Tag: mommy’s piggy tales

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Mommy’s Piggy Tales: Blizzard of ’78

Janna of Mommy’s Piggy Tales began a project to share our youth with our children. Every Thursday, I will tell a story about my childhood as if I were telling it to my children. At the end of this project, I’ll have a collection of stories about my childhood for my children to keep, and hopefully treasure.

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Now, where did I leave off last time?

Oh, that’s right…there was a blizzard.

Technically, this story happened in third grade shortly before my ninth birthday, and this week I’m supposed to tell you about fourth grade. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Since we lived in a small town, we drove quite a few miles to go buy groceries. We had a small market down the block for when we needed a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread, but we drove about 45 minutes away to buy the bulk of our supplies. One January day, my dad took my sister and me shopping with him, leaving my mom at home with my brother, almost 2, and my sister, about five months old.

The groceries were packed in the trunk. It was snowing. The wind was picking up. We got on the highway, but it was slow going. Dad would have missed the exit for Rantoul, but my sister spotted it just in time. We had only traveled a few miles, but we weren’t going to make it home. We entered the lobby of the Holiday Inn, and Dad got us the very last available room. Since the blizzard was so bad, the hotel let other stranded travelers sleep in the lobby that night.

We didn’t have our pajamas, so we slept in our underwear. There was so much snow that we couldn’t leave the next day, and there wasn’t much to do except wander around the hotel. My sister and I were very jealous of the girl who had her swimming suit with her! We wanted Dad to let us swim in our underwear, but he didn’t think that would be a good idea. At least the groceries in the trunk were going to stay cold, he told us.

Meanwhile, my mom was at home, snowed in with her two littlest babies. My little sister was sick. Mom was so concerned about Heather’s breathing that she slept on her back, with Heather snuggled on top of her, for the entire night. I don’t think Mom actually got much sleep! The next day she called a nurse in town for help, and soon after some men on snowmobiles arrived with medicine.

We had to stay at the hotel one more night. It was very strange, having to wear the same underwear and same clothes for three days in a row. After the second night, the weather cleared enough for us to finally drive home. The groceries had indeed stayed cold in the trunk…in fact, they were quite frozen.

And then came fourth grade, where, after such a long wait through Kindergarten, First, Second and Third Grades, I finally received what I had longed for…HOMEWORK! The primary grades were over, and yet my school career was just beginning.

Watership DownFourth grade brought long division and longer books to read. Our teacher had a racetrack bulletin board; it was a game; a race to show our independent reading. When our little cars reached the end of the racetrack, we received a book of our very own! I reached the end twice that year. The first book I picked was based on a movie I had just seen with my dad and my sister in the theater…Star Wars! The second book had a picture of a rabbit on the front, but it was a bit beyond me at the time. When I finally picked it up to read at an older age, Watership Down became one of my favorites.

There’s so much more to come….

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Mommy’s Piggy Tales: Our Town in Third Grade

Janna of Mommy’s Piggy Tales began a project to share our youth with our children. Every Thursday, I will tell a story about my childhood as if I were telling it to my children. At the end of this project, I’ll have a collection of stories about my childhood for my children to keep, and hopefully treasure.

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In the summer before third grade, I lived in a little town across from a red brick church with a tall steeple, in a red brick house on a red brick street named Main. Late at night, when I was closing my eyes in the back seat of the car, I could always hear the rumble of the bricks under the tires when we turned onto our street. When the summers were hot, the house was cool, and yet Mom always made us go outside to play. It was so hot, it seemed like the cement driveway sizzled. We would sit on the steps, too hot to run around or ride our bikes, and watch the heat waves radiate out of the white concrete. Tar bubbles formed on the blacktop street we had to cross on the way to the playground, and we would get sticky, black circles on the soles of our feet.

At the end of a hot, hot August, my baby sister came home. I remember the exact day; I was amazed at her tiny, little feet. I didn’t want to hold my baby sister, because I had a small cold and didn’t want to pass it along to my new, baby sister. Now our family of six was complete.

We spent a lot of time outside. Since we lived 35 miles away from the city where TV was broadcast, we only received 3 television stations on our tall, outdoor antennae. Cable and satellite weren’t available back in the early 70’s. My city-dwelling cousins would talk about Romper Room and Speed Racer, but the stations we received didn’t broadcast those shows. We were able to see PBS, so Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers were what we watched, at the demand of my baby brother and sister and insistence of my mom.

As television was not a draw to the indoors, we stayed outdoors. We had a huge tractor tire full of sand in the shade of an old plum tree. There was a metal-framed swing set under the apple tree. My sister and I were only 13 months apart, and we were playmates. We could go pick some rhubarb stems, snap off the leaves, wash them in the hose and eat them raw. We would climb the pine tree next to the alley, and get covered with sap. We rode our bikes in the same alley, seeing if the neighbor girl was outside and wanted to play. In the fall, we would build leaf houses, piling up the leaves to make walls and rooms and hiding places for our treasure. It was always fun when one of our friends came into town from her house in the country, and played with us for hours in our backyard.

Third grade was a wonderful year, the year when reading became a joy and an escape. We read Little House in the Big Woods, and my parents started buying us each book in the series. Of course, we also watched Little House on the Prairie and spent time with Laura and Mary every week! We also started collecting the Nancy Drew books. My sister was only in second grade, but she had been reading since Kindergarten. She was in my reading group at school, which was the highest reading group in third grade, but I never thought a thing about it. We just thought it was fun to be in the same reading group! Second and third grades were combined, so she was in my classroom anyway.

Third grade was when I start to have the most memories, and almost all the memories are good. There were a few times when I felt left out by classmates, but for the most part, childhood is a wonderful memory. To be continued…

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