Mom’s Story, part 4, “I Could Write a Book”

J.P.Allison, a pastor on Sundays, sometimes at more than one church, and during the week a builder, father and resourceful provider.

Picking up from where we left off . . . in her writings, Mom remarked more than once about the two-room log house that had been abandoned and how her dad got it for the asking. He disassembled it, numbering the logs so he could put it back together the same way, borrowed a wagon and a team of horses, and moved it to the homestead.

Her words:

My Dad was pretty clever. The living room of the original house had had three windows. Instead of putting one in each of three walls as they had been before, Dad placed them in one wall, along side each other. It was a nice long window looking out on the “lawn.” Of native grass. 

Of course, it was never mowed. We didn’t have a mower.

They moved house more than once (literally):

Another house we lived in was moved from a nearby city. I can remember watching as they brought it into town. The electrical wires had to be lifted to clear the house. My folks always remarked that the moving did not cause even one hairline crack in the plaster.

Before the house was moved, a basement was dug and a foundation built so the house was set down on that. For some time the foundation just sat unfinished.

We moved into the house before the plumbing was connected. My dad made arrangements with a neighbor down the alley who had an outside toilet to use his. He apparently he did not have a bathroom in his house. It was right on the alley.

Hy came to visit me while we were still using that toilet. I was so humiliated. But it didn’t bother him. 

Also, for a long time there was no staircase built from inside the house down to the basement. It amazes me still that no one forgot and opened the door in the kitchen that led to the basement to find there were no stairs. Someone could have fallen to their death.

After those steps were built the basement was finished off well enough to use as a bedroom for my brothers. The coal furnace was there too. It was not forced air but something called a “pipeless furnace.” 

Between the living room and dining room there was an archway with built in bookcases. Between the two rooms was a big floor register, probably about four feet square, where the furnace heat came up to heat the whole house.

My mother would put chairs around the register to hang clothes on to finish drying when they had not gotten dry enough either outside or in the basement where she sometimes hung them. She called it her “chinese laundry” and was always embarrassed when people would come to the house. I was more than embarrassed. 

I should write a book. 

It would tell things like Little House on the Prairie.

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P.S. Vernon is still in a coma, just had pelvic surgery.
Updates here.