For part of my childhood, from about age four or five, to my ninth year, we lived in the coal town of Larksville, at its edge. We neighborhood kids always had friends because almost every family had children. I remember Dorothy, Mildred, Connie, Dolores, Elaine...
We would play the games or pastimes appropriate to our ages, and we'd always come home covered with the grime that kids in coal towns usually have on them. The fine coal dust sifts down on our porches, the porch railing, the steps leading down to the ground, the unpaved streets, our little wagons and other pull-toys, our clothing, and ourselves.
Sometimes we played in the dirt, making little roads with our fingers, or piling up the soil/dirt to make little hills. We would also walk along the culm bank up the hill from our school, and you could call that real grime, because a culm bank is the residual from coal mining. Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're like little mountains.
Sometimes we were asked by our parents to go to the culm bank and try to find a few pieces of coal for our coal stove. One of my little girlfriends lived right next to a culm bank, and we would play on her porch, and under her porch behind the lattice-work with our little shovels, or our dollies, or pretending to hide. We'd also put on a little show, the two of us, one of us sitting on their porch swing, as the audience, and the other a few feet away, singing, or reciting a poem we learned in school, or acting out a bit of something, like cooking, or reading a book, or writing on an imaginary blackboard.
Another girlfriend and I would color to our heart's content on the porch, or in the house, and it was usually a coloring book with line drawings. I don't remember ourselves drawing pictures to color. It was always a coloring book. Such beloved coloring pages! One of my very favorites was a little house with flowers in the front of the house, a fence, and a gate. The flowers were quite often hollyhocks, as they were very popular in those days. I still LOVE fences and gates!
During those years, we moved at least three times that I know of. While we lived in the last place, I was getting to the age of being able to go to the mid-block store for my mom or dad, in the evening. One that I remember was probably not even an eighth of a mile from our back door to her front door. There was an evening that I went to the store to get some baloney for my dad's lunch for the early morning departure to work at the nearby coal mine. I had the flashlight in my hand since it was dark already, and in our dirt alley to the dirt street, I was bending down with the light shining onto the ground, very close. I don't know what I was doing that for, maybe to see all the tiny pebbles and gravel, or just because... and a woman going by said, "What are you looking for? Night walkers?"
Night walkers are earthworms that the fishermen use as bait when they go fishing. Many of the men liked to go fishing on their time off from work. If it had rained, you might find earthworms crawling all over the alley, but usually one looks for night walkers in the grass or near the grass.
I came home with the baloney, and then I suppose I had to get ready for bed and say nighty-night. Everyone in those days liked baloney sandwiches. Sometimes the baloney was ground up and mixed with some pickle relish and mayonnaise, and it was a real favorite. Oooohh, I shouldn't have mentioned that, now I'm going to crave some of that baloney mix. Sometimes the housewife would fry the baloney in the frying pan and maybe have some potatoes to cook to go along with it. To fry a slice of baloney, you have to put a little cut in about four places along the outside of the circular slice, to prevent it from curling up.
On another street, Chestnut Street, there was a lady who ran a small grocery/candy store. She would make some Kool-Aid and fill the metal ice cube trays with the very popular beverage. Each ice cube would have a wooden popsicle stick put in it, and into the freezer they'd go. You could buy one of those luscious Kool-Aid popsicles for a penny. We would go to the store on a very warm day with our pennies, and get a popsicle for each of us. You'd suck on one corner, and the color would slowly disappear from that corner as you melted it in your mouth. Then on to the next corner. Such a wonderful treat for just a penny.
In our first house, we had a small apartment, and I think I may have been around four. My brother is a year and a half younger than I. He had locked himself in the bathroom. You know how children like to play with doorknobs. I think my aunt and uncle were living in the same house for a time, and all of the grown-ups were trying to figure out how to tell him to unlock the door, but apparently he was too young to do that. We had been having breakfast or lunch, and I remember how I brought his plate with a fried egg on it, wanting desperately for the grown-ups to give it to him. I don't know how they got him out of there, if they had to remove the hinges, or if someone located a key that would work. I wonder if he had thrown the key out the window? or down the toilet?
There was another incident involving my brother. At our second place, he made friends with Georgie, and they spent a lot of time together, with wagons, and doing lots of things that boys four to six do. He and Georgie were good buddies. Almost. For some reason, Georgie hit him in the forehead with a metal dustpan. The wound bled. Our mom took my baby brother into our house and fixed it up and my brother said vehemently, "I'm never going to play with him again!" The very next day, he and Georgie were good buddies again.
I'll see you at the Corner Post...
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