OUR BIRTHPLACE

We were all born and lived until we grew up in the house our father built in Daketown.

The main part of this white clapboard building with green shuttered blinds was square, with a low tin roof that made frightening thunder like roars when billowed by a hard wind. There were three bedrooms and a large hail upstairs. It's first floor had a large pantry, a bedroom and a sitting room with folding doors opening into a parlor. The front hail and kitchen were in a wing with a piazza running full length of it's southern and eastern exposures and a big woodshed on back. Outstanding as pieces of furniture in the sitting room were mamma's piano with it's green felt cover [that] she had embroidered in white silk [in] a grape and leaf design border, and Papa's secretary [that] Uncle Charlie Smith built of cherry lumber trimmed with coffin molding. Among the pictures hanging on the it's walls was Mama and Papa's wedding certificate and the motto "God Bless Our Home" that Mama had worked in worsted on perforated cardboard. During cold weather this room was kept warm overnight by big chunks that burned slowly in the wood stove. Mama's houseplants in the double south window thrived and had to be cut back when they shut out the light.

The sitting room ingrain carpet that had been swept with a broom every morning throughout the winter had to be taken up for a beating during spring house cleaning. By then the rye straw strewn on the floor and covered with newspapers before the carpet was laid and tacked down had been ground to bits and was so dusty it nearly choked to death those who cleaned it up. Whenever the room had to be papered, Papa took off the two inch black walnut molding that edged the woodwork [and] then nailed it back on again without splintering a strip.

We ate our meals in the kitchen and all drank from the dipper kept in the pail of well water that set on a bench back of the cook stove where we washed our face and hands. The family hair brush and comb were kept on the shelf under a looking glass that hung on the wall between the east window and an outside door with a nearby corner for hanging wraps and piling rubbers on the floor during cold weather.

Since we could never keep off the floor for the slow drying paints of those days to dry, it's pine planks bore marks of footfalls and plowings with the curved backs of wooden chairs that we used to make up a train of choo-choo-cars, when Papa was away. He said "I can't hear myself think when you make so much noise." If our hilarity kept us from hearing him come in, he'd out shout us by saying "What's going on here." That was our stop signal.