet friends and fellow wild game hunter in Africa was Carl Akeley (first named Clarence), son of Webb Akeley. He was born on what is now called "Reamer Road" near the Glidden Road. When they were boys, and my Uncle Benny were pals and they did his first mounting of animals together.

I remember the old barn and helping Daddy, (Grandfather McCormick) by turning the fanning mill. I would find mice nests and carry them into the house in my apron, I soon took them back!

I remember old Judy. The parameters on the Hall Road gave Aunt Mabel a pair of kittens before I was born. They were Punch and Judy, Punch ran away, but Judy lived for 13 years with an average of 3 batches of kittens a year. She would mother anything even my skunks. One winter she disappeared for three weeks and at the end of that time she came back half starved with on foot rotted off in a trap. She lived to be chloroformed by Mother in 1911.

As a tiny child I smelled chloroform which they had got to kill a cat. I began to feel faint and thought I would die like the cats so I asked Grandma to hold me and rock me and I lay in her arms and waited to die. When I began to feel better I thought it wasn't meant to be. Grandma didn't know what was the matter until a long, long time afterwards. When I was little I liked snakes. I would see one in the yard and try to reach it. When they would drive it away I would sit in the middle of the floor and cry "I wanna nake! I wanna a nake!" Boy, how I have changed! My fascination for snakes nearly resulted disastrously when I was quite small. Mother and I were visiting Alice Johnson in Byron. They had given me a dish of water and clothe to play with at the bottom of the kitchen steps by the cistern wall. Mother stood back of the screen watching me. When she saw me reaching for something she assumed it was for the washcloth, but a second look showed her a strange colored snake with its head weaving from side to side gliding toward me. She grabbed me and closed the screen door just as the snake struck it on the outside. Mrs. Johnson killed it and when the men came up from the barn they said it was a rare poisonous snake seldom ever seen in this part of the country.

One of my pleasantest recollections is of the wonderful sweet cool water from the well, which Grandfather was so proud of. Then there was the wonderful berry patch (black raspberries) at the east place. Mother picked and sold them to earn a little badly needed cash. She also made delicious butter from old Toby. This cow would jump any fence and even take down bars. She always had her head tied to one front foot. How Daddy would laugh when she began cavorting around Uncle Ed Cook until he tried to climb an apple tree. Uncle Ed had been a ward of Great-grandfather Lusk.

I remember the long winter evenings when Mother would pop corn and Daddy (I always called my Grandfather "Daddy or Papa") would go down cellar and bring up the wonderful apples which grew in the old orchard back of the house. There grew the 20 oz., Pumpkin Russets, Spys, Pippins and all the good old fashioned kinds. In the fall there were the strawberry apples, Detroit Red, Talman Sweets, Lady Blush, later the Sheep Nose in the west yard and down the path. Also the butternut trees which grew in a straight line by the road on a line with the maples and locust tree which were planted by my Great-grandfather. Also the black walnut back of the house behind "the down the hill place" which is almost a thing of the past now. I remember the frost "plums" on the edge of the garden, which weren't good until after a frost. I used to fill my coat pocket with crackers and climb the tree and play camping out and living on plums and crackers with the snow falling around me. I remember the row of everlasting onions in the garden. How good they were in the spring! I have some of them in my garden now just for old times' sake.

I remember the time I found a nest of skunks in the hay mow. I brought them into my Grandmother, who was in bed. Tho’ blind she knew by the feel that they weren’t the pretty black and white kittens I said they were. I quickly put them back in the mow but played with them all summer. Finally I saw two by the barn wall one day and ran to pick them up. They had passed the safe age and I was saturated with "skunk" odor. I remember the folks threatening to bury me, and I thought they meant it. I was bathed in camphor – hair and all.

When I was small John Rexinger, who bought the place from the family in the early 1920's, was the hired man and I was very fond of him and tagged him all over. He remembers it and was telling his sister about it this summer. He sold the place to Egbert Seifert in 1953.

While living on the farm I attended two schools. I started out at Cowles District. My first teacher was Miss Quinn, whom I adored. The next was Miss Fawcett whom I remember principally for her limp and the lecture I got from my mother when I imitated her walk. It was a lesson in kindliness toward other’s infirmities that I never forgot. Then there was Dan St. John, who ranted and raved; some threatened to carry and umbrella to ward off the spray of saliva. I'll never forget the time he sprung the following question: "Which is heavier a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?" We all answered in unison, "A pound of lead". All but McKinley Putnam. He quietly said, "They are the same. A pound is a pound." I thought he was the smartest, cleverest boy alive. Then there was Carrie Harris who lived across the road from me. We were two good friends and chums to be on the level of teacher and pupil.

Then there was Miss Alberts who had been teaching for years. She was a kindly old lady who seldom left her desk. I guess it was her chance to rest because at home she did the work of a man even to a team behind a plow. I remember the older pupils there. Nellie and Lillian Chugg, Carrie and Emogene Eggers, Frank Putnam and McKinley, Clarence, Ross, Norris Smith, the Jenks. Scores of others whose faces are clear but their names are gone for the moment. The book cupboard is where I got my first taste of literature: "Knights of King Arthur," "Robinson Crusoe," "Swiss Family Robinson", etc. I read every book in that cupboard avidly. I remember the common water pail and one oozing with slime. One of the boys had to cross the road to the Henry Cowles' place for water. There was a family by the name of Bert Unger who lived there. They had a daughter, Lottie with whom I was very chummy at one stage of the game. We used to buy maple sugar from them until one spring one of the younger boys fe11 into a tub of sap which they immediately emptied into the boiler to boil down. There was Esther Lenk, adopted daughter of Mades Lenk who lived on the Cook farm across from the Jacksons. We were inseparable for years. Then good old Adah Lusk, who quietly went her way, always ready to welcome my company when I got ready to com back to her. She and her baby brother, Fred, along with her father, Adin, and Mary would visit us and bring her grandmother Electa Lewis Lusk. She was a helpless cripple with arthritis for over 25 years. The Shaker rocker that I gave Alice belonged to her mother in 1789. 1 used to lake a shortcut through Jackson's yard and orchard to school with always a wary eye out for their big peacock that would sometimes chase me. I remember how famished I would be after school and would rush into the pantry to make myself a sour pickle and bread and butter sandwich or sometimes one with some of Mother's currant and raspberry jelly. Sometimes in the late fall or early winter I couldn't wait to get home and I'd dig the frozen Russet apples out from under the snow and eat them.

In 1912-1913, my last year in a country school, was spent at Bennett’s Corners. Mother took me out of the other school because she felt that Miss Margaret Cooley was better qualified to get me ready for Regents, that was a very happy year. She did her job well and I entered Holley High School that fall with all my Regents exams passed, except history, which I finished in January. This school was out of our district, but the trustees very kindly refused to take tuition from Mother because they knew how hard every penny came.

Mama or Grandma or sometimes one of my aunts would come upstairs and help me on with my slippers and "kimona" as it was called (never bathrobe). I would hurry downstairs too excited to breathe properly. The first proof was the pungent smell of cedar as we opened the stair door. To me there is no tree for Christmas except the flat leaf cedar because that is the one I remember. I never hung up my stocking. Who could be bothered with a stocking when I knew fairyland would be transplanted into the parlor every Christmas Eve? Then in silent awe I would walk toward the parlor oblivious to the happy smiles around me. I know now of something of what they felt when I know how my girls and their children enjoy their Christmases. It didn't seem then or now as though they have the thrill of my Christmases, because they have too much to do with the preparation. It seems as if it takes away the sheer magic and mystery.

After the first shock of wonderment I would rush forward to take first one, then another, of my gifts from the tree, which sat in the middle of the room in a crock filled with coal. Its branches were festooned with tinsel and ornaments. Streamers ran to each corner of the room. Bells at all the windows. The gifts were never wrapped but just laid on the branches or on the floor underneath. There was no need for paper and tags because the tree was exclusively mine. The family presents were on the cherry table in the sitting room. The parlor was mine and I reigned supreme. I'll never forget the year my little Morris chair sat underneath the tree with my big doll in it. How I bragged that my doll came way up under my arm in height! Is it any wonder I defied all doubters at school? I guess I knew there was a Santa Claus. Didn't I find a letter from him telling me that he had heard I had a hole in the toe of my stocking and he was leaving me a thimble and sewing kit? After New Years on a day when I wasn't around, everything would be cleaned up, and Santa was given the ornaments to use another year. I never knew where they were kept. Then would begin another eternity until the next magic morning. I wish I could tell them all what their efforts have meant to me and how the memory will live with me always. When Wentworth tells of his bleak and meager Christmases I could cry. There are so many things I wish I could make up to him.