The Shortcut

When we were kids, we walked to school. From our house, we took the shortcut. We did not use the sidewalk in front of our house, but we would leave by the back door, follow a path along the back of the then deserted stone building next door to us, and then pass by the 3 garbage can/ burn barrels under the huge double cottonwood tree behind the Valley Inn. From there we would make our way through the back yard of the corner building that was then the Post Office. The ground floor tenants then were Norah and Tom McMahon, and he kept a very tidy and well maintained back yard with plantings and flower gardens, the only blot on the landscape being the worn trail which we and other kids followed on our shortcut path. There was a driveway then on the south side of the building which was used by the mail personnel, mainly Bill O'Neill. (An added treat was that he would discard pennies on the gravel, for us kids to find. Especially the silver pennies, which were out of favor because they could so easily be confused with dimes. ) We would follow that driveway out to the village sidewalk. There, at least when we were little, before we began the uphill section of our walk, we would turn and wave to our mother, who would wave back to us from the kitchen window. I remember feeling comforted seeing her standing there, tall and in her house dress; we knew she'd be there when we got home. She never let us know she was worried about our encountering any dangers, but I always thought that was because she knew we were cautious enough to avoid any trouble. She may have been a little concerned, though, because the son of the couple who ran the Valley Inn, where we trespassed daily with no thought of repercussions, was "not quite right." The way you could tell was that he walked vey fast and swung his arms vigorously as he walked, and he always wore a fresh white shirt, rolled up at the elbows. He would also pick up scraps of paper as he walked, maybe because his duties at the Valley Inn conssisted of keeping the grounds neat. He certainly never interfered with any of us kids, though I seem to have a vague memory of some problem or irregularity involving him. I would have heard this only from listening to "big people talk" so it would have had no bearing on us kids. It seems strange now, but as kids we had no regard for property lines--we took the shortest distance to where we wanted to go, and no one seemed to mind, not then.