Grandma Johnson had the coolest house in town. It was a little, tiny, square house with a flat roof, on Dana Avenue, right behind Country Club Road and the underpass of Broadway Road. She and Grandpa moved there a year after they came to Mesa from Utah, in the early 1940's. We must have spent more time at Grandma's house than anywhere else, it was the gathering place for our whole family.
Many Friday nights found us cousins spending the night in her little back bedroom. The train tracks were near enough to hear the whistle on and off through the night, and Saturday mornings always dawned to the smell of Swedish pancakes and homemade maple syrup cooking on the stove. What a wonderful aroma!
Most Saturday afternoon and evenings we spent at grandma's, visiting, playing, and having picnics, and every Sunday the whole family came to visit. If it was not too hot we would sit in the back yard and visit. Mom and the aunts would spread a blanket on the grass for the little babies and kids to sit on. As we grew older that blanket became our swimming pool, and we would pretend to dive into it and swim. We were a bunch of funny little kids.
There was a big tree in the back yard that made a good climbing tree. The older cousins built a platform in the tree, and it was the tree house. Mom’s younger brother, Evon, put a baseball bat in the branches sometime back when he was a kid. He left it sitting there so long that the tree grew around it until you couldn’t take the bat out now matter how hard you tugged.
At the edge of the lawn grandma planted a yellow rose tree with climbing roses. Behind that was dirt and an old shed were grandpa kept his tools and mining things. There were big old rocks, samples of ore he had picked up at his mine or out prospecting They were green and blue with turquoise and copper. There was also a big compost pit where grandma dumped grass clippings and leaves in the fall. It was covered with long planks of wood, to keep little children from falling in.
Behind the back fence, if we were brave enough to venture, was a ditch. Mulberry trees grew along it, and we could climb in them and hide among their big, green leaves. A scary man was supposed to live in the ramshackle house on the other side of the trees. I never saw him, but it made venturing there more exciting.
In the front yard verbena grew in flowerbeds. If we were careful we could pull out little individual blossoms and suck on their stems to find a tiny taste of sweetness. It was easier to find the nectar at the end of honeysuckle stamens, but we had to find a blossom with a stamen sticking out the middle with a green ball on the end. It we pulled that out and sucked it tasted like honey.
Along the back east wall of grandma’s house she planted sweat pees. They grew taller than my head, and had huge blossoms. During the spring we would spend Saturday afternoons picking sweet peas to take to our Sunday School teacher the next day. Sometimes we would find a pod in among the blossoms, and then we would open it and eat the tart, fresh peas inside.
To Be Continued
No comments:
Post a Comment