There were a lot of things I loved about going to that small
rural Midwestern hamlet of about 300 residents nestled by the Red River which
bordered the Minnesota line…but one of the best and most comforting was the
feel of my Grandpa’s old house. The two-story home with a dirt-floor cellar sat
on the north side of the main drag Broadway…just about three blocks in from
“old” highway 81, which served as the main north/south eastern North Dakota
thoroughfare before the completion of Interstate 29 several miles west bypassed
the town in the 1970s.
The house was classic…at least in my mind, and featured
three bedrooms up stairs, an attic directly above the kitchen, one bedroom on
the first level along with a living room, kitchen and parlor just of the living
room. You rarely ventured into the parlor unless it was to play old hymns on
the badly out-of-tune ancient upright piano. There was always a bunch of stuff
stacked in there…and I remember it seeming kind of dusty and dark.
There was also a dirt floor cellar just below the kitchen
with a single porcelain keyless light that you had to illuminate by pulling a
chain once you descended the crewed wooden stairs. My grandma (who passed away
in the late 1970s) used to keep fruit-and-such which she canned down there…but
as a kid I was always afraid to even open the cellar door fearing that Boo
Radley would be lurking in the dark…just at the base of the stairs.
The most amazing thing about this big house was that it
really had only one real bathroom…and small upstairs room contained only a
commode, a tub and a sink. If you wanted to take a “shower” you had to kneel
down in the porcelain tub and use an old leaky rubber sprayer-hose that you’d
have to force on over the tub faucet. It would usually slipped off multiple
times during even a short shower…but that just seemed to be part of the place’s
charm.
There was a screened in porch on the front of the house
which faced out onto the main thoroughfare, and while I don’t recall there ever
really being much in the way of furniture out there, I used to sit there as a
kid in one of my grandmother’s old wheelchairs. I remember going out there one
afternoon and sitting in one of those chairs and putting my head back before
dozing off. I’m sure I took naps as an infant and youngster, but that is my
first conscious memory of being relaxed enough that I dozed off and took an
extended nap in the middle of the day.
If I was visiting my grandfather by myself…I’d usually sleep
in the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. There were a couple of
pushbutton brass-platted 3-way light switches to turn on the stairwell lights
at the bottom and top of the bending wooden staircase, and though I rarely
worried about Boo getting out of his preferred digs in the cellar, I was always
grateful to be able to illuminate the stairs before ascending the stairs to go
up to bed on a dark Midwestern night. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls in
the bedroom, and the only light in there was another porcelain keyless light
bulb that you had to turn on by pulling a chain. In later years, my uncle
Donald (my mom’s older brother) had tied a couple of old neckties from the
brass bed headboard up to the light chain so that anyone sleeping in the old
bed could simply reach up and grab the neckties to pull the chain and turn on
the light. Growing up in the depression with the added misery of the dust bowl
years could make a guy pretty inventive (and for that matter industrious)…and
my uncle Donald was a great example of that rewarding combination.
The brass bed (with the necktie light switch feature) in
that room was the same bed where my mother had been delivered when the old
house served at the area “hospital” in the late 1800s and well into the 1900s.
My grandparents purchased the house in the late 1960s to move off the farm and
have the comforts of town…and I guess some of the furniture must have conveyed.
That polished and fully restored bed still sits in my cousin Annie’s beautiful
home in Fargo, which has more bathrooms than the old Abercrombie house had
bedrooms. I think my grandparents paid about $5,000 for that house in the
1960s…which is a little less than I paid for just one Leroy Neiman painting
which sits in my DC home right now. Though I could be wrong, I don’t believe we
sold it for much more than about 30K after my grandfather passed away in 1991.
What’s the point of all this? If you know…please use
the comment tool and let me know too. I just kept with the first real rule of
this useless blog…which is to put to paper whatever happens to come to mind at
4am on a Friday. As I get older and life seems to get more complicated and
hectic (and much, much shorter), I’m sure I romanticize what I at least fondly
recall as a simpler time. You think a lot more about the way you lived your
life when you get my age, and though I’ve been blessed to spend a fair amount
of time in the Midwest, I wish I’d spent even more time in North Dakota.
The writing in this blog is subpar at best, but hopefully the music is usually pretty decent. The best
part of this whole exercise is it’s Friday (even if subscribers sometime don’t
get the email until Saturday), so please enjoy the beautiful Fall weekend and
make some time for the people and pets that matter to you the most. If you can,
visit somebody you care about…or maybe take your kids to see their grandpa. As
you get older, you will find yourself reflecting much more about people and the
value of relationships, than you ever will about work.
BTW...I seldom have the time to proof these each week...and even if I did, I'm an electrician not a writer so there will always be some mistakes in the prose. So, I'm sorry for all the misspellings, pour grammar, lousy punctuation and bad vocabulary. Actually...in all honesty...I'm really not all that sorry. Maybe it's a stubborn wannabe Midwestern thing.
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