I don’t know if it was good fortune or misfortune, but when my mother died when I was eight, the neighbor lady, who had taken me for nature walks and taught me about the plants we encountered and told me stories of what the land had been like at another part of history, told me to write down everything I wanted to remember about my mother, so I wouldn’t forget. So I did. I have lost the list since then. I remember being dismayed when I found it a few years later - one of my biggest things on the list seemed to have been food: her homemade pizza (we lived pretty far away from town, so pizza was usually homemade or not at all), fruit cocktail cookies when I got home from school, homemade peach cobbler (something I learned to make from her), etc. She used Prell shampoo, and even after she died, the corduroy pillow on the living room couch smelled like her.
However, that exercise of “memory list” also made me try very hard to keep earlier childhood memories. When you lose your mother at a younger age it feels like you are suddenly unlike everyone else around you. Kids’ moms don’t die. At least, not very often. My stepsister after my dad remarried assured me that it was much worse for her to have divorced parents: she had to go visit him and get presents from him several times a year and he didn’t live with her anymore. To me, that sounded a lot better than in a hole in the ground and you never see them again.
This is an explanation for what little early memories I retain. Research shows that memory is malleable, and often inaccurate. I will be doing my best, though, to be accurate as best I can. The distance of time and place, however, also create perspective, and I will do my best not to put too much of a grandmother’s view into my childhood eyes. I hoped growing up that other childhoods weren’t like mine. Sometimes, though, it feels like generational curses do exist, even if only in lessons not learned and maybe hidden in the scars passed from parent to child.
I was born in the late sixties. When we had a lesson on naming places and people in fourth grade, we were told to ask our parents why we were named what we were named. My dad explained that my mom picked out my name, and that she chose Lisa for my first name, and when told that Marie made me sound too Catholic, chose Joy, because I was her first baby, and she wanted to be a mother more than anything else. A few years ago I finally got suspicious (it took me awhile) and googled. Lisa Marie Presley was born seven months before I was. No wonder there were four Lisa’s in my first grade class!
My mom was second to the youngest of four daughters born to a civil engineer who worked with coal mining companies and did the aerial surveying for a couple of interstates. He dreamed of dying a millionaire, and managed it, but he refused to buy braces for his daughter’s teeth, which upset her, and when he sold her his used piano, he charged her sales tax. He built a small house on property beside his business, three bedrooms and one bathroom, with no shower (that cost more). In the basement was the laundry area, storage, and his beloved model airplane workbench. When he died there were more than sixty that were sold at auction. He invested heavily in real estate in Florida, my uncles mismanaged it (now that I am older, I wonder why the daughters were given no input?), selling parcels here and there when my grandmother would need money and getting hit with heavy taxes each time. The money was gone more than 15 years before my grandmother passed. Social security for a widow who never worked was less than $400/month because my grandfather refused to pay more than the bare minimum into social security because he could invest it better.
My grandfather was a bit of a crazy person, at times. When his daughters announced they were going to get on the roof and jump off of it with umbrellas, he said that sounded perfectly fine. My grandmother was absolutely horrified when the first kid plummeted past her kitchen window. He would slam on the brakes at intersections on ice and would dive in his plane when the family was flying with him and pretend it was out of control. It is a joke that the family is afraid of flying. The house and girls had to be immaculate, of course, so they never had pets. My grandmother said it wasn’t for a lack of trying. They were always trying to keep a stray kitten they found here or there, but my grandfather absolutely forbade it. My mom and her sisters all swore their kids would have pets, and they all did.
My parents went to the same church, so they had youth group activities together, sledding parties, caroling, etc. They were in different counties, though, so I don’t think they went to the same school. My dad makes it sound like he wasn’t really thinking of marriage or anything, but when the time came, he couldn’t figure out a reason to not ask her, and they got married. Apparently, my mother’s dad did not approve of the union and told my mother he would pay her $2000 if she managed to not have a kid for two years after their wedding. I was born a couple weeks after their third wedding anniversary.
So, my poor young mother was 21 when I was born. She had married a man who wanted his wife to be able to stay home and raise kids. I wouldn’t know until years later that my father was raised in a violent home with an alcoholic father and a mother who worked two jobs to keep the family farm from going under. My grandmother took the kids to the company store for clothing and shopped there for other things because the purchases were taken directly from her husband’s check. my grandfather drank the rest. In hindsight, I see a young man who swore he would never be his father, who wasn’t sure how to be a good parent, just knew that he didn’t want to raise kids the way he was raised. From everything I have been told, my mom wanted to grow up to be a mom and raise kids. State troopers weren’t well paid in the early 70s, though, and these two young people wanted to buy a house one day, so she did accounting for businesses and went to classes to learn to prepare taxes and set out her sign every year once tax season arrived and prepared people’s taxes. All of this was done on the kitchen table of a 1965 New Moon trailer.
When my parents married, they bought the trailer and put it on his family’s farm, and it stayed there until my father graduated from the academy and got his first assignment in the smallest, least inhabited county in the state. Family lore says that I was a colicky baby, and that my mother would be beside herself trying to comfort me. My paternal grandmother would proudly tell me every time I was handed to her, I immediately quieted and that it frustrated my mom. I feel sorry for my mom- she had to feel like the baby she wanted so desperately didn’t want her back. My mother got pregnant again before I was six months old, and my sister was born just after my dad graduated from the police academy. My family paid to move our little home to a trailer park near a railroad line, and that is when some of my earliest memories begin, mostly a fear of how loud trains are and the shaking of the trailer as they rumbled past.
If you have listened to me on here in the evenings on the porch, you know I am someone who admits to foibles, is probably way more open and transparent than I should be, and who can talk a lot. I was more like that as a child. When I was three years old, the trailer was moved to the location it held until I moved away from Pennsylvania in early adulthood. I vaguely remember the oil drum for the heater being delivered and installed by the heating oil company and telling the patient man about my little sister who wasn’t talking much yet. The farm was 116 acres, much of it forest, and the snowbirds who owned it met my father when he was dispatched to investigate a burglary report. The apples were ready on the one apple tree, and they invited him to come pick some. He brought his toddler daughter (me!) with him when he came to pick apples, which delighted the old childless couple, Dorothy and John. Dorothy would tell me years later that I was a little over a year old then and kept running to the back screen door and yelling, “Da!” She found that absolutely delightful.
I don’t know how John and Dorothy figured out about the trailer, but they offered my dad free rent to put the trailer across the road from their house so the property was always inhabited and hopefully there wouldn’t be future break-ins. John and Dorothy’s house was my mom’s dream house, and what she worked for all those hours at the kitchen table. The farm was 116 acres, with a spring for drinking water, a creek running through the property, a fishing pond, a humongous old barn built in 1907, an old garage of similar age, and probably four acres of mowed lawn to play on. The property took up both sides of the road and sat in the bottom of a valley. When you walked down the sidewalk and into that little blacktop road, everything you saw was yours. You owned to the top of all the hills you could see. It was a good place to raise wild things. My father would finally purchase it after she died. Most of my memories, good and bad, start on the farm.