The end of summer came and a return to Englewood where there was the goldenrod of late August, and soon the raking of leaves into huge piles that we could roll in to our hearts' content. And we could play Follow the Leader with a variety of somersaults and games in the soft leaves. For several years the Tuttles, our neighbors in the big white house across the street brought us a rich collection of shells from their Florida winter vacation, and we played games with them in the sandbox.

Hut building was another basic game there were two kinds: above ground and below ground. The former consisted of dragging stuff off the wood pile or cleaning out the chicken coop, but, after a few days, the momentum usually collapsed for lack of roof material. Digging to make a hut was something else. Fortunately my mother accepted digging as being a good part of every child's education no matter how dirty we got. (However, she drew the line at mud pies, which we were never allowed to make.) The first few feet of digging were always full of euphoria, and imagination projected us to an underground palace, or even a shorter route to China. By the time the muscles gave out, the most I can ever remember achieving was a somewhat damp and cool hideaway with enough boards stacked above to make it barely possible to sit inside.

I remember triumphantly deciding that now was the time to have an available set of edible provisions stored in our hut. I got an Ivin's Jumble tin box and stowed away some crackers and a beautiful pear. By that time the hut craze was waning, and by the time I remembered to retrieve my secret store, the pear had produced a labyrinth of mold in a variety of colors that almost filled the box. The mold horrified me rather than awakening any scientific interest.

Next door to us lived the Campbells a postmaster and his wife. There was never any love lost between our two families, for Mrs. Campbell made it very plain that she would not tolerate any small children cutting across her lawn. My mother naturally considered her children obedient and responsible, without Mrs. Campbell's anticipating trouble. Then there was something about the Campbells' putting up a fence on the east boundary of our property, only it was a foot or two inside our property. Anyway in my small mind the Campbells became ogres to be avoided at all cost. Much later my mother became more relaxed about the situation but that was after the children ceased to be a threat.

Freddie Warner was a boy about my age who lived two doors away. Looking back I think we were always encouraged to feel vaguely superior to the neighbors in that house too. Freddie seemed very colorless and not particularly memorable except for the fact that he took me out behind the garage every day to demonstrate how he could urinate. When my mother discovered him in the act she scooped me up and forbade Freddie to play at our house any more that day. I got the message.

Later when the Warners moved away, the Greens and their small boys replaced them I remember Dellie the best. Still later a wonderful family named Wentworth moved there from Canada. They were so nice that I often wondered what became of them.

On the other side of our house, to the west, was Augustus and beyond that an unused church. Some of the older boys discovered how to get into the basement and I remember an initiation ceremony that my brother Paul, Duart McClean, and Hobie Flanagan were involved in very scary for me. The "little kids" to be initiated were taken individually into the cold, totally colorless, damp underpinnings of the church all I can remember is primitive and abandoned plumbing arrangements. There was the vague threat of being guided blindfolded, the dank smell, opening one's eyes to what seemed like dark holes and barriers, and finally being let out into the light of day with a vague sense of escape or accomplishment.

I remember once sitting on the back stoop with several friends discussing who we were more afraid of our mother or our father. I think my sister was with me I know there was at least one sibling besides myself and we were not very old perhaps I was 8 or 9. I remember that we, my siblings and I unanimously agreed it was our father, while our friends said they were more afraid of the discipline of their mother. I remember thinking in my heart that it was more complicated than that. Actually my mother was more harsh in her discipline of me but it was my father's presence that seemed more powerful or ominous because it came less frequently and more finally. The funny thing was that I came to see my father as much more easy for me to deal with as the years went by. And certainly we never sensed conflict between our parents when it came to discipline.

But the point is that it was discipline through approval. To be in the sunlight of my parents' love was enough of an incentive with no need for spankings. The most severe punishment was being "put to bed", or even worse "to be put to bed without any supper" though I can never remember the latter being enforced to the point of no food. Nor can I ever remember ANY physical punishment. My father never struck my mother or any of us children; my mother never used spankings or slappings with one exception which I remember feeling at the time was sort of earned.

She had been cutting my brother John's hair in the upstairs hall, and I was sitting on the steps that led to the third floor, snivelling and complaining. Finally I whined and cried to the point where in desperation she slapped my face and said, "There, I'll give you something to cry for..." I wouldn't remember it I'm sure except for the fact that I was shocked into realizing how desperate she was with me, and the fact that it was a unique occasion.

Perhaps the worst thing mother ever said to me was at a time when I was feeling sorry for myself. No doubt I had driven her to a point of exasperation. Finally mother said rather fiercely, "You have no business feeling so despairing. There'll be times in your life when much worse things happen to you. You don't know what it is to feel really terrible..." I don't know whether it shut me up or not; I do know that for years I had a suspenseful attitude toward what she had said. Worse things have happened to me, but I still don't think I've ever FELT worse than I did at that moment.

Years later my sister and I suspected that the pressure of our parents to make us conform was unfairly strong even though it was all psychological. At times I remember saying, "I wish we were punished by being spanked rather than sent to bed, because then it would all be over with." Sometimes I was disciplined for what I thought was unfair. I had a way of building up resentment over real or imagined injustice, and then it would spill over in a sort of tantrum.

The word "oppression" as used by Feminists would never have occurred to me in connection with my family. I think of my mother as a very "liberated" person. Grandma liked to talk about "household engineering" as being a better expression than just "housework". (I think my father suspected her of enjoying the phrase more to put him down than to elevate the distaff side of the household chores.) My mother liked the basic relationship of having the male as leader. But she was certainly as much the final arbiter in family decisions as was my father. They were a team. She passed on to me a sort of "wisdom of the ages" in believing that men and women are complementary. There was almost a divine joy in the harmony of functioning well together. She never made any secret of the fact that their sexual life was of prime importance. But she also felt that part of this joy came from supporting the male ego. She wouldn't have called it submission. But she was free to say, "It's a man's world..."

Chores were accepted as having distinct gender. My sister and I invariably waited on table, a task that was to be done correctly and silently, never removing more than one plate at a time no piling up or casual loading. We also had our turns at cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, dusting, and mending. It would be hard for my daughter laws to imagine what a pile of mending accumulated in a week where cotton and woolen socks must be darned and patches applied to fabrics that had no added synthetic strength. The boys, on the other hand, were expected to chop wood, make fires, tend the furnace, shovel snow, and mow lawns. Washing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen after meals were not so rigidly defined. There was no feeling that any job was "beneath" you. I've mowed lawns and tended the furnace and I know my brothers helped in the "female" jobs. But it was a handy division of labor.

So many of the jobs are much easier now. When the Depression settled in, I remember hating to wash handkerchiefs by hand. There was no such thing as Kleenex. A large family with winter colds exhausted all the handkerchiefs and carefully torn rags as well. They must be soaked in cold water first and it was horrid and tedious to get them all clean. And of course they must be hung out on the line, sunned, sprinkled, and ironed.

I think I resisted some of the dogmatic rules that were laid down while being brainwashed by others. I resented the fact that I wasn't allowed to go to Hermione Meyer's birthday party when I was in the 7th grade, "because my mother didn't know her parents". Hermione was a nice German girl who had much nicer clothes than I did and I'm sure her family lived better than we. Her friends were all "the best kids in the class". My mother was wrong not to let me be a part of MY class, MY generation. Later she seemed to realize that she had lost the battle and I did make my own friends. In fact both my mother and father were good about not asking too much about my personal life.