CATEGORY: LATE CHILDHOOD

FLOOR PLAN OF GRASS VALLEY HOUSE DRAWN AT AGE TEN

Almost all the things I have done in my later life, I learned as a child.  I had certain inherent inclinations.  When I learned to sew at the age of seven, my mother started me right out on the sewing machine.  No tedious hand stitching of samplers in our family!  She thought I had the ability because the year before that I had cut a whole four-piece ensemble out of old curtains, the pieces of which tied together.  I took to sewing like iron filings to a magnet.  Right away I started making my own clothes.  I made clothes out of anything I could get my hands on–mostly old clothes that had been given to us, but I also remember a dress made out of a sheet and a robe made from the still good parts of old towels.

As soon as I learned how to use a ruler, I started measuring our rooms, drawing and re-designing our whole house to scale.  I drew the plans of gardens and ranches and barns and houses.  I especially liked to draw houses with secret passageways.  These utilized the space under the stairway to the second floor as the stairs to a subterranean compartment!!!  What a novel idea!  Being culturally deprived, I didn’t know that stairways were commonly built that way.  The house at the ranch was the only two story house with which we were familiar.  Its basement (cellar) stairs did not descend under the main stairway.  They went down from the back room off the kitchen. The stairway to the second floor was at the opposite end of the house in what had originally been the front hallway.  HOWEVER!  In that front hallway, on the wall below those stairs, was a little door about 20” wide and 30” high.  It was a panel in the woodwork that formed the side of the stairs.  It was a secret!  It was kept locked, but once Uncle Wallace opened it and let us look through.  Miracle of miracles!  We looked right into the cellar!  Right below our startled faces was one of the huge octopus arms of the furnace.  Perhaps we could slide down it and lower ourselves to the floor!  Even now, I can’t imagine the purpose of that little door.  It must have been built by the fairies to start me dreaming of secret passageways that started under stairways.

I had a strong desire to build the things I drew.  I was a tall, strong girl in a family with no boys and a mostly absent father, so I was “wood gatherer and water bearer.”  I spaded the garden and chopped the wood.  Although I had the strength to build what I designed, building materials were not available, so all I could do was drive stakes and stretch string. Despite this, I actually did succeed in creating a new garden with a small lawn in our back yard.  Knowing nothing about planting lawns and not knowing that they needed to be rolled with a heavy roller, I worked up the soil like that in a vegetable garden until it was light and fluffy and then carefully raked it smooth, being careful not to step where I had raked.  Then I planted the seed and watered it faithfully.  Every time we took a step on that lawn we left foot prints three inches deep.  Because there were many footprint holes by the time the grass was long enough to mow, we couldn’t run the lawn mower over it, so we had to let the grass grow and wait until the soil settled, which it still hadn’t done when we left there.

Another talent was dancing!  After we moved to Camp Sherman when I was 11, my mother eked from her meager salary enough money to give me tap dancing lessons, driving me all the way to Sisters once a week.

And POETRY!!!  Mother loved to read poetry to us.  Every night we were read to sleep with the visions conjured by whatever whimsical abstract creation was afloat between the pages of whatever poetry book she had found that she thought we might like.

I never stopped reading poetry.

I never stopped dancing.

I never stopped any of it.  My first adult career was dressmaking.  Then, in my early thirties, I went to college and got a degree in architecture.  After I graduated, I moved to Port Townsend, became an architectural designer and combined it with landscape design.

I wish I could say that I was as able and directional with the other aspects of my life.  It has been a long and crooked path.  I am grateful for every minute.