Tag: childhood

Nap Rugs and Sugar Plum Fairies

Brenda Stratton

Whenever I hear “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” I am six years old again, lying on a nap rug in my first grade classroom—warm and safe.

Kindergarten wasn’t required back then, so first grade was my first real taste of school—and I loved it.

After lunch, my teacher — Mrs. Quanstrom — told us to get out our nap rugs and lie down. She turned off the lights, but the room never got completely dark. The tall classroom windows still let in the afternoon light, filtered through the oak trees that lined that side of the school.

After turning off the lights, she put a record on the classroom player. I don’t remember all of the songs she played, but “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” was my favorite.

The room was very quiet except for the music. We could take a nap if we wanted to, but I was always too interested in listening.

The rug beneath me was soft. Mom knew why the teacher asked us to bring one, so she chose a rug she knew would be comfortable to lie on.

I don’t remember ever falling asleep. I was too busy listening—to the music, to the quiet, to the feeling of being exactly where I belonged.

I didn’t always keep my eyes closed, but I did most of the time. And when “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” played, I could see them in my imagination.

The fairies were small and light, and they danced and twirled in the air above me.

Even now, when I hear that music, I am six years old again, lying on that soft rug in a classroom washed in afternoon light.

I am still lying on that rug.

And I can still see the fairies.

No, I never did fall asleep during nap time.

I was already dreaming.

First Grade

Brenda Stratton

Around the time I first started school, I went shopping with Mom, Dad, and Monty for school supplies. I was so excited! I remembered the years when my brother went to school and I had to stay behind. Now I would never be left behind again.

When we got to the store, it was decided that Dad would help me pick out my supplies while Mom helped Monty. When everything had been chosen, Dad paid for the supplies. He was still carrying my tablet under his arm.

We left the store and had only gone a few feet when I heard him say, “Oh, no! I forgot to pay for the tablet.”

Without another word, he turned around and went back into the store — still clutching it to his chest — and apologized to the clerk for the mistake.

The only real experience I had with school before starting myself was the day I went with my brother — a memory I’ve written about before.

I can’t remember the exact first day of school. What I do remember is the school and the classroom itself.

The school was a tall, square building made of dark brick. It stood exactly one block from home. I couldn’t guess what school would be like, but I was anxious to find out.

I remember the inside of my classroom — from the wall of windows where the light filtered through the oak trees outside, to the crayon color chart on the wall with the names of each color printed in bold lettering. I remember my cubby, too. We each had one with our name printed on it to keep our nap rugs in.

We would move again before the end of the school year, but this is where I met Dick and Jane, Baby Sally and their pets, Spot and Puff. It is also where I learned that colors had names that I could write and someone else could read — and that classical music could make a child sit still and listen… and imagine.

Never Far From Home

Brenda Stratton

From the summer before I started school, until the spring of my third grade year, I attended five different schools.

One place we stayed a couple of years. Three others we stayed a very short time, hardly more than a few months. In the third grade alone, I attended four different schools. I never questioned why until much later in life, when it was too late to ask anyone.

We moved from the farm, near Viola, Illinois, to Galva, Illinois, 30 miles to the east. There I started school in 1958. 

By the spring of the next year, we moved back to the Viola area, near Aledo, Illinois. I finished first grade here, attended all of second grade, but before Christmas of the third grade, we moved again, this time 44 miles west to Burlington, Iowa. I was disappointed because I had a part in the upcoming Christmas play.

I remember we spent Christmas in Burlington, but we moved again shortly after, this time 72 miles northeast to Rock Island, Illinois.

We didn’t stay long in Rock Island, either, and by spring we moved again. Our move this time took us back to my mother‘s childhood home in the small village of Millersburg, Illinois, 7 miles northwest of Aledo. 

There I would live for more than 40 years.

If you wonder why I mention the distances between towns, it is to show that we were never far from Aledo, where I was born in Mercer County Hospital in 1952 — the same hospital where my own children would be born years later. We never strayed far from our roots or our families.

My parents are gone now, so I can’t ask them why we moved so often during those three years. With the moves came job changes for Dad.

Looking back, I understand more than I did then. Those were hard years in the Midwest. Jobs weren’t always steady, and people took work wherever they could find it.

But as a child, I didn’t see any of that.

Both Mom and Dad were very hard workers — and my dad always had a job. If one ended, another one soon followed. We never went without anything. If things were tough for them, they never let us feel it.

All I knew was that we kept moving…

and somehow, we were never very far from home.

Mom, Meet Butch!

Brenda Stratton

One afternoon when I was five, my mother put me down for an afternoon nap and decided to join me.

We were both sleeping soundly when we heard those words:

“Mom, meet Butch!”

We didn’t know anyone named Butch.

Mom opened her eyes.

She was face to face with an owl.

Butch the screech owl. And my brother was holding him.

Mom wasn’t amused.

It was well-known in our family that she didn’t like birds — at least not in her face. Or in her house. Or anywhere near her. Or near us kids.

She didn’t mind them from a distance, but she said they were dirty and carried mites. I wasn’t sure what mites were, but I got the idea they were some kind of crawly bug. Turns out I was right.

I don’t remember actually seeing the bird myself. I always took my glasses off when I was sleeping so I wouldn’t break them.

My brother wasn’t in the room much longer than it took to say those few words before Mom sent him scrambling back to the barn to put the owl back where he found it — cautioning him never to do that again.

Loudly.

Butch must have been a juvenile or Monty likely couldn’t have caught him. It never occurred to me to ask.

I do know Monty never brought a bird in the house again — or any other stray animal.

Sometimes I wonder if his ears were still ringing when he got back to the barn.

A Little Dab Will Do

Brenda Stratton

In the 1950s, Brylcreem was as common in Midwestern households as toothpaste.

One morning while Mom was getting Monty ready for school, she was combing his hair and absent-mindedly reached for the Brylcreem. She started distributing it through his hair and realized something was different — it was thick and white and did not blend into his hair. 

Glancing at the tube she held in her hand, she discovered she had rubbed toothpaste through his hair.

What to do? The bus would be there any minute. 

I was watching them from across the kitchen. She looked at me, shrugged, and quickly washed his hair. 

In those days, we didn’t have running water. We also didn’t have hot water. What we did have was an old hand pump at the kitchen sink that only brought in cold water. Cold well water. 

Monty went to school with wet hair that morning. I expect that was the only time in his life he had his hair washed with shampoo and cold water. Brrr. 

Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya — that is what the television commercials said. That morning, a little dab definitely did not do. 

Two Longs and a Short

Brenda Stratton

Party lines were a fact in the 1950s, and many rural areas didn’t convert to private lines until much later — around 1990. 

We didn’t have phone numbers in those days. We had rings. Ours was two longs and a short. 

Whenever the phone rang, everyone in the household listened carefully to see if the call was for us. When the phone rang at our house, it also rang in every other house on the party line. 

Sometimes it was hard to tell who the call was for. If you were just coming in from outdoors or another part of the house, you might not hear the entire ring.

Mom taught me the difference between our ring and those of our neighbors. I appointed myself the household sentinel to announce to the house in general — and Mom in particular — if it was indeed two longs and a short. 

The polite thing to do when answering the phone was to pick the receiver up and listen carefully for a moment to see if anyone else was already talking, then hang up if the call wasn’t for you. 

Not everyone was polite enough to follow this protocol. Some people would stay on the line and listen, a practice often referred to as rubbering. The people the call was for could usually tell someone was listening in, but only had suspicions as to who it might be. 

I wasn’t allowed to use the phone in those days — yet somehow, that old black box still found its way into my childhood.

It was a heavy, black desk telephone — the kind that seemed as solid as a small piece of furniture. A sturdy black base anchored it in place, and the handset rested across the top in a simple, unpretentious cradle. In the center sat the familiar rotary dial, its round finger holes lined with numbers that circled back toward you as you released them.

There was nothing delicate about it. The phone felt permanent, rooted to its spot on the phone table, as if it had always been there and would always remain. The cord, still straight then, stretched toward the wall in a quiet promise that this was not a toy, but a tool of connection — dependable, familiar, and woven into the ordinary rhythms of home life.

And when it rang, it carried its own unmistakable voice: two longs and a short, a sound that announced itself clearly and left no doubt that someone was calling.

Where’s Brenda?

Brenda Stratton

Every family has that one child who tends to do a disappearing act sometimes. In our family, that was me. It wasn’t intentional, but that’s how it turned out, anyway.

I was playing outside by myself one summer day. When Mom went to check on me, I was nowhere to be found — or so she thought.

I was dragging a small doll blanket around with me. I had been playing with my doll — and probably the cats and dog, too.

The bridal wreath bushes around our front porch were in bloom. As a little girl, I loved flowers, and I had been admiring the bridal wreath. I loved them so much. 

I laid down on the porch with my doll and doll blanket. I was looking up through the branches — and fell asleep. Mom had apparently been calling me, but I didn’t hear her. Because of the bushes, she couldn’t see me until she came outside and stood in front of the porch — and there I was. 

The Asian flu pandemic of 1957 swept through our little town that winter. Mom and I were both sick at the same time, which is why she was in bed the day I disappeared the second time.

We were taking a nap together in her big bed. I woke up before she did. I wasn’t used to her being in bed in the daytime, and I wandered around the house a little. Then I got sleepy, and decided to go back to bed, but I didn’t want to wake her. 

The bed was high off the floor, and the pretty pink nubbly carpet under it felt soft and safe, so I crawled under it and went to sleep. 

When I woke up, Mom was leaning over looking under the bed at me. She said I scared her. I never meant to. I just liked quiet places.

Bluebells in Spring

Brenda Stratton

Bluebells — one of my favorite signs of spring — usually arrived sometime in April, along with gentle breezes and a general thawing of the land.

I lived just three blocks from school, so I walked there and back each day. There was a patch of bluebells I passed twice daily. They belonged to Mrs. Joseph — an elderly neighbor — but she said she didn’t mind if I picked a few.

I was careful not to take too many, so we both could enjoy watching them grow. Mostly, I stopped to smell them — once or twice every day for as long as they bloomed — but sometimes I gathered a small bouquet for Mom. They smelled so good.

A friend showed me how to pluck a blossom from the stem, place the stem end in my mouth, and draw out what I can only assume was nectar. What a sweet surprise.

One year, I made May baskets from construction paper and filled them with small bouquets of bluebells. I left one for Mrs. Joseph, one for Mom’s best friend Marion who lived next door, and one for Mom — and felt very grown up doing it.

There were other flowers in the neighborhood, of course — many in our own yard, as Dad was an avid gardener — but nothing was ever quite so sweet as those first bluebells in spring.

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Brenda Stratton

Two years after we left the farm — in the spring of my third-grade year — we moved back to Mom’s childhood home in the little village of Millersburg, where so much of our family history already lived. 

It had been a tumultuous year for me. We moved often, and I was about to enter my fourth school in as many months — the fifth since starting first grade.

The new school — the little red schoolhouse that I became so fond of — was just two blocks from home. I would be able to walk or ride my bike back and forth.

Color rendering of the Millersburg School re-created from a historic newspaper photo.

The school itself — and many of the kids who lived there — were already familiar to me. My Aunt Evelyn — Mom’s sister — lived across the street. When I visited, she often put me in touch with the neighborhood kids, so I already had playmates when we moved there.

The school was made of red brick. It was two stories tall with a bell tower on top, though the bell had been removed before I ever walked through its doors. 

There were only two classrooms — one for grades one through three and one for grades four through six. Both classrooms were on the ground floor. 

Each classroom had only one teacher. Miss Garner was mine. The teacher for the bigger kids was Mrs. Brayton. 

Upstairs was a large room where we all ate lunch and had our music lessons. We did other things there, too, like school Christmas celebrations and sometimes a class play. 

Next to it was the kitchen and the tiny library. Sometimes when I went upstairs to get a library book, I’d stop in next door to say hello to Mrs. Archer, the cook. 

When that Monday came, and Mom brought me to school for the first time, I wasn’t nervous like I was at those other schools. I knew the streets. I knew the kids. It felt like home. 

You’ve Got Mail!

Brenda Stratton

When I was a little girl, my paternal grandmother used to send me things in the mail.

Sometimes, she tucked a piece of chewing gum into a letter that she wrote to my mom.

Several times, she sent me handkerchiefs that she crocheted pretty edgings on. I still have all eight of them.

It was always something flat that would fit neatly into an envelope so it would go through the mail for the standard price of a three-cent postage stamp. (I can still remember the displeasure my mother voiced when the price went up to four cents!)

It doesn’t seem like much by today’s standards to get a piece of gum in the mail. But at five years old, receiving an unexpected treat in the mailbox meant my Grandma was thinking of me.

Now, as an adult — and someone who made a career out of being a fiber artist — I can fully appreciate the time and care it took to crochet the edgings on those handkerchiefs and to knit the many pairs of slippers she made for me one Christmas long ago.