Memorial Day 2014

From my Porch on Layton . . . I enjoy the view.

It’s Memorial Day.

            Temperatures on Layton today have made Justus a summer delight. 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 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, 1962. 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 one another.

           

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 and pulled out the aluminum yard chairs.  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 in Scranton near her daughter Peg; her son Bill lived just a street over on Edna Avenue. Aunt Peggy’s 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 his entire working life in the Olyphant breaker; 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.

            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 lightening 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 old 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 of us kids horse back 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, Mair, 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 Mair, 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 goodbye’s, 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 93, remains of that 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 retired from the FBI to Memphis. Les is an in-demand orthopedic surgeon in Kansas City. The twins are still best friend-brothers down in Bucks County. Gail had a knitting business for awhile in Pittsburgh, and Glenny suffers, the collective recipient of the family’s legendary struggle with diabetes. Many of us are the 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 had a long run through three generations, thanks to my ever-mending, ever-replacing father. We still enjoy badminton, though the nets manage only short lives. A propane grill eventually replaced my dad’s red charcoal burner.

But the yard is silent this Memorial Day. 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.