Wolfe's on Route 4
We moved to Wolfe's on Route 4 outside Fort Edward. Stuff
happened there for sure. Maybe I was just getting older and could remember more.
The Wolfe's owned a little gas station with a store
beside the house. They also owned and rented to us the house next door to them
for a while. I think we lived there for at least a year. I remember both summer
and winter there. They had 3 kids, two boys and a girl. I don't remember much
about the girl. She didn't play with us. I think they treated her like she was
the little princess with long blonde curls.
The older boy, Larry was about Anna's age I think. Millie
and Anna felt it was their job to heckle him and for sure I had no problems with
that. I didn't like him. I don't know why. He was creepy.
We had an old canvas and wood lounge chair on the front
porch. One day they got him to sit in it knowing what they could do with that
chair. He sat down in it with a big smile on his face and Millie touched the
back of the chair. It flipped and he wound up on his back on the porch. He was
not amused.
I used to play cowboys with Dickie. He wasn't too bad
back then. I hear he got nasty when he got older and even became a cop but not a
good one. Anyway, one afternoon after school I latched on my 45's and cowboy hat
and waited for him to come over. When he did I whipped up my gun fast like they
do on TV but unlike on TV I accidently bopped him right in the nose. I think I
drew blood. For some reason we still stayed friends while we lived in that house
even though I was real embarrassed by the deed.
They sold penny candy in their store so we girls saved
every penny we could. We got ten cents a week allowance and extra if we did
chores. Sometimes we'd get a dime for doing the dishes after dinner for a week.
We saved it up for a whole summer in a jar. It was hard not to spend it on candy
but we had a goal. It was coming on to time for the County Fair and we loved the
rides and cotton candy and sometimes the games.
Mom kept an oatmeal box that she put slips of paper in
with chores on them. Each week we got to draw out our chore.
Fair week came and one night when Dad got home from work
he drove us to the fair. It was the last day of it and we were excited. We were
only there a few minutes when a storm came with lightening and rain. We missed
out on the whole darn thing. We were disgusted.
We got our first TV there. It was black and white, of
course. It seemed huge to me, but it didn't have a very big picture. It was
always in need of a tube replaced.
We watched a lot of war movies and westerns. Saturday
morning we got to see our favorite cowboy shows. Wild Bill Hickok, Roy Rodgers,
Gene Autry just to name a few.
In the summer, I loved to walk through the fields and
woods "studying" the flowers and plants. I picked a big bouquet of bright yellow
goldenrod. I was about to take it in the house when I noticed that one of the
blossoms was moving. It was a huge yellow and black spider. I threw those
flowers as far as I could and ran the other way!
In the winter we would "borrow" a kitchen knife and cut
blocks of hardened snow to build our snow forts. Then we'd mound up a whole
bunch of packed snowballs and wait for one or the other of us to walk along and
zap them.
We got our first skis there. I got pretty good with them
but before long somebody broke one and that was the end of that.
Enid was the baby at 5 years old, Sue was 7, and I was 9,
Millie 11 and Anna 13.
Mom was sick a lot and one day she went to the hospital
for a checkup. When she got there and the doc started to examine her he told her
that there was a small problem and he sent her upstairs to the OR. A short time
later, she gave birth to Nancy. Nancy weighed 4 and a half pounds. Mom had been
told when she lost our brother that she would not have any more children. No one
even considered she could be pregnant. The doctor thought she was just having
the beginning of menopause and didn't ever test her for pregnancy.
Nancy was named after a nurse at the hospital. Her middle
name Ilene was because Mom thought it sounded Hawaiian a place she always wanted
to visit.
She was so tiny that when dad went shopping for something
for her to wear home from the hospital, he couldn't find a hat small enough and
eventually someone steered him to the toy aisle and he got her a tiny yellow
doll's hat.
In the fall we made it to the Fair. Mom was holding some
cotton candy up and Nancy made a grab for it. She wasn't old enough to eat it
but maybe the color attracted her. The cotton candy ended up stuck to the back
of some lady who walked by just then. She was wearing a fur coat. I don't know
why someone would be idiot enough to wear a fur coat to the fair, but that lady
did.
Shortly before we moved, Wolfe's gave us notice that the
land the house sat on was being sold and the house was moving about twelve feet
to the right or left depending on how you looked at it. They said we didn't have
to move but Dad found us another place.
Before we could move, the house moved. We had watched the
work men dig out all the foundations and put jacks underneath it. We were still
in it when they moved it. A man told my mom that the electric was off and the
water and they were baring the door. He said it wouldn't take long and we would
barely notice it. We wanted to run from one window to another to look but Mom
made us sit still till it was done.
There was a set of train tracks that ran through the
woods behind the house. The boys used to take BB guns and go out there to shoot
at birds. Dickie shot his brother in the eye but it wasn't bad. The BB got him
in the upper eye lid. They were stupid. I thought at the time that the older one
was aiming at the younger one deliberately but I heard later that it was the
older one who got hit.
When we moved from here we had
someone's truck.
We packed the cats into homemade cadges. They
went during one trip with furniture and boxes. I don't know how it happened but
the cats clawed their way out of the boxes and got off the truck somewhere. We
never found them, not dead or alive. I was heartbroken.
On the last trip, the rest of the household stuff went
including the stove pipes. Most of us kids got to ride in the back of the truck
with all the stuff. I cut my knee on the metal on one of the pipes and arrived
bloody as usual. My mother once said my scars were a road map of all the places
I'd been.