July 10, 1996; 4:17 p.m.
Everything is different between what I had as a child and what my grandchildren have now.
When I was six years old, I lived in the large home of my Grandma and Grandpa Fisher. Mother and Daddy and my brother Fisher, three years old, had one room and a sleeping porch, but we had access to the rest of the house. Downstairs the two parlors had sliding doors which made a good place to put on shows with some of my many cousins.
I remember one play we put on. We were dressed up in gypsy clothes and we sang a song, “Gypsy Peddler, tell me pray: What do you carry around in your basket?” and the gypsy (me) answered, “Pretty wares to sell today–ribbons, handkerchiefs and laces gay.”
That is too simple for the youth of today. In the first place, my grandchildren do not have six or eight cousins their age to choose from. My husband and I had three children, whereas my grandparents had nine children.
To make up a play and put it on for the entertainment of parents and grandparents is not what youth do. It is too simple. They are busy working on computers, tuning into the world wide net.
For refreshments we had a pitcher of lemonade and chunks of ice chipped with an ice pick from the ice box. Now children have cans of soda water in their refrigerator and ice cubes available by pressing a button.
Children have a way of messing up table napkins and clothes. I remember we had a maid in the backyard stirring a boiling pot of clothes and sheets over a fire. It had a special smell–not bad–coal or kerosene. I guess they used coals to make the fire. Now children throw their dirty lemonade-spilled or coke-spilled clothes into a washing machine, add some soap powder and press a button. They or their maid can do this.
So far I have not said there were great differences. I remember I got sick often; I caught children’s diseases and malaria. In those days we did not have trucks driving around at night spraying mosquito lotion to remove the mosquitoes. That was 1914. When my brother came down with diphtheria, our home was quarantined for the time it took to get over the diseases. I stayed home from school and was given vaccineagainst the dread disease. We all came out okay, but the whole episode caused us to be afraid–afraid of losing Fisher, afraid of me catching diphtheria. I can remember how fearful we were.
Ordinarily we walked to school and came home in a leisurely manner. There was no fear. Sometimes we were given a nickel for a Hershey. There was little money available.
Now there is much fear. Children cannot walk to school. Everyday, twice a day, the parents have to drive their child or their child’s carpool to school and pick them up. The children do not have a feeling of independence; they feel pampered and protected. But instead of being thankful for this protection, the children want more; they want more CD’s. They want computer games which cost $25 and $50. Money is everywhere available for clothes, skates, games, gifts. Now the parents buy expensive gifts for the child to give to their teachers and friends.
In my time, I had no money to spend for gifts, but this did not bother me at all. I went about making different kinds of candy: chocolate fudge, divinity, peanut brittle, stuffed dates with pecans (now I make orange marmalade)–and boxing it. I picked dried “coffee beans” (a weed that grew in the gutters; not all streets were paved so weeds, especially these old “coffee bean” weeds, grew rampant.) I painted them with enamel and dusted on gold and other powders and made arrangements with them. I enjoyed making things.
I loved to cook. I enjoyed learning how to make different kinds of candy and then putting it together in boxes and wrapping these. It was creative and gave me much satisfaction. I would look at the expensive silk stockings wrapped up in expensive paper on the Christmas tree at my friend, Lorna’s house. I was interested but not jealous. The fact that I didn’t have money to spend was not important to me. I had a loving mother and father and Grandma and Grandpa, good food to eat and a chance to make things. I was brought up in a happy environment.
My Mother sewed my dresses. She helped in the school entertainments and made costumes for me if I was in them. She was always ready to be on a helping committee at school or church. The fact that she helped in the P.T.A. meant that I was chosen to have leading parts in the morning exercises and plays we put on. Lorna was never chosen. I don’t know whether it was because she was short or because Mrs. Little never came to the school to participate. Otherwise, Mrs. Little was a good mother and provider at their home.
I remember one time when Mother and Daddy came to school to participate in Parents’ Day. I remember how embarrassed I was. I had nice-looking parents, but like all children, I was so embarrassed, the teacher thoughtfully skipped calling on me to recite in front of them. I remember when Elaine, our oldest child, was 13, going to her first girl-boy party with us taking her. She said, “You walk behind me. Don’t act like you know me.” So we did. The girls stayed in the ladies’ room most of the time, because it
was too painful to dance with the boys or because the boys didn’t ask them to dance. Anyway, we were there to take her home, walking behind her. By what I read, some adolescents today get into a lot of trouble–like marrying and having babies. That would have been most unusual in my time–in fact, it would have been a terrible, terrible scandal.
When I was twelve years old, I joined a group of Girl Scouts under a fine leader, Francis Foster, who later became my daughter’s fifth grade teacher.
I always wanted to “sleep under a tree” and I got my chance; the Girl Scout Troop went to camp. The camp was located in a piney wooded place on the Trinity River.
When I arrived with my group, I felt that here my dream would come true. I had all the trees I could wish for–all lovely green–and the piney smell mesmerized me. Besides the green trees and green grass, a beautiful wild weed grew here and there with purple berries covering the thick stems. It was just like a little green heaven. I don’t remember much about the camp or sleeping that night, but I remember going swimming in the river. The bottom was uneven and sometimes I would step into a hole. Fortunately I could swim, but it gave me an uneasy feeling.
Soon we went into our tents and dressed for lunch. By then we were hungry. I remember we had meatloaf and mashed potatoes. We had brought our own mess kits which we held out to the person serving. It smelled good. We were ravenous. I felt happy under the tall pine trees, as if I had come to the place I’d been dreaming about.
After that I went to Girl Scout Camp every summer. My troop disbanded. I began to work on my Golden Eaglet alone, without a troop, which called for at least 21 merit badges. Every badge is in a different category, e.g. cooking, sewing, dancing, first aid, home nursing, life saving, swimming, citizenship, animal study, Morse Code, Star Gazer, overnight camping. I studied the Girl Scout Handbook and went to friends or mentors for help.
I never shall forget the over-night camping trip a small group of us Girl Scouts took. I was about 13 years old, attending Girl Scout Camp at El Jardin down on the bay, somewhere near Seabrook or Kemah.
The bay spread out as far as the horizon. The water was more gray than blue. It had that bay smell, fress, invigorating. It was so shallow that to get in water deep enough to swim you had to walk far out. Usually camp had a long pier. El Jardin had lots of trees. The tents were placed in a row by the trees. Each tent held eight girls and eight beds. There was little room for anything else. Each girl had her suitcase at the end of her bed. There was a kitchen, a dining hall–either a large house or a tent.
To plan the overnight hike we had to be sure to remember all the details and all the groceries for the menu. I am now 87 years old. That happened in 1922–74 years
ago. I remember it well. Besides the eight girls taking the overnight hike, “Curly,” the camp janitor or clean-up man, hiked along with us to help carry the heavy things, e.g. cans, skillet, jars of water. Also we had a dog, Flea Cushion. The menu called for two large cans of corn, several pieces of bacon for each girl, two onions to chop up. I guess we had two skillets, one for each group of four. The salad was a finger salad which meant the lettuce leaf was wrapped around carrot and celery sticks. The dessert: Box of Bisquick and milk to make a long rope of dough which was wrapped around the end of a green one-inch stick and then on up the stick wrapped overlapping so when cooked, it held the pineapple custard.
Each girl carried her own blanket and mosquito bar. We hiked away from the bay and the smell and sight of water until we came to a group of small trees. These would be exactly what we needed to tie our blankets to in the form of a hammock. Flea Cushion chased away all creatures, birds and snakes. We chose which two trees we wanted to tie our hammocks to. Curly helped us to some extent. Flea Cushion got under our feet more than once, but it was fun to have him. It was hard to tie square knots with ropes to hold the ends of my blanket and then around the young sapling. I don’t remember how we managed the mosquito bar, but we did. We had to dig a latrine for our bathroom.
After we had our beds fixed we had to cook supper. First we had to build a fire. Flea Cushion ran around with us gathering branches of dried sticks and we had to find green branches for cooking the dessert. It would have been much easier to have smores, which are toasted marshmallows between a piece of Hershey and two graham crackers, but no, we had to show that we could cook something kind of hard to do.
Finally, we had a fire going and when it got down to coals we put the skillet on the coals, then the bacon cut up and the onion. When the bacon was crisp and the onion cooked and the smell was tingling us with a good appetite, we added the two cans of corn and stirred. Some scout poured the water and made the finger salads. Someone made a flower arrangement for the table. Someone made the pineapple custard in readiness for the crusts.
Crusts posed a problem to find eight green sticks one-inch in diameter. We decided to go ahead and eat our main course first, then make a dessert. I don’t remember if we had a leader or not, or if we had organized the group well, giving each one a task. All I can remember was how hungey I was and how good the bacon and onions smelled cooking and then how good the dish tasted with the corn. We managed well. We had a good first course.
When the Bisquick in the box was stirred with milk and made into dough, each girl got a piece of the dough to form a crust around her stick to cook; which when the stick was removed would be an empty tube of brown crust to hold the custard.
We sat around the fire enjoying our meal. Someone had thought to bring some mosquito candles which made a familiar smell of citronella.
Then we sang songs. We planned to sleep in our clothes. Curly took Flea Cushion off and left us alone. It was a little scary. We got into our hammocks and covered up with mosquito bar and went to sleep.
Another ending:
We got into our hammocks and covered up with the mosquito bar. I felt cozy and secure. I was tired, but couldn’t go to sleep. I looked up through the mosquito net and tree branches over me. I could see some sky and stars but not very well. Then I began to think about the night before when a group of us were working on our star- gazer merit badge.
We were sitting in a spot where there were no trees or any other obstacles to hide the wide expanse of heavens. We were drawing a picture of Cassiopia in the North heaven, showing how near it was to the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and the Evening Star and the red star, Antares. It was the first time I had ever learned the name of a constellation. When drawn on paper, the constellation looked like a chair. It was called Cassiopia’s chair. Every four hours we woke up and drew a picture of its position as it traveled across the heavens.
Here I was all comfortable and safe from mosquitoes and actually sleeping under a tree. It was wonderful–with the stars above and the tree branches overhead and the bay not very far away and the campfire song still going on in my head: “I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree.”