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Photo above: Grammy Flynn “Ma” with Mary and Joe(?) 1917(?) When Uncle Joe and Aunt Rosemary brought my grandmother to see Mary’s new home shortly after moving day, the story she told them was an incredible surprise–yet no surprise at all. Joe pulled his car into driveway (oval cedar shrubs on the left, a massive conifer…
The weeks immediately following our family’s move must have been chaotic. There was my mother with a two-week old baby and five other children. Kathy (just sixteen months old) had been brought home by Aunt Sadie and Uncle George, who had cared for her at their home in Brighton for several weeks bridging the move. (They…
Ann J lived at corner of Brush Hill Road and Fairmount Avenue. What a place! “The Brown Estate.” (Who were these Browns? I never knew.) The house was not visible from the end of the gravel driveway, where the gardener’s house stood guard. So I’d go crunching down the gravel driveway past carriage house, very…
When you were a kid in the 1950s, if you had to get some place or wanted to see your friends, you walked. Mothers did not drive their children around. For one thing, there was usually only one car in a family, and often the father took that car to work. From 376, there were…
Across the street from us, where Smith and Brush Hill Roads meet, was a fieldstone wall that stretched as far as the eye could see, in both directions; it enclosed a vast pasture studded with big, big trees. This marked the northwest corner E.M. Loew’s twenty-five acres–The Loew estate. We often saw sheep and cows…
The Bachelors Our nearest neighbors, to the north, in a modern glass-fronted ranch house, were two men known to us as “the bachelors.” I have memories of one of the bachelors working with my father, occasionally, on projects that crossed the property line. Were they trying to eradicate poison ivy…or just raking leaves? Maybe both…at different…
Springtime. A treasured memory is the delicate fragrance of apple blossoms wafting into my bedroom from the orchard beyond the front yard. First had come a cavalcade of daffodils, dozens of them, lining the perennial border that enclosed far side of the front lawn, where, at its edges its curves echoed the shape of the…
Now, more than half a century later, it is the telephone that my grandchildren want to hear about. “Nana, tell us about the telephones when you were a girl.” This is more or less the script… The Old Black Phone When I was a girl, there was only one telephone in the house. There was no…
A big house, a big barn, and a big yard offer many opportunities for mischief—especially for two little girls, the youngest of six, who are only sixteen months apart. Thus Kathy and Karen seem to have caused my mother more gray hairs than all the rest of us combined (and let’s be honest, she was…
The barn was a place we kids liked to explore. It was (technically speaking) a carriage house, but to us it was always “the barn.” We were told it was moved to the site. (From where? I don’t know.) The entrance, as expected was a giant, heavy sliding door (old cracked green paint), three or…