Table

   I don't know where it came from. It may have been left in a house we moved into, as was a frequent occurrence then. People moved and with only a passenger car and a few relatives to help them out, they frequently abandoned large items that were not necessities. I don't know how long we were in possession of the table either, but I know we owned  it in Valley Falls until my mother gave it away. She had little fondness for old pieces of furniture or appliances, as she spent most of her life with old hand-me-down stuff that no one else needed or wanted.
   The first house I remember the presence of the table was the Schmidt house we rented in Melrose.  I think now the table  would be referred to in the antique furniture description as a library table. It was dark wood with a shallow drawer in front and a built-in magazine rack on either side. There was a shelf or narrow platform across the bottom of the table, maybe for additional storage or a place to rest your feet. But to me, at three years old, the table was a secure hiding place, and the bottom shelf a sort of cot.  I remember crawling into that space when I felt sad and alone. I think I felt that way because our mother, though always at home, was so busy trying to keep everything together, she didn't have a lot of time to nurture her kids'  sensitivities. She was busy dawn to dusk with endless chores that would be unfathomable in today's world.
     The house had no electricity, no telephone service, no running water, no central heat. All water for laundry, (done by hand) had to be carried into the house, heated on top of a wood stove, which she needed to replenish by toting the wood into the house, starting the fire, not to mention shaking the stove down and carrying out the ashes. There were tools for that---pokers and ash buckets, scuttles.  And used water had to be carried out in buckets also. To say nothing of the toileting facilities, also based outside. Wash days meant pumping and heating water, scrubbing clothing etc. on a washboard in a tub and then discarding the water outside. Almost everything needed to be ironed back then, in the days before wrinkle-free fabrics. The iron had to be heated on top of the stove, handled with great care, and re-heated regularly, unless you owned a second flatiron, which she didn't. Clothes had to be dried on an outside  clothesline though in harsh winter weather they were often hung on a line strung around the stove.
      There was an icebox, and the drip-pan for the melted water had to be emptied regularly before it overflowed onto the floor. The floors needed sweeping regularly too, remember no electricity, no vacuums. And my mother had to cook for a family of five, with very little access to grocery stores.
   In addition, my mother had outside chores to attend to ---chickens, a garden, other animals from time to time, including a milk cow which was bought when she observed the milking on a prosperous dairy farm we once lived on. She saw that the milk was strained for flies, and she couldn't stand to give that milk to her kids.
   So we kids were on our own a lot of the time. I would feel sad and sorry for myself, thinking nobody cared about me. And I would crawl into my secret  space under the table and cry.  Of course I never complained out loud or told anybody; none of us kids ever did. I would cry in private, hidden away from everybody, invisible.  Or so I thought.
    Then one morning, my sadness was outed. Uncle Joe, passing by, stopped, asked me what was wrong, and without waiting for an answer, handed me a box of Freihofer's chocolate doughnuts, which meant the bread man had just stopped by.  I remember running to my mother and giving her the box of doughnuts. She seemed glad to get them, so I was comforted and the  day got better.
    As I said, my mother got rid of that table; it's long gone, as are Uncle Joe and Freihofer's deliveries, but I don't suppose I could fit in that space now anyway.