On the Move and Up?

    As I believe to be true:

        The first house my parents lived in was where the old mill gate is/ was located. That house has been gone a long time, but when we were kids, there were abandoned lilac bushes there, presumably in the dooryard of the house which once stood there. The mill workers would pick lilac bouquets on their way home from work.  I think it was a shared house,  now called apartments;  maybe some Osterhout family members lived there.  I don't know whether Charles and Mary  lived there when their first child was born, but it seems so.

  The next family home was a tenant house on the Bates farm in Melrose. I think that's where we lived when I was born. I remember my mother saying the Bates girls would admire the baby when they were in town. I think my father may have worked on that quite prestigious family farm for a time, until he took another job. My most vivid memory of that place was standing on the front porch of our yellow house and looking across the driveway to the porch of that main house, the brick house. My brother pointed out a buffalo standing on that porch. Of course I saw it; he told me it was there, and at that time in my life, he was the ultimate source of knowledge.  I would not have remembered that sight, except I do remember my mother acting very concerned and grilling me as to  what I'd seen. Turns out, my brother later saw the carved claws on the furniture turn alive; he had a fever, which was the ailment my mother most feared and dreaded.

  We then moved to the house on the road now called Brundige Road, the house on the hill. Once in a while my mother would walk us down to the store in Tomhannock, a long walk, especially uphill on the way home. I have a memory of my father and Tommy M. sitting in the doorway of the old barn and singing, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." It would have been war time.

      Next was the house owned by Schmidt's. My father left for work every day from there. I recall quite a lot of events at that time. But what stands out is the dog bite. My brother and I were outside. Dorothy was too young and inside with my mother, who would have been without telephone or any nearby neighbors. The task my brother assigned that day was to cover up the dog sleeping outside. The dog was a chow which someone had given our family; it was received as an adult, and I don't think we had it very long. We were intent on covering it with leaves, grass, twigs, anything we could find. Whether someone stepped on its paw or whether the dog just woke up to see kids leaning over it, the dog leaped up from its sleep and bit my brother in the face, right near his eye. With all the bleeding, crying, and tumult, my mother had to do the best she could to handle things, which was wait for the mailman so he could drive us into town to the doctor, Dr. Sproat.  I recall we also had a terrier type dog at that residence, named Laddie. Though most dogs then were of the free range type, Laddie had the bad habit of chasing cars, so my mother had him tied to the clothesline, where he could run back and forth quite freely. One day, Tommy was driving us to Troy, to the Pet Store, maybe Gordoneer's or something like that, with a litter of puppies. I don't recall where the puppies came from. When Laddie saw us leaving in Tommy's car, he backed up, slid out of his collar and began running alongside the car. I could see him from the window of the back seat. The car ran over Laddie, killing him.

  From there, we moved to the house on the curve, just outside Valley Falls. The house was owned by a German woman, and her daughter. I remember a great many things from when we lived there. I remember being terrified of Blackouts and the sound of airplanes flying overhead at night; the  rumor that the German woman kept a light in her window during Blackouts didn't help. Word was that she was signaling the Germans.  That house is where I came down with some serious sickness that seemed to have lasted a long time. After numerous house calls, Dr. Sproat "diagnosed" Vincent's Angina. I only know I felt so sick I told my mother I wanted to die, and I was 4 years old. My poor mother.

  And lastly, thanks to my mother's proactive and ultimately prevailing efforts, we moved to Valley Falls, to a home that had been in my father's family for years and years. My mother must have felt so relieved.