"Over Home"

The house had a full-length porch at the entry, which I think Matt added to the shot-gun style construction some time after Ellen Hogan and her remaining children moved into the house. She bought the house with the insurance payment from her oldest son's accidental death. She wanted to get out of the city of Troy where he so tragically died, and so she moved to what must have seemed the end of the earth at that time, a little house out in the country on a dirt road neighbored by a few hardscrabble farms. No power, or phone lines, and at first no plows or road repair, as I remember being told. My mother told me her mother had paid for the house with the check she received when Timmy died, the sum of $200. That doesn't seem like enough, but back in about 1916, it may well have been. But back to the house we visited every 2 weeks or so, when my mother yearned to go "over home." Walk up a few steps, through the glass-windowed porch into the kitchen, which led into the dining room, and then into the parlor. There were rooms to the right of each of those 3 rooms. The kitchen had 2 adjoining rooms, a narrow pantry just to the right of the sink (no running water though). I remember going into the pantry with Helen to get the wooden potato masher. The second doorway off the kitchen led to Nanny's bedroom. I think I only entered that room one time in the 12 years of "over home," and that was to say good-bye to her. She'd taken sick, we made an unscheduled visit, Ma stayed while Daddy drove us home, and that was the first time I ever saw my grandmother in her bedroom, and the last time I ever saw her alive. To the right of the dining room was Matt's bedroom, and I'm pretty sure I never entered that room. All the bedrooms were probably just about big enough for the bed, and maybe a dresser. Back in those days, with no central heat and no electricity, a bed room meant exactly that. The dining room held most of Matt's stuff---his radios and equipment and stacks of Popular Mechanics' magazines. Though Matt dropped out of school in about the 6th grade, after punching the nun who pulled his ear to get him back in line and off the haywagon, he was genius-like in teaching himself about the new invention of radios. Even without electricity, he built and powered them with batteries using all the skills he learned from magazines. Later in life he found additional work as a radio and then TV repairman. The last room in the series was the parlor, always cold, unused and unheated, but when the temperature allowed, we kids played on the antique pipe organ, imagining we were making music. However, off that room was Helen's bedroom, and that was the high spot of many of our visits. Helen was delighted to have visitors, especially kids. Looking back, I suppose she may have been lonely but she was always cheerful. Sometimes she would invite us to go "furging" among the many treasures she had stowed in her tiny bedroom. There were religious items, buttons, beads, jewels, pictures, little boxes and containers, and once she had hand-sewn a family of little cloth dolls, and stuffed them with cotton. Helen joined us in playing with those little items, always carefully returning them to their places afterwards for the next time. As is true in life, sadly, we never know at what point there will be no "next time." I have a feeling that we kids gave up on this adventure while Helen would gladly have continued; it is a fact that childhood lasts only a brief time.