At Home in Curryville

Our Curryville house was humble, but it was a fun and love-filled place.

The cellar was alive. The coal bin, the raised bins for potatoes. Many shelves held hundreds of jars with canned peaches, pears, tomatoes, tomato juice, beans of many varieties, corn, pickled beets and jellies. A mix of any vegetables left after the final harvest were pickled. A little turmeric was added to make it yellow, and we called that Piccadilly. There were often large crocks of sauerkraut and root beer. Dad and Fred dug under the kitchen which expanded our cellar. A ping pong table filled that space and gave us years of fun.

Our bedrooms were on the second floor. There was a large double room where we kids slept. When I was too old to be in the same bedroom with the boys I was moved to the guest room. That was a beautiful small room with an amazing double gold brass bed and blond Hollywood-style dressers to match. Dad built me a clothes closet and I was in heaven. One day I decided to make my bed more modern. I got dad’s metal saw and sawed off the top of the bed and turned the bed around so there wasn’t a bottom rail. The edges where I cut were sharp so I tied hankies over them to keep from tearing the covers. When I got older, I realized that I had ruined a beautiful piece of furniture and probably the most valuable thing we owned. I asked mom and dad why they never scolded me for doing that. They said, “Because you were not intending to do anything wrong.” That is an example of how I was raised.

When it rained, the first water off the roof went down the spouting into a cistern by the back porch under a large grape arbor. After the roof was washed off good, a lever was turned and that clean water went into the second cistern. This was our drinking and cooking water. The water in the other cistern was used to wash our clothes, water the flowers, and could be pumped at our kitchen sink for washing dishes, etc.

The back porch had a church bench. A special thing happened there. Transients (then they were called bums) would come for a drink of our good water. We invited them to sit on our porch. If dad was around, he would have them sharpen our lawn mover blades or do some odd jobs. Sometimes we gave them clothes. If it was meal time, we kids would fight over who got to give their meal to the bum. The excitement of being able to feed a hungry man was somehow instilled in us. We felt so lucky that the bums had marked our house as a welcoming place.

“There is no better exercise for strengthening the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.”