Years ago, people regularly took Sunday afternoon drives. My mother loved to tell us stories about her family's adventures with horse drawn vehicles. On Sundays, they packed the children and a hearty picnic into the wagon and headed to church. Everyone had a picnic after the morning service, visited for a while, and then made the long trip back home. Later, when the car got them there faster, the desire for a leisurely Sunday afternoon ride prompted them to take roads less travelled, to see other places and things before returning home to milk the cows and prepare for another long hard week of farming.
My father, whose own father was an alcoholic barber, had much more colorful experiences to tell us. Like the time his dad was under the influence and piled the family of eight into the old Ford, the kind with the little round glass window behind the back seat. Granddad thought the car was in drive, but it was in reverse, slamming the car into a telephone pole, the old fashioned kind with metal climbing spikes sticking out of the sides. One metal spike broke through the round glass window, conked a family member on the back of the head, knocking him out cold.
When we were kids, our folks had a Mercedes Benz. Not really. That was a family joke. Each of us had a right foot named "Mercedes" and a left foot named "Benz." You got it right. We walked. Everywhere.
On almost any Sunday afternoon, our little brood could be seen marching in single file, like a camel caravan, across town, over the Joilet Bridge, and out into the extremities of our town to our grandmother's house. Warm weather or cold, we made that trip every Sunday afternoon unless we were sick.
We didn't think twice about walking. We walked everywhere. To the grocery store, to the doctor, to the library, to church, to local events, to school, to our friends' houses. At first, we didn't know there was another way. When we noticed that our some of our neighbors had cars, it was simply that. They drove. We walked.
On our Sunday walks, sometimes a couple of us kids would speed up and make our way to the far front of the caravan, mostly to be able to talk and kid around without constantly being told to behave. And if one of us really was bad, she had to walk with my mother and hold my her hand, which had a really fierce grip that took the life right out of your fingers rendering them numb in no time at all. My father was not a hand holder. He had a thing about germs. He knew we were a germy bunch by nature. His kind of discipline was a thump on the head.
The route to Grandma's house never varied. Down Campbell Street to West Lincolnway, then over the bridge and down Joliet Road. The only negative to our trips was that the route was so predictable. In my mind, I could see a dozen different variations, all more interesting than the go straight, turn right, then turn left route we always took. In warm months I would have loved to have walked past the root beer stand on Chicago Street. It would have been so easy, so within the desired direction. I knew my mother just didn't want to buy us root beer. My dad wouldn't have objected. He loved root beer, but he also loved peace and quiet. Everyone in our family knew better than to cross my mother.
But even on such an unrelenting route there were things to see. People out in their yards. Children riding bikes or playing together. Wading pools. People doing yard work even though it was the Sabbath. Flower gardens and later in the season vegetable gardens. And swing sets.
I loved swing sets. Ours was two discarded pieces of telephone poles with a plank nailed between them to support two homemade wooden swings on ropes. My dad, always a clever fellow, built the whole thing out of scrap wood. And though I admired the brightly painted metal swing sets of other neighbor children, I was assured that ours wouldn't fall over in time or rust.
Early on summer mornings, I would get up, dress, unlock the kitchen door quietly so that my parents wouldn't wake up and start the shrieking that always followed the thought that there might be a prowler in the house, and I would go out to the little fenced in yard to swing to my heart's content.
Sometimes I would swing and sing. Sometimes, I would swing with my eyes shut and imagine I was flying. But mostly, I just listened to the birds singing, the trucks and cars wooshing past on our busy street, enjoying the feeling of being somewhere by myself. In a big family, and especially in a noisy family, one is seldom alone, but in that early morning half hour or so, I loved the feeling.
One of the few times I was glad I wasn't alone was when we were at our grandparents home. My grandfather was a retired farmer. When he moved to our town at the age of sixty-five, it was to buy his first house and land. He had always rented before that. He took a one acre parcel of land and turned it into the most compact food-producing tract of land for miles around. He had an apple orchard, plum and cherry trees, blackberries, raspberries, boisenberries, and strawberries. And then there were the usual garden items like tomatoes, potatoes, beans, carrots, turnips, squash, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers, etc. I learned the joy of farming from my grandfather.
My grandmother had a green thumb for flowers and houseplants. In the winter, every room in the house had a plant or two on any available surface. In the summer, the plants all went out on the big front porch on tables that my grandfather built. He also made her long window boxes for the front of the porch which she filled with vinca, primroses, petunias, Sweet William, and other bright colored flowers. From the street, her filled flower boxes looked like the hanging gardens of Babylon as they spilled over and cascaded down the front of their big white house. Later in the summer she set up a table at the roadside where she sold fruits, vegetables, and bunches of flowers for what she called her "pin money."
My sisters and I knew the route to our grandparents' house very well. In the summer, we were often called to help Grandma and Grandma by picking produce from their garden. They always rewarded us with lunch before they brought us home. Grandma was a great cook. And baker. She always had fresh cookies stored in a large silver electric skillet, and she never counted how many we ate.
Theirs was a tall square white frame house, like many houses built in its day. Kitchen, dining room, and living room on the first floor, two bedrooms a bath and a sewing room on the second floor. The basement had the furnace, hot water heater and a wringer washer.
I remember thinking that Grandma's living room was elegant. It wasn't. It was just spotlessly clean as was her entire house, and it was tastefully decorated. It was homey, and it welcomed any guest to be comfortable and at ease. On Sunday afternoons, after being welcomed with the usual hugs and smiles, we all went to the living room to pull the board games out of the cupboard in the bookcases. We all sat at the dining room table and played games. Parcheesi, Rack-O, Checkers, and Milebourne. Grandma was good at games and she never let us win. If we won, we took great pleasure in the fact that we had done it on our own.
After a while, Grandma would let us play among ourselves and then we'd smell the popcorn popping. Pan after pan she would make until her large canning kettle was full of buttery, salty fresh popcorn, cooked the old-fashioned way on top of the stove. We'd line up with our bowls to scoop popcorn and then we were off to watch TV. Family Classics came on at four o'clock on WGN. During commercials we ran to the bathroom or back to the kitchen for more popcorn and pink lemonade.
"Lassie" came on next, then "Disneyland", the first hour long Walt Disney TV show. Mickey and Donald and Chip and Dale made us laugh and scream in delight. Later, it was "Davy Crockett," excerpts from "Dumbo" and "Bambi" and even "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea."
It all ended too soon, and we'd clean up our spilled popcorn, kiss Grandma goodnight and pile into Grandpa's car for an exciting if slightly squished ride home. Watching the lights in the houses along the way as we drove home was a novel experience for us since we didn't own a car, but although the car made the long trip home much faster, we never once asked, "are we there yet?" We all wished we were still back at Grandma's house.
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