Memorial Day 2013 . . . or is it 1957?

A 1957 backyard picnic on Layton. The author is first on left.

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It’s Memorial Day weekend, and I’m enjoying the view on Layton.

            The lawn, thick and green with last night’s rain, awaits my Toro. Several mowers can be heard up and down Layton. Families of wrens, robins, and chickadees have called the Justus Symphony Orchestra to concert in the old oak, whose arms have draped over Layton for a hundred years. The cat lies lazily in the shade of the picnic table, swatting listlessly at low-flying bugs. The cukes, tomatoes, and beans peek through the soil of my small raised-bed garden. The Adirondack chairs under the sprawling maple in the rear of the yard sit like thrones, presiding regally over this small world.

 It could be Memorial Day, 1957. The view from my porch hasn’t changed much in the past fifty years.

            Fifty years ago this already-old house buzzed with picnic preparations. Memorial Day launched the summer season when the city cousins from North Scranton trekked “up the country.” The extended family came every weekend in the summer for all-day backyard cookouts, to escape the city heat, and to “kibbitz” with the family.

           

In those days this house, on whose porch I sit these fifty years later, belonged to my grandmother, Nana Evans, known as Aunt Ethel to the cousins. My mom, dad, sisters, and I lived in the house next door to Nana here on Layton. Our two yards converged with plenty of room for children to grow up.

Summer preparations began in earnest for this first picnic of the season. Dad washed off the metal glider, pulled out the aluminum yard chairs and rethreaded their frayed nylon seats.  He hammered the badminton net into place, rehung the tether ball, and filled the grill with charcoal. “Annie, where’s the . . . ?” Dad called intermittently to my mother in the kitchen. “Annie,” a whirling dervish in her own right, swept about the kitchen preparing her favorite jello mold recipe and macaroni salad.

The coming of the cousins brewed high excitement.

            Nana and her sisters, Aunt Peggy, Aunt Ruthie, and Aunt Millie, reigned as matriarchs of the brood. Aunt Ruthie lived in Chinchilla. Aunt Peggy lived on Margaret Avenue near her daughter Peg; her son Bill lived just a street over on Edna Avenue in Scranton. Aunt Peggy’s other son Bob and his wife Mickey had moved after World War II to that haven for post-war vets, Levittown, in search of a job that didn’t involve the coal mines.

All of the men of those two generations had put in some time in the mines: Grandpa Evans spent most his working life in the mines; Uncle Gordy, Aunt Peggy’s husband, Aunt Ruthie’s husband Uncle Victor, and Aunt Millie’s husband Uncle Cliff had their hands to the pick and shovel until the demise of the industry. Even my dad earned his first paychecks from the Olyphant breaker. Summer afternoons in the country gave them a chance to blow off the soot and breathe fresh air.

Summer picnics with the family on Layton, 1957.

            Aunt Ruthie didn’t have any children, but Aunt Peggy’s children and grandchildren made it a party. We had cousins in every age group from Peg’s three girls, Lynn, Beth, and Lori to Bill’s children, Glenny, Phil, and Les. Sometimes Bob and Mickey came up from Levittown. When Bob’s family came, the excitement and activity increased with his twin sons Bob and Bill and daughters, Joan and Gail. Our cup overflowed with cousins and a bevy of adults to supervise. Everyone had a buddy.

The ghosts of memories dance around the yard this Memorial Day: I see Phil hiding behind the front hedges in our twilight hide-and-seek game. The twins clank the lids on their jars as they corral lightning bugs. “Hey, Joey,” Sid yells to my dad as he slams the birdie over the badminton net and into the lilac bush.

Nana and her sisters laugh and talk simultaneously at high volume under the shade of the apple tree. Mom runs in and out of the kitchen with tablecloths and food. “Annie, don’t forget the ketchup. The dogs are ready!” Dad announces to the yard in general as Jiggsy, our beagle, runs between legs, seeking what he might devour.

One year Glenny ripped open her leg on the chicken wire around my dad’s new seedlings. The pitch of the old aunts’ cackling went up a decibel as Glenny was rushed off to the emergency room for stitches.

Another year Sid won our hearts when he took all us kids horseback riding up Layton at Bill Jones’s riding stable.

Gail, Glenny, and I would swing on the front porch glider, sharing secrets about our parents and boys.

If there weren’t enough paper plates, my mother, never a slave to fashion, was known to rip them and serve the kids on half plates.

Bill’s wife, Miar, always managed to bring the winning covered dish delight. A bit more avant-garde than the rest, she actually searched out recipes and bedazzled our taste buds.

At the end of the picnic day, our family stood around the yard saying good-byes, planning the next week’s picnic, hugging, and waving the cousins off to their distant homes in Scranton. A satisfied sense of belonging and continuity tucked me into bed although I doubt if I could have identified the reason for my joy at that time.

Today the yard is silent except for the clatter and spontaneity of my memories. Nana and the Aunts, Peggy and Sid, Bill and Miar, Bob and Mickey, and Mom are all gone. I only see the cousins now at funerals. When we cousins see each other at these last goodbyes, it’s evident that the cousin bond was deeply forged in our childhoods. Phil and one of the twins, Bob, reminded me at a recent funeral, “My best childhood memories were in your yard.” Only Dad, at 91, remains of that earlier generation.

The cousins scattered to the wind when we began the migration to college. Most never returned to Scranton. Lynn married a Dutchman and moved to the Netherlands; Phil had a successful career with the FBI and then retired to Memphis; Les, an in-demand orthopedic surgeon in Kansas City, continues to practice; the twins, still best friend-brothers, live in Bucks County and juggle several enterprises; Gail had a knitting business for awhile in Pittsburgh, and Glenny suffers as the collective recipient of the family’s legendary struggle with diabetes. Most of us are grandparents now; all of us are senior citizens.

Still, I enjoy the view from my porch. The apple tree succumbed to lack of care. When it only produced quarter-sized apples, it met dad’s axe. The front porch glider has seen countless coats of paint, but it stands immovable, its steel frame too heavy to lift. The other day my grandson and I tried to find the tether ball pipe, implanted somewhere mid-yard, hoping to put it back in action, but it had sunk into oblivion. The chicken wire is gone as are the aluminum chairs, but they did have a long run through three generations, thanks to my ever-mending, ever-recycling father. We still enjoy badminton, though a series of nets have been short-lived. A modern propane grill eventually replaced the old red charcoal burner.

The yard is silent this Memorial Day. One of my sons and three of my grandchildren live in Indiana. Dad sold his house next door and moved to South Carolina. The echoes of memories resound from oak to maple.

But I . . . I continue to enjoy the view from my porch on Layton.

Mother's Day and Birthdays

 Nana Jones

Mother's Day gets me to thinking about my son who made me a mother for the second time on Mother's Day weekend thirty-six years ago. So Mother's Day and birthdays have a conjoined significance.

We've had a healthy dose of birthdays here on Layton (as well as a healthy dose of mothers) for over 80 years . . . five generations worth . . . all kinds of parties for every decade marker and all the milestone ages in between. I distinctly remember an Olympics birthday for the Mother's Day son sometime in the '80s that had me constructing a challenge course around the entire yard. And who can forget the 16th photo scavenger hunt birthday party that had us driving teenagers throughout the area?

One of the most memorable birthdays here on Layton was Nana Jones's 80th. Nana Jones, my dad's mother, entered the world with the turn of the twentieth century, 1900, in Liverpool, England.  Recalling her age was never difficult as she rolled on in age with the year. So in 1980 I determined to give her a "girl" party for her 80th birthday, a party with best friends.

Nana (Winnie) Jones also lived on Layton about a quarter mile up the road. Almost all of her lady friends had spent their lives on this half mile of country road between the Mt. Bethel Baptist Church, where they attended, and Justus Corners. They raised their children and grandchildren together, they ran Old Home Day every year at Mt. Bethel, they crocheted granny block afghans, knitted sweaters, hats and mittens, cooked up a whirlwind for covered dish dinners, worked with the Ladies Auxiliary of the Justus Fire Company, and enjoyed visiting back and forth to rock on the front porch glider and finish off a pot of tea.

I knew all of her friends well. We lived in the extended family of a country village and attended the same church. Our lives intersected at every point.

Florence James was Nana Jones's best friend. Florence lived just two houses away from my grandmother. Short and petitely built, Florence was the antithesis of my grandmother's tall, strongly-built physique. I can't ever remember Winnie and Florence wearing anything except house dresses, always lightly flowered and neat, even when weeding their gardens.

Betty Priest lived in the house right next to my grandmother. Their back doors were separated by no more than 20 yards. Mrs. Priest came over my grandmother's almost every day for tea. Nana Jones never lost her British affection for tea with milk and a few biscuits. As a child I was fascinated by her skill of reading the tea leaves left in the cup. Good friends until Betty died, leaving a gap in my grandmother's life, they never called each other anything except Mrs. Priest and Mrs. Jones.

The Von Storch family, the premier farming family in Justus, lived just around the corner, and Minerva, the matriarch of the family, had raised a bevy of boys who romped the countryside with my dad and the Evans and Lewis boys. She knew how to handle rowdy teens and how to make the best pies in Justus. At a church dinner we vied for Mrs. Von Storch's desserts.

Mildred Baker lived on Layton but further up the big hill, and Beatrice White, of the legendary White clan who originally settled the area, lived over on Fairview. The women were united by age, family, church, the Justus Volunteer Fire Company, the Depression and the War. They survived as friends.

Florence, Betty, Minerva, Mildred and Beatrice (although I would never have considered calling them anything but "Mrs. ...) composed my guest list of best friends for Nana Jones's 80th birthday party - A Who's Who of 20th Century Mothers in Justus.

Held in my front parlor, an appropriate synonym for my living room, the party featured chicken salad sandwiches and several rounds of BINGO. But it was the conversation that intrigued me.

As the ladies arrived and sat around my parlor, the reflections about the house began. "I haven't been here since Ethel died . . . Oh, it was long before that since I've been here . . . We used to come often to play cards . . . I'll never forget the night of the funeral . . ."

I'd heard the story before from my mother and grandmother, but here sat the mothers of the neighborhood recalling an event in 1950 that left an indelible community impression - a funeral.

"The roof nearly collapsed . . .Water poured into this room . . .  The men had to get up on the roof in the rain and patch it up - quick . . . One of the worst storms . . . The casket sat right over there."

And the recollections continued of my Grandfather Evans's funeral. Grandpa Evans built this house on Layton. When he died suddenly of a heart attack on the cellar steps of the house he loved, his body was prepared for "viewing" and "laid out" here in the front room, probably very close to where I'm sitting now. Traditional custom of the day had people "viewed" in their own homes, rather than at a funeral home. A disconcerting thought, as the rest of the family lay upstairs in bed. It's not a custom that has carried into the 21st century. Thankfully.

The night of the "viewing," a storm hit that blew off the shingles, ripped up part of the roof, and brought gallons of water gushing down the walls to the parlor, and . . . into my grandfather's casket. The men of the family and the neighborhood rushed into action through pelting rain and wind, climbing to the roof and re-boarding and covering the holes. I didn't ask how they dealt with damage to the coffin and . . . Grandpa Evans.

The guests at Nana Jones's birthday party had attended the "viewing" here in my parlor, and they relished every detail in the retelling. Thirty years after the event, and it still made a great story for the neighborhood.

Mother's Day, birthdays . . . death days - all part of life here on Layton.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Trev, from your Mom. You are a Mother's Day gift.