To My Siblings: Penrose Memories

To My Siblings: Do you remember these little gems?

1. Mother: "Hurry up or you'll miss the bus!"
2. The water bucket on the wash stand inside the door with water carried from the pump about 20 yards from the house with the dipper that we all drank from day in and day out.
3. Dad: "Have you cleaned out the chicken house?"  Ghastly.
4. The "slop pail" which took the place of a sink with a garbage disposal into which went all the refuse of the day and which I proudly taught Steve to twirl over his head in the yard without spilling a drop and poor Judy never mastered the scientific principles of centrifugal force.
5. Taking baths in the galvanized round tub, usually Saturday night, but more frequent as I became more fastidious in my advanced high school years.
6. "Mother, Dwight's picking his pimples again."  Well, I didn't have a mirror in my bedroom so I had to sit on the vanity in the girls' bedroom to see the mirror.  Whereupon mother would show up the with mercurochrome bottle and paint red blotches all over my face so I would cease and desist my pimple squeezing.  Tattle tale girls.
7. Who got to read the serials in the Saturday Evening Post first?
8. Crowding six kids and two adults into our Model A Ford, which served as our family transportation until after WWII when we finally got a normal car.  We hunkered down when we got to town because we didn't want anyone else to see us in our historic automobile.
9. Gathering around the stove in the living room on frigid winter mornings when we left our unheated bedrooms to finish getting dressed when it was below zero and the wind howling.;
10. Watching for cars driving down the road near our house so we knew who was going to town and when they came back.
11. Going up to Grandma Wasden's when we absolutely had to make a phone call, whereupon Grandma would ring the number for us, we would listen to see who else was on the line, and then make our phone call.  We didn't have a phone at home until several years after I left home.
12. Who else could have known what it was like to be raised an only boy in a whole house full of girls, with my one little brother being born too late to do me any good?  Unbelievable!

Whatever we six Bloods remember, whatever we did without, whatever we did have, the six of us today are still here, with Judy leading our round-robin phone relays, and occasionally we hear when I reveal a secret that only I knew, "Well, Judy certainly didn't tell me that!"  I don't think any of us have ever left Penrose and we go their often in our dreams and in our quiet moments.