ADRIFT

     Following six years at Lookout Mountain Grammar School I was enrolled for seventh grade at a girls private 'prep school in Chattanooga.  Girls Preparatory School was long ago established as "academically superior".  It was an elitist school though I was many years away from understanding the meaning and implication of the word elite.  My mother and her sisters all attended and graduated from GPS and it was, of course, expected that my sisters and I would do the same.
     The required unitform for GPS was a one piece cotton dress (of any color) with pleats running down the front and a tiny black bow tied and modestly covering the breastbone.  I was tough on clothes when I was young.  I always wore a dress to grammar school.  Pants were not even a consideration for little girls in the early 1940s.  Boys wore knickers and girls wore dresses.  Most of my dresses had wide sashes at the waist that tied in the back in a large bow.  Inevitably these sashes were torn or the bow came undone during games and play at recess.  After-school hours of running through the woods and crawling over rocks I added more wear and tear to my dresses.  There were many despairing wails from my mother over my tattered appearance after a day at school and the afternoon adventures in the woods.  Saturdays meant I could wear blue jeans and I loved the freedom and comfort of this less restrictive clothing.
     When I entered the seventh grade at GPS my romping afternoons in the woods with my dog Nick ended.  The morning ride to school from Lookout Mountain, through Chattanooga and across the Tennessee River to GPS was approximately a ten mile drive.  I car-pooled with four other girls my age.  Kaki also car-pooled with four girls her age.  And the year after I entered GPS, my sister Joan car-pooled to GPS in the same manner.  
     Car-pooling varied in rotations.  Sometimes we had a different father each morning driving us to GPS.  Other times one father would take a full week of driving; another father, the following week, etc.  At our house on a weekday morning there were three cars coming through our driveway to pickup Kaki, Joan and me.  Now, when I write this, it seems really nutty that our father didn't simply drive Kaki, Joan and me to school every morning on his way to his office in Chattanooga.  I remember Kaki insisting there was no space open for me in "her" carpool.  At that age and time I was not one to make a protest with Kaki about anything and I didn't care who drove or how I was transported to school.
     Car-pooling in this way often created a traffic jam in our driveway as well as confusion within our household on a school day morning.  The driveway was a long narrow one, snaking through the woods and circling at the corner of our house.  When a car honked in our driveway it could only be for one of the three of us, and recognizing the driver or the car from our dining room window, determined who ran out of the house and into the waiting vehicle.  If identification could not be made,  One crawled aboard and the other two retreated to the front porch to wait our rides to school.  
     The three carpool rides often arrived in our driveway at approximately the same time, looking like taxis waiting outside a hotel.  We all scampered hurridely to the cars so that the car at the head of the line could move on, allowing the others to follow.  I always found these morning scenes highly amusing without quite understanding why.
     After school (at 3:00 pm) a school bus shuttled students from GPS across the Tennessee River and into downtown Chattanooga.  There we all transferred to buses that took us to our r espective home neighborhoods, or we stayed on the bus if it was going to St. Elmo, a community at the foot of Lookout Mountain.  In St. Elmo we rode the Lookout Mountain Incline to the top and walked home.  All of this usually put us home about four o'clock or later depending upon delays along the way.  
     Growing out of grammar school age; entering a very different school and at a distant location; adjusting to not only the carpool routine in the mornings but geographically maneuvering my return home in the afternoons; all of this may well have had more impact on my innate sense of self-identity than anyone, most certainly myself, understood at the time.  I like people and enjoyed friends but I had little sense of myself beyond my home and family.
     I learned to read at an early age and by the time I entered GPS reading enabled me to enjoy my school work.  Especially I liked reading history and geography and science.  Seventh graders were required to take a class called Civics and I loved this study.  Thre was, however, a problem for me with math.  Years later I realized that buried beneath the problem with math I was struggling with a more serious problem in growing up.  Perhaps math was the decoy.  I understood all the basic rules of math.  I knew how to multiply, divide, etc.  And when test time came around I stared at the paper on my desk, and even knowing how to solve the math problems and answer the math questions,  I could not deliver the correct answer to paper.
     I have no memory of even attempting to explain myself to anyone.  THere was no understanding in my head that I could - or should - help myself or let others help me.  Much ado was made about Francie and her math.  My report cars consistently showed A's in all subjects except a C, D, or F in mathematics.  I was alaternately cajoed and scolded by my mother who reminded me frequently of my sister Kaki's star honor role status.  Kaki called me Stupid.  My father, always gentle, worked with me on my math homework.  I offered no defense for myself because I had no sense of self.  I have no memory of ever even trying to explain to either parent of teacher the 'block' that seized my mind when a math test was put before me, preventing me from giving what i knew to be the correct answers.  While excelling in all my other classes, I failed in math.
     Mother delivered me to a tutor, Mrs. Hurst.  I was dropped off at Mrs. Hurst's house on Saturday mornings for an hour of math.  Mrs. Hurst was a kind lade.  She always had a plat of cookies and a glass of apple juice or a cup of hot chocolate for me.  We reviewed math assignments and test papers, and I understood the answers to math problems and I solved them all to Mrs. Hurst's satisfaction.  I could see in her face how perplexed she was with my failure at school but it never crossed my mind to explain to her the helplessness that covered me like a blanket in math class.  I believed there was something wrong with my head and I felt very small and confused.  Perhaps my sister Kaki was right.  Maybe I was just stupid.
     Mrs. Hurst, perhaps understanding my problem better than did I, pulled me through 7th grade mathematics by giving me the required arithmetic test (from GPS) at her home, and with the anticipated apple juine and cookies.  I was more comfortable with algebra in the 8th grade, and in the 9th grade I did well in geometry because I liked drawing boxes and squares, circles and rectangles.
     My three adolescent years at GPS introduced me to new social changes and relationships.  I enjoyed recess fun and games with boys and girls in grammar school but now the social events were square dance parties and carefully organized dances at Mrs. Lyons dancing class.  Boys I had known at Lookout Mountain Grammar School were now at either McCallie School or Baylor, both military academies in Chattanooga.  The boys were corralled to the social scene as were the girls my age so that we might all learn together how to dance and how to socialize in the conventional and cifilized manner hopepd for by our parents and teachers.
      I loved music and dancing and socializing in this way was easy for ome.   I was very naive in that I had no expectations for myself socially beyond continuing friendships as I had always known them.  There were slumber parties with other girls and sometimes, in a group of boys and girls, I went to a Saturday afternoon movie in Chattanooga.  I had girl friends and boy friends but no serious relationships.  I liked people and wanted to feel liked but I had no grand image of myself.  I was comfortable with my own company and that of my dog Nick with no sense of need for companionship beyond that.
     My parents were both beautiful and intelligent but it was apparent, as my sisters and I grew older, that their marriage was an unhappy one.  This tension began to lay itself upon all of us at home.  Frequently there was vocal dissension between Mother and Dad, and this pattern, erupting into angry behavior, became predictable weekly.
     My sister Kaki responded to their quarrels by playing the piano throughout our parents' fights.  My sister Joan locked herself in her room.  Mother argued dramatically, wailed and cried, and inevitably I would hear the front door slam and the car spewing gravel as Dad left us.  Sometimes he would stay away for several days.  Other times I would hear him return late at night.  There was always a tender reunion and makeup, and then, usually on Sundays, the anger between them would suface again. 
     This anger, the harsh words, my mother's weeping, my father's stormy departures affected me deeply.  These domestic scenes of conflict haunted me with an apprehension for the next time, raining down on our household.  Invariably there ws a repeat, and then another.  With Kaki pounding the piano, and Joan behind a locked door, my mother['s sobs muffled in her bedroom, I would run from the house and to the quiet beauty and security i knew in the dense nature outside.  There were trees offering me comfort.  The branches above seemed to reach out to shelter me, and the leaves softened sounds and shut out the world from which I had run.  Tree trunks are strong and I counted on their standing tall and immovable.  Trees didn't run away or disappear.  They were always there for me, and my back found comfort, pressed against the base of a tree.  The soft lovely moss that so easily covers the ground under trees always smelled good to me and I liked running the palm f my hand over and over the moss as a child does a security blanket.  The sounds I heard in the woods were soft and nesting: rustling leaves and the murmuring comments from birds and squirrels overhead.
     There was a very old and very large tree stump, deep in the woods beyond our house.  The jagged surface of this tump was worn down by time and rain, and in the center was a cavity, a circular hollow, frequently holding rain water.  In my moments of acute emotional stress and pain, I gathered leaves and forest flowrs, arranging them in the tree stump's cavity as one would adorn a chapel alter.  Because it gave me a sense of peace and because i believed I was cutting a deal, I promised God that I would never - ever - fight or quarrel - every in my whole life - with anyone if through His great mercy He would stop my parents' quarrels.
     These were moments, minutes, hours of my life in the woods that have stayed poignantly in my head and my heart all of these years.
     I do not know what pulled me back to the house but I would return and often find my mother, sleeping where she had thrown herself across her bed.  Crawling up onto her bed and curling myself next to her, I would lie still and listen for my father's car in the driveway.

FLWT
June 2008

 
My Dog Nick

Nick was not the first pet for whose care in my childhood I was responsible.  There was always a dog in our family.  My mother cared for her sister's spaniel for several years.  Dad had a white pit bull terrier, Kid.  When I was eight or nine years old I discovered a stray cat prowling on our rooftop - most likely stalking birds.  I opened my bedroom window and invited him inside.  I named him Thomas since he was a tom cat.  Thomas accepted the adoption and stayed to share bed and board with me.
     Nick was special and I''m not sure why except he endeared himself to me at a time when I was especially hungry for this kind of attachment.  
     I grew up in beautiful surroundings.  Our home, a rambling white frame house, sat on the highest elevation of Lookout Mountain.  This was decidedly evident for anyone who, driving up Lookout Mountain from the valley and Chattanooga in warm weather, would feel the temperature drop dramatically half way up the mountain.  Turning into our driveway and approaching our house on the shaded gravel driveway we could feel the air under the trees cool our faces, arms, and the back of our necks.  It was a delightful homecoming welcome in the summertime.  The house and the property were visually welcoming any season of the year and I never walked or drove the driveway that I did not feel in every pore the sweet air and loveliness of nature surrounding me.
     The house was completely shaded with trees.  The bedroom I shared with my sister,Kaki was half of what had been the attic.  The roof sloped on opposite sides (of the room and house) with windows that opened by pulling from the base up and hooking the window to the ceiling, thus the easy access for the cat, Thomas.
     We lived on three heavily wooded acres and until later in my teens we had no neighbors except for Georgia Dean who lived in a large and sad looking structure at the corner of our property.  Georgia Dean was very old and very large or seemed to be in my child's vision.  Occasionally I would see Georgia Dean walking very slowly through the woods.  She wore a huge sun bonnet that shielded her face; always a long dress reaching to the ground, and she carried a cane.  Mother said Georgia was blind.  She was a Negro and I don't know how I knew that because very little of the real Georgia Dean was visible.  Since she seemingly was poor and lived in a wretchedly spooky looking house, and because she was not a neighbor who enjoyed an occasional cup of coffee with my mother, the translation in my unknowing mind was that Georgia Dean was black.  I was born into a family and a culture and a superficial age that did not socialize with Negroes and I was cautioned repeatedly not to go to or near Georgia Dean's house.
     On the occasion of Georgia's walks in the woods, and if I was nearby, I would follow her from a safe distance.  Sometimes I hid in the bushes and behind trees, pretending I was a scout or an Indian.  Georgia may have been blind but on her slow and deliberate walks she knew who was stalking her.  She would stop, turn my direction and motion with her hand for me to come to her.  This was thrilling for me because Georgia was a scary mystery.  Only once did I venture close to Georgia's old house and there she was, sitting on her front porch.  She called out to me, not by name but with an invitation to join her though I don't recall her exact words.  In that setting she did not seem such a mystery, like her house and her porch were all part of Georgia and all were harmless.  I ran away from Georgia's call, satisfied that I had a friendship with her but, of course, as children are inclined to do, I did not share my encounters with Georgia with my mother.
     In the fall of my first year of school I walked to school with my sister, Kaki, who was entering the third grade.  We walked through the woods and down the hill behind our house to school.  I discovered freedom from the close supervision at home of my pre-school life.  Kaki walked to school with two or three of her friends and I was not encouraged to join in their chatter or walk.  I either lagged behind or ran ahead, depending upon which offered the most side interests.  The following year my sister Joan entered first grade and she and I became partners in the walk to school as well as up the hill and through the woods to home in the afternoons.
     I loved my new space in those afternoon hours between school and supper.  There were trees to climb and mountain streams to wade into, and rocks under and over which I crawled.  The woods around our house held endless treasures in wildlife and critters, large, small and minute.  Sometimes I sat on a rock and imagined a shared conversation with the trees.  And if I sat very still I could hear and sometimes see the wildlife all around me.  There were rabbits, squirrels, birds, chipmunks.  My dad showed me how to look for raccoons inside tree stumps or curled in the branches of trees, waiting for their evening hours of foraging.  There were snakes but none wanting my company.  The few occasions I came upon a snake snoozing on a log or hunting through the brush, it was with great haste he slithered away from me.  If I was very still for a very long time I might see a deer's white tail as he or she leapt across the brush.  Bugs, spiders and creepy crawlers were a part of this world.  I was the intruder and I tried to be gentle and polite in examining all the curious critters I found in the woods. 

     This was a period in my life, remembered now as an important time in my childhood development.  I discovered the comfort of communing with nature, and the freedom of spirit found in solitude.

     And then there was Nick.  When I was probably ten years old I came home from school one day and there was a brown dog;  not too big and not too small; just the right size for me. He was not a puppy and not fully grown.  Just like me, he was somewhere in the middle.

     This slender, long nosed and energetic dog appeared one morning on our terrace behind the house.  That afternoon walking home from school I was welcomed with a burst of enthusiastic whimpers and attempts to wear me down with his tongue.  I loved it.   I loved  the welcome, the excited noises instead of words, and I loved his tongue lapping at my face and arms.  This dog gave me a sense of being very important.

     I named my special friend 'Nick'.  For a couple of days I smuggled food to Nick in the backyard.  My mother, suspicious, reminded me not to feed strays because "if you do they will never go away."
     Hey!  That sounded like a good idea to me and I scrounged around in our pantry for more 'Nick' food.
     Every afternoon when I returned home from school, running through the woods, I would call his name and Nick would come to me, bounding across and over the brush and ferns, around trees.  I could see a bit of brown in the distance and then closer until we would have our ritual of greeting and wet licks.  Sometimes I would fall, rolling with him on the ground, in sheer delight with our reunion.
     My mother was most anxious to find Nick's owner.  I cringed when I heard her go on and on and on at supper about looking for Nick's owner.  I had no sense of injustice but there was this tiny little hurt in the back of my throat that said the power of authority was working against my best interests.
     After a couple of weeks with Nick as my inseparable companion I came home from school and, while soothing me with an afternoon treat of juice and cookies, Mother explained that Nick's owner had been found.  He belonged to another little girl, Linder who had lived not far from us but had moved across the mountain.  For whatever reason, her dog had been left behind.  I thought the whole story was really stupid but I was too young and too unaware of human mix-ups, too lacking in self-identity to initiate an argument with my mother.  Children did not argue with their parents.
     Mother told me to gather together all that I had collected for Nick; his feeding bowl, his water bowl, his bedding, his toys.  We would send them with Nick when he was returned "where he belongs".  These words "where he belongs" stuck in my ears.  I thought he belonged with me.  When my dad came home later that afternoon, Mother explained, he would take Nick to the "little girl, Linder, across the mountain".
     I retreated with Nick to the driveway and waited for my father.  It was a long wait and a long cry and a wrenching of my heart that I had never before felt.  Nick seemed to like licking the tears on my face and this process filled what seemed a long time.   Finally there was the sound of Dad's car, the tires turning in the gravel driveway, and there was my father, trying to comfort me, and at the same moment load NIck into his car as quickly as possible.  And then, Nick, my dad, and the car were gone and I sat in the driveway alone and cried.  I hated that "little girl, Linder across the mountain".
     As the sun set and I was called inside for supper there was once more the sound of Dad's car, the tires turning in the gravel driveway, and my father returning, having completed his painful mission.  Suddenly, from behind me I heard his whimpers instead of words, and felt the bump of greeting, the tongue lapping at my hands and arms, and Nick and I rolled on the ground in once more a gleeful reunion.  I remember my dad's face, a tug in his smille, and eyes that looked a little brighter than usual.
     I never asked and was never told how my dad managged to bring Nick home to me.  All that was important, at that point in time, was the assurance from my father that Nick was now my dog and no one would take him away from me.
     Where I went, so did Nick.  Sometimes, when I ran, he pushed me with his nose, preferring one direction over another.  Once in a while he would be gone for a day or two and I would feel anxious as well as lonesome for him.  Dad explained that Nick was "courting" a lady dog friend and would probably come home soon.  And he always did, sometimes looking sort of beat up and exhausted from his "courting".
     In my childhood I discovered excitement and imagination in the treasures and beauty of wildlife that surrounded our house.  There was also the pleasure and comfort in the companionship of Nick.  These two securities have remained brightest ad best in my memory of my childhood. 

FLWT
June 2008

 
WWII - 1941-1946

The Nazis invaed Poland in 1939.  Poland's western allies, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France along with other countries, declared war on Germany.  I was a few months short of my third birthday so world affairs did not mean much to me at that time.
     On the seventh of December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  The United States declared war on Japan, and Germany declared war on the United States.  The excuses to avoid global conflict were now mute and our country was thoroughly involved in WWII.
     My parents, sisters and grandparents, following church on the morning of December 7, 1941, were at home with me, a day late in celebrating my fifth birthday.  Aunts and uncles and friends with children arrived with the new of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  I have a vague recollection of the subdued mood of the adults present.  There were quiet discussions above my head and not related to the birthday fun laid out for my benefit.  There were gifts for me, and balloons and party favors.  There was ice cream, and a big cake with candles burning, and always there was song.  Not only the Happy Birthday song.  Everyone liked to sing in my family and it was not unusual for a parent or relative to break into song.  Nevertheless, I remember a tension, even on the occasion of my 5th birthday.
     Thus began five years of a significant and purposeful periood in my early childhood.  My father listened to the news every night.  Our radio was encased in a cabinet along with our record player.  Often the static on the radio was heavy and Dad's solution was to hit this cabinet.  This would touch off a sharp rebuke from my mother who did not believe hitting was a solution to resolving any problem.  After a terse exchange of words between my parents, Dad would adjust the tuning and the volume on the radio and the sputtering and wheezing static would stop, albeit temporarily.  My sisters and I would sit still and quietly because the news, which was always war news, was important to our parents, and as with the tension at my birthday party, I recognized the seriousness of war news on the radio.  Sometimes my father talked back, angrily at the radio, especially if FDR was speaking.  Mother would add a conciliatory thought in a quieter tone.
     Children listen to tones and tempos in voices above their heads.  Certainly I learned to do this at an early age.  My invisible antennae (I called them my whiskers) helped me to reach conclusions about subjects I did not fully understand.
     In those war years I do not recall ever hearing about the real horrors of WWII.  Dad missed the draft by one year.  Both my parents felt a commitment to the war effort and my father enlisted and served in the United States Coast Guard.  He was stationed at Chickamauga Dam and occasionally he would come home for a weekend with us.  There was always much celebration during these short visits.  Even as young as I was, I was thrilled when he came home, wearing his uniform and looking so handsome.  He always brought home military food rations in strange looking cardboard boxes.  The contents tasted like nothing good but it was a novel way to eat.  My parents encouraged my sisters and me to take the food boxes to our terrace in the backyard and pretend we were soldiers eating supper.  They would tell us it was "for the war effort".  
     It was not long after the war began that families felt the serious impact of all that would be expected of us on the home front.  Our country's economy immediately shifted to support of war production, and rationing of food and other products began.  By May of 1942 prices were frozen on all goods.  Coffee and sugar were the first scarcities, and butter and meat soon followed suit.  Bacon was not to be found, and eventually milk became powdered milk.  
     My mother, always quick to educate her daughters on current events, wanted my sisters and me to understand the seriousness of the war without frightening us.  She explained that a terrible man, "a monster", named Hitler wanted to conquer the world.  Mr. Churchill, in England (my mother's hero), was trying to stop Hitler and our country had joined England, France and other nations in this effort.  I do not remember ever hearing any mention of the word "Jew" as related to WWII.  
     Also, Mother continued, the Japanese didn't like us and had dropped bombs on our ships in Pearl Harbor.   It was necessary for us to send our men across the Atlantic and across the Pacific (and at this point in her talk, we had to look at a map of the Atlantic and the Pacific) to fight and protect America.  Only when we are threatened in this way, she said, is it right to fight.  And, she added, solemnly eyeing my sisters and me, if we fought with each other we would be punished and sent to our room.
     Mother repeatedly reviewed the war situation with us in broad explanations.  I believe she wanted us to remember being a part of this important period of history.  She was careful to avoid the horrors that are the realities of war and we made a daily game of all that we as a fammily could do to help the war effort.  I was very aware of my father's absence and joyous when he was reunited with us, however briefly.  Chickamauga is not so far from Lookout Mountain but I did not have a clear understanding of distances.  I only knew he was not with us.  
     There were "victory gardens" on Lookout Mountain.  Neighbors shared a vegetable garden; the moms and pops and children all pitching in to help plant and weed and water.  The most fun for me, of course, was when I was allowed to pull tomatoes off the vine, pick a cucumber, add a head of lettuce, and also aa cluster of radishes for my mother who loved them; all this put into a basket to take home for our supper.
     We all were together in sharing.  A community spirit prevailed.  There was no hoarding or stockpiling food.  Our example, each to the other, was to help and to share with our neighbor.  
     Rubber was scarce and what could be collected went to the war effort.  Government requests and drives for rubber were constant, and we all gave garden hoses and old tires and any other rubber item to the trucks driven by soldiers that roamed the streets, picking up these products from our homes and yards.  
     Gasoline was rationed in 1942 and ration stamps were issued.  Car owners were classified according to need:  Doctors and MInisters; Families; Mail Carriers and Clerks; each identified by a sticker issued by the government and visible on the owner's car.  Our two-door Chevolet displayed an "A" on the window for Family.
     No one could own more than five tires and each car was allowed only limited gallons of gasoline a week.  Dad had given Mother a new car, a blue DeSoto, for her birthday just six months prior to the Pearl Harbor Attack.  He sold the DeSoto before Christmas 1941, and our Chevy, running on rationed gasoline, carried us through WWII.
     There were metal scrap drives on weekends.  Adults and children combed through houses and yards and woods and ditches for anything metal.  On the school playground we sifted through the dirt, collecting coins, safety pins, and  hairpins (called bobby pins).  The wire wrapped around the caps of our milk bottles was saved and added in a big ball to the metal collection.  We searched the woods for vuried pieces of scrap iron.  At home every night we squashed and flattened empty cans that had provided food for our supper.  All of this was taken to the grammar school and as every family contributed the pile of metal grew slowly.  An Army truck with an American flag on its side came to the school and we were allowed to leave our classes and watch the soldiers put the metal in the back of their truck.  I remember how very proud we were; small children, feeling we were helping our country, and we sang "God Bless America" to the soldiers as they loaded the metal and drove away. 

     At home my sisters and I played our father's records of Sousa Marches on the record player.  We would march round and round the living room, waving our small American flags.  Occasionally an airplane would fly low, just above the treetops in our yard.  We would stop our play, or our Sousa marches, and dashing outside, looking skyward we waved to the pilot.

     There were somber times when a friend or neighbor would lose a husband or son, or someone our parents knew would be missing in action.  Mother would take us with her on what she called a sympathy call.  We were left outside to play quietly while Mother went inside on her sympathy call.   Although I never heard the worse of any story, the tension and the sadness of war was very evident and felt by us all, young and old.

     Black-outs were expected and unexpected.  Expected because this secuirty procedure was carefully explained to my sisters and me, and explained as "practice" black-outs, which I suppose they really were.  Unexpected because we never knew on what night we might hear the siren at the fire station which meant we were in a black-out.  The purppose for a black--out was to darken our homeland, preventing enemy aircraft from identifying targets on land.  This also prevented ships off shore from being seen overhead. 

     Hearing the sirens suddenly begin their wailing in the evening after dark, we would race around the house, turning off all the lights.  Then came the waiting game and we sat in the living room in the dark, listening for the Security men, those being our neighbors, who volunteered to make the inspection.  It was always a game to listen and be the first to hear the footsteps as these volunteers made their way to each house on Lookout Mountain.  They checked and confirmed that all lights were extinguished during a black-out.  It was exciting, in the dark, for us to listen for the footsteps, then hear a tap on our door, and a voice, often familiar, confirming that Security was there, making a black-out inspection.  Then footsteps  would fade away into the night.  We would continue to wait, in the dark, until we heard the siren again, giving us permission to turn on the lights.
     This was a non-threatening exercise for us, safe in our homes and homeland during WWII.  it was another war activity of which we were a part.  In my child's mind I could not know, and would not have understood had it been explained to me then, that while I waited in the dark to hear the footsteps of our neighbors, children in Europe and England ran for cover when they heard the warning wail of their town siren; they cowered underground or in shelters, waiting for bombs to drop, life around them exploding into a burning hell, often taking family and friends away forever. 
     Every day we thought about "the war" in some way.  I did not feel burdened by it but certainly children were made aware of the sacrifices required and expected because there was a war.  Children waited for their fathers to come home from war.  Mothers' prayers  for safe homecoming went with their sons to war.  Wives waited and often in vain.  Our efforts and attention and prayers were for an end to war and a homecoming for our fathers and sons.  Our trust was in our government and our President to restore peace and order to our homeland. 
     WWII was a war in which the United States, with the Allies (Britain, France, USSR, Austrailia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, S.Africa, Yugoslavia) fought the Axis (Japan, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) on two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific. 
     Boosted by our patriotism, we were a homeland united in the war effort.  Food and supplies were almost immediately rationed.  War savings bonds were a popular investment.  Everyone, even children, came together in active patriotism and, significantly, the public supported ur Commander-in-Chief with this war effort.
     This loyalty and trust in our President was not prevalent in this country in 2003 when George W. Bush invaded Iraq.  Confusion and divisive issues and attitudes circulated throughout our nation; lies and poor leadership within our government diminished the trust and respect so necessary to inspire patriotism and support for war. There was no clear identification of the enemy and no defining understanding of the United States' invasion and subsequent prolonged occupation of this small country in Southeast Asia, so distant from our homefront.
     Today, in this year 2008, we hold the responsibility for a war that continues to fester in Iraq in Southeast Asia.  We have been five years in this bitter conflict.  The who, what, when, why and how are missing in the equation for peace.  We do not know who we are fighting; we do not know for what we are fighting (killing); we do not know there will ever be a when for our troops to come home; we do not understand why we are at war; and we not know how to make peace. 
     

 Hapless Lump of Coal

In the late fall of every year a large truck rumbling and snorting, would back its way cautiously between trees and around my mother's rock garden, to our house.  It was delivering a load of coal which it would dump in our side yard next to our basement.
      Highland Street was not a real street.  It was a  narrow dirt road becoming a wide path overgrown with trees and brush, and it led to our front yard where it stopped and our wooded property took over.  Our long gravel driveway found its way through the trees where it formed a circle at the corner of our house.  Behind our house and beyond the stone terrace and Mother's rock garden was a wooded area, a dense stand of trees on the other side of which was Watkins Street.  From Watkins Street our house could be accessed by foot, bicycle and, infrequently, a car on a rooted and mud-holed dirt road (more path than road) that ended at our property line behind our house.
     Our driveway was too narrow and shrouded with trees for a coal truck to enter, and even if that were possible, the truck could not navigate the terrain to reach  the other side of the house where the coal was dumped.
     The coal delivery was always a major event every fall because we were so removed from neighbors and activity of this kind.  The truck had to back its way around the trees and large rocks because there was no space to turn around once the driver reached his destination.
     My mother was always intimidated by this kind of intrusion on what was otherwise a secluded haven of privacy, protected by the barrier of trees and populated with an abundance of wildlife.  She was guardedly friendly with strangers especially if they were of quality that she considered "not of her class".  A coal truck and driver inching across her turf, even though only once a year, threw my mother into an heightened state of nerves and apprehension.
     I loved this event!   The big noisy intruder backing its way around trees and breaking into our privacy had an awakening effect on me.  It was a visitation from a world of which I had no knowledge.
     Following the departure of the truck, and sensing my mother's nervous behavior throughout the episode, I, as aa very small child, saw the black hill in our yard as rather scary.
     I remember my father, on a weekend I suppose, shoveling coal into a small wheelbarrow.  Looking back now I realize how brutal a job this must have been for my father who was not inclined to labor of this kind.  Mother insisted that Kaki and I stay a safe distance from the coal pile to watch our father load the coal and push the wheelbarrow to a ground-level window, on the basement side of our house.  
     Inside this window was the coal bin, a tilted receptable or crib.  The coal bin contained, on its downside, a mechanical stoker, which when 'on', fed coal into the furnace.
     The wheel barrow was small enough that its forward lip fit exactly inside the frame of the window and with a thrust and sometimes a bang against the window frame, the coal, released, would tumble into the coal bin.  Back and forth my father trundled, delivering to the basement our winter's source of warmth.  As Kaki and I watched, our father soon became covered with coal dust, his face and arms and hair streaked with grime, and his shirt going from white to gray.
     Mother's closest friend was Anna McCall.  Anna's daughter, Dorothy was a year older than I and one year younger than Kaki.  When Anna visited my mother she brought Dorothy to play with Kaki.
     One afternoon while Mother and Anna had their coffee hour together at our kitchen table, Kaki and Dorothy went to the terrace to play and I tagged along.  I was perhaps three, maybe four years old;  Dorothy would've been five and Kaki six years old.  I was the tag-a-long.  I wanted to be included in whatever fun Kaki and Dorothy invented.  Kaki, as could be expected, did not want me with them; perhaps because I was so young or because she wanted exclusive companionship with Dorothy.  I tagged along anyway.  It is possible that Mother did not know I was following Kaki and Dorothy as she was engrossed in conversation with Anna over a cup of coffee in our kitchen.  Kaki tried to send me back in doors and I persisted in returning to join my sister and her friend.
     Kaki and Dorothy went off the terrace, down two or three stone steps, past Mother's rock garden to the side yard.  I followed and Kaki, now angry with me, repeatedly pushed me away.
     Propped against the side of the house was the small wheelbarrow that Kaki and I had watched our father load and unload through the little window and into the coal bin.  I don't know whether it was Kaki or Dorothy who came up with the solution to eliminate me from their company but one of the other invited me to get in the wheelbarrow for a ride across the side yard.
     I was the perfect candidate for this adventure.  I don't remember ever passing up an opportunity for a new mode of travel.  With assistance from Dorothy and Kaki I got into the wheelbarrow and off I went on a bumpy and halting ride.  Kaki and Dorothy each gripping a handle of the wheelbarrow and with much pushing and panting, maneuvered my ride straight to the window of the coal bin.  
     Later my mother would alternate betwen insisting the window was "surely closed", or indignantly scolding my father for having left it open.  Who opened the window we will never know but riding in the wheelbarrow I saw the coal bin window getting closer and closer.  Had I not been so young I may well have saved myself by crawling out of and away from the lurching ride.  But that was not what happened.  
     Suddenly Kaki and Dorothy shoved the lip of the wheel barrow into the open window just as Kaki had seen our father do with his loads of coal.  Like a large but unusual lump of coal I went tumbling into the coal bin.  Today, in my senior years, I remember this event clearly.  It was a harsh tumble.  All around me was quite black with the only light coming from the window above.  
    Mother, still enjoying her coffee with Anna, heard the wails of a child coming, she said later, from the radiator next to the kitchen table.  I was pulled from the coal bin, covered with soot,  my arms and legs and face pocked with small cuts and scratches from the lumps of coal I encountered on my way down the chute.
     After much soothing and comforting and a bath to wash away the coal soot, I was taken to Chattanooga to our doctor.  While Mother and a nurse held me still the doctor cleaned the cuts, loosening and removing the tiny chips of coal embedded in my face, hands, arms and legs.  
     One small chip of coal was deeply buried in my forehead and Dr. Van Order advised that retrieving it would create more scar than leaving it in my head.  It was hoped by all adults involved that the coal would grow into my hairline where it would not be noticed.  It never grew into my hairline, neither was it an obvious scar.
     My mother, who carried at all times a huge sense of guilt for any calamity which befell her children, hugged, petted and scolded me for several days, reminding me that  I was never to leave the house without her, and certainly never to follow Kaki and Dorothy without her permission.
     I don't know what, if any re percussions resulted for me sister.  After I was old enough to create my own mischief and in moments when I was in need of defensive distraction, I would gaze sorrowfully at my mother and rub the small dark spot on my forehead reflectively.

 Gradual Awareness

My sister, Kaki (Mary Katherine) was born February 4, 1935, ten months after the wedding and subsequent marriage of our parents on April 14, 1934 in Chattanooga.  December 6, 1936 I joined my sister Kaki to make us a family of four.  Twenty months later on August 24, 1938 our sister Joan Barclay was born.  We were three sisters with our parents in our home, 117 Highland Street, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.  In four years and four months Mother and Dad had assembled a family of five.
     Family life was very different in the 1930s and '40s as it is lived in this country today.  It would be difficult and possibly not fair judgment to compare the moral ethics, social values, family attitudes, school programs, and the work force of today with that which was a part of our lives so many years ago.  We cannot measure the challenges and conflicts we face today with the rights and wrongs and prejudices of yester year. They are totally different.
    Our home life when my sisters and I were small was insulated against all activity beyond our front and back yards.  The framed, rambling house sat on a woodsy three acre lot.  A curving gravel driveway wound through the woods and circled at the corner of this self-sufficient resident-compound.Three employees contributed to the operation of our home.  There was Ethel Bell who cooked our evening dinner, and cleaned the house for us.  Ethel had very black skin and she wore very white uniforms.  Sometimes Ethel's face seemed so dark I imagined I could see only the whites of her eyes and her pretty shiny teeth.  She lived in a small room across the screened porch from our kitchen.  She had access to a toilet in a water closet off the laundry room.  There was no shower or bath for her use.  In her room there was a small sink, a bed, a rocking chair and a chest of drawers.  The room had heat only from an electric heater.  Ethel went home (wherever that may have been) on weekends.  Mary was our nanny and laundress.  She was also black although not as dark as Ethel.  This was one of my earliest color observations. 
     Laundry was a major job in an age before the efficient washing  machines and dryers we have today.  Behind the kitchen and also off the screened porch was the laundry room which contained a huge wash tub and scrub board.  Also in this room was a wood burning 'monkey stove' and a clothes line stretched overhead from one wall across the room to the other side.  Later we acquired an electric wash tub that twisted and churned the clothes in sudsy water.  This soapy water was drained from the tub by a hose leading to the large double-sink nearby; the tub was then refilled with fresh water and there followed more twisting and churning to rinse the clothes.  The draining process was repeated and then Mary would feed the wet clothes through a wringer attached to the side of the tub and which she turned laboriously by a crank handle.
     The laundry room was 'off bounds' for my sisters and me unless an adult was with us.  On occasion that it was convenient Mary would take me with her to the laundry room.  In the winter months the monkey stove was fired and the room always warm and I watched while Mary hung the wet clothes on the line above her head.  In the summertime I followed her, she carrying a heavy basket of wet clothes, to the back yard where, with the clothes pins sticking out of her mouth, she hung the clothes on lines in the sunshine.  
     Following sufficient drying, the clothes had to be starched and ironed.  Irons in those days were very heavy and not as efficient as they are today.  The only control on Mary's iron was hot (or cold).  Sheets and my father's shirts, and the pinafores that my sisters and I wore had to be starched and ironed.  With an iron so hot, starching was a slow process as well as the heavy repetitious ironing exercise for hand and shoulder.  There was always the danger of burning (scorching) the cotton fabrics.
     I am remembering my mother's frustrations when a brown scorch mark on our clothing or sheets was discovered.  I was too young to understand employer/employee relationships but it was distressing for me to hear my mother's displeasure.  I often watched Mary while she washed and ironed our clothes and even though I was just a child I felt and I knew how hard she worked.  
     The third member of the staff at 117 Highland Street was the "yard man".  I never knew his full name.  We all called him Charlie.  He was a Negro and I always stared at his ragged clothes.  Charlie was a gentle man who earnestly talked to me when Mary brought my sisters and me outside in the afternoons.  I could never understand what he was saying but I remember he always smiled and reached out with a hand to pat me on the head or tap me gently on the hand while he talked.  He made it easy for me to like him even though his clothes were torn and stained and his hands and shoes always dirty.  Sometimes he had a strong odor that was not pleasant  but added something to the mystery in the man. 
     Charlie seemed to always be there - in our yard.  He ate his lunch outside on our terrace.  Ethel Bell brough his plate of food and a jelly jar of water to him.  In my young and eagerly assimilating mind I considered this curious man to be my friend and I hovered near by when Charlie was sitting down and eating.  I recall feeling confused about the jelly jar of water because we had lovely glasses inside.  It was even more perplexing that Charlie's plate held the table scraps that we saved in a large bowl for our dogs.  What Charlie didn't eat, my dad and I gave to Nick and Kid for supper.
     It is easy for an adult to assume that a small child cannot grasp the code of ethics regarding class and culture.  Certainly I was too young to understand adult reasoning in complex matters relating to household staff.  Observations are, nevertheless, logged away in our memory banks, even when we are very young.  
     I have never forgotten Ethel Bell and Mary and Charlie, and many others that followed in providing domestic services for me.  Each in his or her way contributed to my well being and comfort and each played a role in my developing awareness of social hierarchy; class culture, and racial discrimination.

 
Listening

For many of us the word mother is the most familial, intimate, common and natural word in our respective languages.  In the English language mother, mom, mommy, mama, ma are the first words we attempt to utter in our infancy.  We all have a personal identification with the word mother.   Clarification of this word's definition is my first step in writing about my mother.
     For better or for worse it is through our mother that we each claim a beginning and the subsequent relationship is inevitably significant throughout our lifetime.  For those who never know their mother, there is that space in the heart which in one way or another must be filled and a substitute for the nurturing must be found.  Mother  is the word for comfort and security that we require and always seek, even beyond our childhood years.  Motherhood is a monumental charge and it is not possible to be at all times the 'good' mother. 
     There are 'good' mothers and 'bad' mothers, depending upon who is making the judgment.  My sisters, brother and I had a 'good' mother.  She was pretty and this made her extra special and fun to watch in my child's eyes.  Mother enjoyed many other blessings.  Her imagination was active and her intelligence sharp.  Combining these attributes with a delightful sense of humor, she offered her children not only a devoted mother but also one who was, when we were very small, a fun and interesting companion.
     We lived in a house distant from neighbors and in my early childhood I became aware of our seclusion.  In the adult conversations above my head I heard frequent references to "Us" and "They", which effectively separated my parents, sisters, brother and me from the rest of the world.  "They" lived beyond "Us", beyond our house and property.  This, along with other attributes of character and identity, qualified my family as eccentric but with no comparison available I could not know the meaning behind such a word nor could I understand the invisible border that separated us from everyone else.  I know my mother loved her children and she believed keeping us within the confines of our home protected us from the harsher realities of life beyond the walls of our house.   Mother lived with this sense of denial all of her life.  
     There are still in my mind clear memories of my early childhood.  I was born in an age that believed in rigid and exactling schedules for babies but it was also an age that "walked the floor" with a baby who chose not to sleep.  I cannot say that I remember being "walked the floor" but I do recall watching two soft lights, dancing slowly, passing me and then again returning in my vision.  I believe I was the object in motion, riding in the arms of a parent who 
walked back and forth in front of the fireplace, above which was a mantle holding two copper pots of ferns and flowers.  The light in the living room reflected in these pots and many years later I recognized this same soft glow coming from the copper as a familiar beam from my earliest life.
     My sisters and I were born eighteen and twenty months apart, respectively.  Our mother, and her mother whom we called Grannie, enjoyed sewing and they were both skilled in this endeavor.  Frequently together, this mother and daughter pair could be found in my mother's sewing room, cutting patterns and putting together marvelous creations for my sisters and me to wear.  They made our dresses, pinafores, petticoats, and panties.  Often we were dressed alike which meant that I, and more so my younger sister Joan, had the same dress to wear for several years.  
     Books and reading and writing have been front and center in my life as far back as I can remember.  Both my parents read to my sisters and me, individually and in a family group.  I was taught to print my name and write letters when I was very young.  OFten, after supper, Mother would gather Kaki and Joan and me around her on the living room sofa and she would read to us.  We began with The Bobbsey Twins, and Uncle Wiggley, and Toby Tyler and the Circus.   We enjoyed listening to The Princess and the Goblin, The Secret Garden,
The Little Princess.  Even after we three learned to read books independently, Mother would continue our pre-bedtime reading hour with her.  I listened to my mother read Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities.  She read  and we listened to Moby Dick, and Treasure Island and The Voages of Dr. Dolittle.  I believe she enjoyed these hours with her children as much as we adored listening to her dramatize the books.  While my father loved books and particularly enjoyed discussing books and all that we learned from them, it was my mother who gave me, at an early age, a love for reading. 

     Reading books aloud was a gratifying experience but also a discipline in listening.  I learned to listen.  We hear  sounds.  Listening is giving attention to the sounds that we hear.  In today's world with our exposure to constant visual technology, listening and using our imagination to develop the picture in our mind is a lost art.  Listening to a story is a pleasure.  Listening and digesting what others say is a valuable discipline.  My mother's readings were my earliest exercise in the art of listening.
     This was an age before television and the computer became household fixtures.  The radio and the record player, both housed in a large cabinet in our living room, was the listening source for current events, programs, music and life in general beyond our home.  In my head I created images as I heard them on the radio.
     Mother had a trained voice and she frequently sang at home, in the kitchen or her bedroom, or while playing with my sisters and me.  She liked to sing, as did my father, and singing at home was a natural impulsive pleasure for us all.  There was always music in our home.  The combination radio and record player  stood in the corner of our living room and next to it was a stand holding a variety of records:  Gilbert and Sullivan, Sousa marches, symphones and grand operas, and Hit Parade popular music.  My sisters and I were taught how to carefully put the records on the turning table, settle the needle in place and then, we would  listen and sometimes dance to music.  Music was a constant presence in our house all the years of my childhood and youth.
     In the evening, after my sisters and I were tucked into our beds, my parents would sit together in our living room and read to each other.  Dad would read aloud, then Mother would read the following chapter to him.  Back and forth they would go and I could hear their soft voices, one and then the other's tones and inflections.  Later, awake or drifting into sleep, I could hear my mother move to the piano.  She would play The Moonlight Sonata; this while my father locked the front and the back doors.  I heard the clicks of the locks, the music would stop, and my parents would go to bed.
     These evening interludes were peaceful and loving times for my parents.  There was not always harmony in their marriage but when there was, they shared their loved for each other with books and music.  And their mutual sharing in voice and music was a lullaby for their little girl, still awake and listening.
     Mother loved to sing and also dance.  She could 'shimmy' and she would do the 'charleston' if we begged, and there was a sailor's jig with which she teased my father.  I loved to watch them when they were happy together, and my sisters and I would clap our hands and join the the song and dance. 
     Both of my parents were active in University of Chattanooga's drama department as well as Chattanooga's Little Theater before their marriage.  Mother in particular held the lead in many plays and was well known and popular in Chattanooga social circles.  After she married and had the responsibility of children at home, most of Mother's social life in Chattanooga ceased.  Her home and her children were central for her and she struggled often with my father's resentment and jealousy of any attention she might give beyond him and her children and our home in the woods on Lookout Mountain.  
     My parents married in April 1934.  The 1930's and the '40s were an age when it was believed a woman's place was in her home (and kitchen).  This was the code of conduct to which this talented and bright and inventive young woman was committed.  WWII changed much of this attitude.  With so many men far away fighting in the war, women went to work,  for the war effort as well as learning to manage a life style not dependent upon men.  This resulted in women discovering a self-identification beyond home boundaries.  After the war there was an increasing acceptance of women in the work force.
     Mother never left her home to discover this kind of freedom or what capabilities she may have had in the working world.  I believe she was often frustrated and unhappy with these limitations imposed on her.   She threw herself into the skills she could develop at home.  She was a capable gardener;  an excellent cook; she sewed beautifully; and she poured her musical and imaginative talents into her children. 
     One of her strongest talents was writing.  My mother loved to write.  She and my father taught me to write letters when I was very young.  I sat atop two Encyclopedia Britannicas at the dining room table and learned to print: 
F R A N C E S  L A M O R E A U X  W A R N E R 
     I remember being disappointed that my name did not contain a 'B' or a 'P' because both seemed fun letters to draw on paper.  
     Mother wrote letters and poetry.  She may have kept a journal or diary though I never saw it.  She encouraged me to write and I followed her example, writing letters every week.  I wrote letters to relatives and sometimes to my sisters or friends.  The letters had to have content and we sometimes went outside to find a flower or leaf about which to write and also to send with the letter.  Other times Mother helped me browse through magazines and newspapers, looking for a picture or cartoon to enclose in my letter.
     In my early childhood my imagination was tapped and stimulated by my mother.  She introduced me to a world of charms and mystery within the four walls of our home, teaching me the precious value in reading and writing as well as listening for meaning in words.

Francie Troy
May 2008

 Value In Light

My father was the youngest of Porter Warner's five children.  Joe was the oldest, followed by Margaret, then Alice, Porter and the baby in the family was Joshua, my dad.
     Dad began his life, apparently, with the name Joshua Jones Warner.  There was no birth certificate.  somewhere, possibly in his late teens, either he or his mother changed his name to Joshua Barclay Warner.  For better or for worse, the name-changing is a mystery.
     Of each and every Warner there is a story to tell.  I grew up listening to the tales and scandals, the hysterics, crimes and drama (and often justifications) about my father's family, those living as well as those long flown to the heavens.  My father's parents were individuals with strong personalities and inflexible wills.  Their off-spring inherited a double dose of distinctive traits and behavioral characteristics that inevitably set each child apart from the conventional and social patterns of that time.
     The house of my childhood on Lookout Mountain was a sprawling fram house in the woods and in contrast my grandparents' home seemed imposingly different.  The Warners lived in a dark red brick house on a corner lot on McCallie Avenue.  The house sat high above the street.  McCallie Avenue had been a rural road of horses and carriages, and later a few automobiles in my father's early childhood but by the time I was familiar with this site the two lane avenue was crowded with noisy traffic below the large front porch of my grandparents' home.
     When my dad took his family there for our Sunday afternoon visit with my grandparents, we parked our car in the back yard next to the garage that had once served as a carriage house. There was a back door to the kitchen but a covered walkway  by-passed the kitchen and pantry, and by that we entered through the dining room.  The dining room seemed central to the house and was the only room that had limited light. The windows were covered with opaque curtains and only the chandelier over the dining table gave light to the room.  It is curious to me that as a child I noticed this feature.  There was a fireplace in the dining room and a broad heavy dining table surrounded by eight elaborately carved chairs, each with a sunken, built-in cushion.  I have two of these chairs still in my possession.  Now in my reflective years I understand with some clarity my father's family life as was shared in that dining room.  No light beyond the circle of themselves, reflecting each other, breaking bread around the table.  
     The high ceilings were rimmed with broad ornate molding.  The living room adjoined the dining room and the many windows in this room, all long and narrow, were covered with lacey or crocheted curtains. The sunlight filtered through these filmy coverings, making patterns on the floor or the walls and I found diversion from adult conversation by studying these shadowy designs for faces and figures.  There were exiting moments when I found a fierce animal or spooky face looking back at me.  As the shadows in the day lengthened, the designs became longer and stretched and eventually blurred beyond further identification. 
     Next to the front door a flight of stairs led to the rooms above.  The staircase was supported on one side by a wooden banister.  This structure intrigued me because we did not have one at our house on Lookout Mountain.  The rail was smooth polished wood and I had read in a book, possibly a Bobbsey Twin book, that it was fun for children to slide down the banister.  There was a picture in the book of two children gleefully gliding on their fannies down the banister.  I tried this exercise on my grandmother's handrail and was sorely disappointed.
     Exploration of the second floor was a bold understaking for my younger sister Joan and me.  It required the high risk of being discovered 'off limits'.  We were explicitly instructed not to wander beyond the first floor of the house.  A tiny voice inside me prompted me otherwise.
     Joan was a willing participant as long as I led the way.  She was a very timid little girl but if I blazed the trail, Joan was loyally one step behind me.  My older sister, Kaki, was seldom a gang member.  Katherine at a tender age anointed herself Miss Goody Two Shoes.  She never stepped in mud; walking the narrow path of obedience; reporting dutifully every errant step taken by her sister, only eighteen months younger.  I learned quickly to stay two steps ahead and out of sight of Miss Goody Two Shoes.
     Escape from adult supervision had to be very quietly executed.  Unnoticed and demanding no attention, Joan and I would wander away from the adults, and up the stairs to the second floor.  With each trespassing step upwards, our energy was enhanced by trepidation.  The hall at the top of the stairs was very dark but our grandparents' bedroom was large and surrounded on two sides with long airy windows.  Unfamiliar objects in a new setting are for a child discovered treasures.  An enormous bed  covered with pillows and colorful quilts seemed to invite us to come aboard.  There was a curious long chair with more pillows, and books and newspapers scattered on the floor around it.  Through the years, every peep I had of this room, the chaise longue was always as described, with reading material surrounding it.  Dominating the room and higher than the big bed was a highboy.  This piece of furniture looked to me like a huge chest with legs supporting it high above my head.  A closet joined our grandparents' room to a second bedroom.  Closets are objects of intrigue for children and this one took on an extra sense of adventure because on the back wall was a door leading us into another bedroom.  Joan and I pretended this closet was a tunnel.
     The second bedroom contained a brass framed bed with canopy overhead.  It was an entrancing sight for me.  Later I was told that this was my father's bed.  I have no memory of anything else in the room because the brass bed with canopy demanded all of my attention.
     There was another room with a closed door.  Even trespassing as I was in my grandparents' home, I did not attempt to open that door.  There was a large solarium at the end of the hall and perhaps this drew my attention away from the closed door.  The solarium was filled with large plants; palms waving to me high above my head; also broad leaf plants that looked more like trees than plants.  All around the room, just below the windows were pots containg flowers.  Long double windows, a scarce inch apart, lined three sides of this room.  Sunlight created dark shadows under the plants.  There were two huge reed woven chairs facing each other and on one side a wicker glider.  The room smelled of damp soil and thriving begetation and I imagined the joy it would be to ive in such a room. 
     Across the hall from the bedrooms and immediately outside the solarium was an arched doorway exiting to stairs both up and down.  I never ventured to the third floor although I could see the door, possibly to the attic.  The stairs also curved downward to the kitchen.
     Every time I crept to the second floor, there was a stern call from a parent to return to the first floor.  I would obey the command and when called upon to do so, apologize to my grandmother for intruding on her privacy.
     There was a secret upstairs.  Perhaps children have an extra sense of knowledge that is withheld but I knew there was more life upstairs than I had discovered.  I don't remember any special curiosity for the closed door and unexplored room.  It was the brass bed and the solarium that primarily held my interest.
     On the second or maybe third venture upstairs, in this prowling style I had developed, Joan and I heard a noise.  It was a rustling in my grandmother's closet.  Sometimes Joan abandoned me and scurried downstairs.  Other times she stayed close behind me.  It was not immediately that we found the courage to peer into the closet but when we did, there was nothing there to account for the noise we heard.  Then again, down the hall, we heard a door close.  It was enough to send us both tumbling down the stairs to the safety of my grandparents' front porch which was where our parents assumed we were at play.
     Such mysteries cannot fade in our memories and on our next visit to the McCallie home I crept up the stairs to the second floor and went immediately to the bedroom to look and touch my father's brass bed.  While I stood beside the bed, touching the curtains curling around the bedposts from the canopy above, there stood in the hallway just outside the room a woman.  She appeared to be oddly dressed or it seemed so to my child's eye.  She was wearing a long ankle-length dress and she wore high-button shoes.  My eyes lingered on her shoes because as a child I loved foot wear.  Around her head was wrapped a scarf, knotted at the back under long hair.  She had a faded kind of beauty; a smooth oval shaped face and I remember her eyes because they looked like my father's.  They were soft and kind, looking at me.  I was not afraid of this person and now, looking back, it seems strange that I was not except there was nothing threatening in her bearing.  Like a deer, as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone, and I heard the door close near the solarium.
     Children do not share all of their learning experiences with their parents or adults.  Certainly I did not run down the stairs and report the woman's presence to my parents or grandparents.  This stranger whom I had only glimpsed had moved into a special place in my head, and I said nothing when I returned to the family below.  However, i ventured upstairs again on our next Sunday visit, and this time the woman with long skirt and hair, came timidly into the room where I stood.  She carried two dolls which she held out to me in a sharing gesture.  I have no memory of her saying anything though she may well have.  We admired the dolls together and I am guessing most likely there were words exchanged but I do not recall them.  The call came for me from the bottom of the stairs and I scurred away.
     My trips to the second floor of my grandparents' home continued on the occasion of our Sunday visits.  It was discouraged by my parents and eventually the adventure ceased.  This was because the women with the dolls upstairs was no longer a mystery but a most tragic fact of family.  she was my Aunt Margaret, older sister of my father.  Her history is very scant and the most crucial details of her life are lost in time forever.  Iwas told that margaret, one of five children, enjoyed a healthy childhood.  There was a picture of my dad and his siblings in the parlor of the Warner home;  the boys standing behind their seated sisters, all in a cluster.  Margaret and Alice were pretty young women at the time the picture was taken.  
     There is no doubt that something went very wrong for my Aunt Margaret in her late teens.  We will never know the true explanation for this.  My grandmotoher was a Christian Scientist which compounded the problem Margaret's siblings faced in trying to help their sister.  Kitty was fearsome even on her good days, and she was steadfastly resolved that Margaret was safe and beyond our reach on the second floor of their home.  Conflicts and the decisions for resolving family problems seemed not to involve my grandfather at all.
     There are several possiblities as to what happened to Margaret that locked the door to her future as an adult.  It is known that she had a suitor in her late teens and that the relationship ended unhappily.  There is also the consideration that she was, in fact, ill with a prolonged disease, her mother refusing medical assistance.  Another explanation was that Margaret suffered a mental or nerous collapse from which she never recovered: nor was she helped to recover.
     As was common in that day and age, family members whose health failed to rally  to an acceptable social level were frequently simply locked away in a back room of the home.  This was Margaret's fate.  My mother did not know of Margaret's existence until after she married my father in 1934.  She was horrified as well a justly compassionate for her sister-in-law.  Time and again my mother pled with my dad and his siblings to rescue Margaret from the upstairs of their parents' home.  And it was all useless striving.  My grandmother Kitty refused to step aside and allow anyone to interfere with Margaret's situation.  This compounded by the fact that Margaret was frightened and threatened by anyone, even her brothers, who might try to remove her from her nest.  Year after year this woman's life was ticked away in a hopeless maze of complexities.
     Eventually my grandparents became too old to remain in their home, unassisted in their daily lives.  They moved to the Hotel Patton in Chattanooga.  My dad made arrangements for Margaret to live in a nursing facility in Asheville, NC.  My grandmother insisted that if Margaret were taken from the family home she would die.  Dad, with the assistance of two nurses drove margaret to Asheville and she did, as my grandmother predited, die within a month or two of her arrival there.  Although I don't know her exact age when she died, I am guessing it to have been about fifty year.
     There were rooms with windows and sunlight in the dark red brick home on McCallie Avenue.  And there was music in the parlor.  There was the dining room, however, where the family gathered to share nourishment  where the windows were covered, offering no light from life beyond the confines of that room.
     This home raised five children, four with visions beyond McCallie Avenue.  Like the open windows bathed in sunlight my dad and his brothers and one sister embraced life and moved on beyond McCallie Avenue.  They left behind a sister who endured a stunted existence; her life, like the dining room windows, closed to the outside world.
     This is not a family tale to be spun lightly.  All of my life I have digested the sagas and scandals and lore of the colorful family to which I was born.  There is no story in all that is collected about us that touches me as deeply or hurts as poignantly as does the history of my Aunt Margaret.  
     How many times do we look back over our years and wish we had acted in a different  manner - wished that we had given more - taken more time to understand - shared ourselves in a more generous way with those who suffer misfortune more sharply than we.  There is always a weeping in my heart for this aunt whom I truly never knew.

 In Chattanooga, Tennessee my father's family was a familiar one for those who lived there; well established as leaders in the community by the 1930's when I was born.  Joseph H. Warner (my great grandfather) enjoyed a colorful reputation while also serving as a public servant in Chattanooga.  I never knew Joseph Warner but there were many scandalous as well as amusing tales told to me about him.  His son, Porter Warner, my grandfather, was known to me as Pop.  He and my grandmother, Kitty, lived in a three story red brick house on McCallie Avenue where my father and his four siblings grew up.
     Once a month, on a Sunday afternoon, my father drove my mother, my sisters and me to McCallie Avenue to share an afternoon with Kitty and Pop.  The Warner home was old, dark and rather spooky on first entering and it was only after music began to bounce off the walls did it become a different kind of home.  There were many rooms crowded with furniture; the tables and shelves holding clocks and china, figurines and trinkets.  There was the living room with Pop's well worn and depressed cushion chair, and the antiique sofa covered with shawls and crochet.  The top of the arms of Pop's chair were wooden and on the left arm were four distinct half-moon grooves where his finger nails repeatedly drummed.  The fireplace in the living room doubled on the other side of the wall which was the parlor, also called the music room.  And it was truly a music room, with a paino, a banjo, a guitar, a mandolin, and, curious to me, a zither.  My uncles, Joe and Porter, played the banjoy and the guitar.  I have no memory that my father was a musician but I know he loved music and in my childhood I heard him singing in the mornings.  In the far corner, next to the bannistered staircase was a gramophone in a lacquered wood console.  There was a chair, also wood and highly polished, attached to, and a part of, the cabinet.  On top sat a turn table and a large brass horn, and from the side extended an ornate crank-handle.  Inside the cabinet was a stack of large clay records, a collection of Broadway and vaudeville musicals, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Sousa marches.  
     I am remembering my sister Joan sitting on a cushion on the gramophone chair, and I was allowed to turn the crank-handle until it became too tight to move, at which time my father or Pop would step in and continue the revolutions.  Then the needle was carefully placed on the record and the music began.  We would all sit still and listen in enchanted wonderment as the music filled the room.  Eventually the marvelous sounds would slow to a grown and once more the crank-handle was put into action to feed us more music.
     Following this inspiring experience we sat in a circle near the piano and one by one my sisters and I were called upon to entertain our grandparents.  Usually this was with music although if we had written a poem or an essay from school, it was well received.  This visit with my grandparents on Sunday afternoons never varied and all those present, children and adults, contributed in some way to the social gathering.
     My sister, Kaki, played the piano.  She loved playing the piano and spent hours daily at home "practicing".  There was no doubt that she knew what she was doing at the keyboard.  Her finger skills were impressive.  Regretfully, Kaki allowed no emotion to come from her hands, her fingers, or her heart, or the keys upon which she played.  I wanted to shout out
"Let it out, Kaki! Let it all out!"  But she never did.  She was wound as tight as the gramophone.
     Joan, my younger sister, also played the piano.  She was a quiet child, not demanding attention but she became an aggressive conqueror seizing the keyboard.  Her best choices were Beethoven or strains of a national anthem that appropriately matched the fervor and intensity of this beautiful child playing the piano.  The gentle Chopin or charming Mozart were lost in her recital.  Joan pounded her emotions into the keys.  What a contrast with her sister's interpretations.  I often wondered what exciting music we might hear if we could combine the talents of my sisters.  In later years they both performed, on separate occasions, in concert with the Chattanooga Symphony and I was most proud of my sisters for the recognition of their talents that they received.
     I played the violin,  My grandmother, Kitty, was always most proud and enthusiastic when it was my turn to entertain the family.  Her East Tennessee roots had a historoy of musicians and the violin was a particular favorite in her family.  I played the violin for several years and managed to reach a skill level that was acceptable for participation in concertos and quartettes.  My Italian violin instructor was patient and encouraging, and we bounced charm off one another.  He frequently felt compelled to review the manner in which I held the bow by wrapping his arms around me and slowly pulling the bow across the strings, his hand lingering on my youthful budding breast as well.  These were always moments of deep concentration on the part of the instructor as well as the student.  I must confess that at that time, in my early teens, these breathless moments in the lesson were mysterious and pleasurable. 
     Kitty loved an audience.  She wanted to talk and to read to us her most recent "enlightenment", either in family history or from her daily studies in religion.  She considered herself a devout Christian Scientist.  She adored the memory of her father, who was a doctor.  Kitty also revered the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy and we all listened respectfully and silently to my grandmother's readings.    We also heard praiseworthy stories of her dentist, whom she visited frequently.  Following our lengthy Sunday experience at my grand parents' home, and on our drive up Lookout Mountain, my mother delighted in reviewing (to my father) Kitty's obsessions in worshipping the memory of her doctor-father and all his good works; her emotional attachment to her dentist; and the avowal of devotion to the Christian Science faith.  
     My grandfather, Pop, was always the last to move center stage to the piano.  Through the recitals of the afternoon he was silent, sitting in his well-worn armchair in the living room, drumming his fingernails into the wooden arms.  He was apart from the rest of us in the music room but listening to the music with pleasure.  When Kitty began her share of the afternoon sharing, Pop went to sleep but  with an invitation from one of us he quickly awoke.  When he moved to the piano it was with alacrity.  A huge smile broke across his face and he would hitch the piano stool closer to the keyboard and hunching forward, his hands settled on the keys in hungry strokes.  He sang and played, smiling at us over his shoulder, sometimes chuckling with the lyrics he tossed into the air.  My father, and his brothers Porter and Joe if attending, would gather around Pop and burst into a chorus; they also laughed heartily and sometimes even slapped or punched each other playfully at the end of each song.
     There were many stories to tell about my grandfather, Pop, but my favorite was this:
     A vaudeville show came to Chattanooga when he was just a boy, presumably in his teens.  Being so musically inclined, Pop was fascinated with the excitement and charm he found on that stage.  When the show left town Joseph Warner discovered his son, Porter, had "run away", joining the cast of characters in vaudeville.  I do not know the length of time it took for this father to travel to New York City and recover his son but this is what he did.  Joseph Warner followed the vaudeville show to New York and found my grandfather, on stage performing before an enthusiastic audience.  This was interrupted when Pop;s father walked onto the stage, picked up his son by the collar, and removed him from the vaudeville scene.  In the telling of this story Pop would always reach back and hold his collar up behind his head, demonstrating the manner in which his father retrieved him.   The two returned forthwith to Chattanooga.  Pop and Kitty traveled by train to New York City once a year for many years.  It was a seasonal outing for them.  They stayed at the Plaza Hotel and attended Broadway shows.  Following their annual excursion, they would return to Chattanooga and Pop would sit at the piano and play all the musical numbers he heard in New York.  He and their daughter, Alice, and son, Joe, all had the wonderful gift of "playing by ear".  I had only to hum a tune for any of these relatives, and, running their hands up and down the keyboard, and with much joy and amusement, they would repeat in delightful chords all that I wanted to hear and sing.

 
A Covey of Quail

My mother had three sisters.   They were, all four, beautiful women.  When I was a child and they got together for their annual reunion I loved looking at them because they were so beautiful and because they obviously held a deep affection for each other. 
       Mother had a sweetness in her face, like the maidens in my picture books and nursery rhymes.  She was naive, with not even a hint of sophistication and this was her beauty.  Her nose tilted up at the end, and she had a warm wide smile, and her eyes were unmistakeably blue.  She was very pretty in an innocent kind of way.
      Mother's sister, Martha, was the most worldy of the sisters.  She seemed, at least to me as a child, to be more in touch with life's realities.  She and Uncle Joe lived in the Carolinas and when they came to visit us on Lookout Mountain, Martha would pull me onto her lap and tell tales of her traveling adventures.  She had a striking and different kind of beauty. Her eyes had a sleepy look and her sophistication, her jewelry, her beautiful clothes made her seem very exotic to this small child at the time.  She was exciting to be close to because she was so different.  There was nothing homespun about Martha but she was a genuine friend as well as loving aunt.
       My Aunt Dinny's real name was Miriam Virginia and she answered to several derivations of that name.  To Uncle Brooks she was Miriam; others called her Virginia.  My mother most often used Jinny, and from that nomenclature we children tagged her with just Dinny.  She was the most familiar aunt at our house because she and Uncle Brooks also lived on Lookout Mountain, not far from our home on Highland Street.  Dinny was taller than her sisters; quite pretty, and she moved in a long legged feline way as cats do when they have a captive audience.  
        I first knew my Aunt Mildred as 'Bunny'.  Where that name originated I do not know and as we children grew older the name Bunny was lost.  she was Aunt Mildred and she was more than just beautiful.  Entering a room Mildred took everyone's breath away.  Her hair, her mouth, her voice; the way she moved and laughed; it was like a magic spell she cast on us all when she spoke.  Most magnificent of all were her eyes.  She had a broad brow and her eyes, in a slightly slightly slant, dominated her face.  They sparkled with fun and mischief.  My mother often said "Mildred is a vamp."
       Mildred was a story-teller and a writer.  She wrote songs and she wrote books.  She sang and she danced and she seemed to be charged with an extra dose of life.  Anyone could easily be charmed by her beautiful eyes as well as her inviting personality.  We loved Mildred and my father, who called her 'Bill', said of her once that it was impossible for any man NOT to fall in love with Mildred.  Her husbnd, Uncle Charlie, had been officially engaged to marry another woman.  When he met Mildred he broke off his engagement and pursued Mildred until she married him.  
        Mother and her sisters were known in Chattanooga as the Lamoreaux Girls.  They were Mary Amelia, Mildred Frances, Martha Hopkins, and MIriam Virginia.  Mildred and Charlie lived in Baton Rouge, LA.  Martha and Joe had homes in the Carolinas.  Once a year the four sisters had a reunion, sometimes on Lookout Mountain, other times at the beach on the South Carolina coast, and they were fond of returning with their parents for a family reunion at the Fryemont Inn in Bryson City, NC.
       When they were reunited the Lamoreaux Girls would all gather together in an engaging way, reaching out to one another, holding hands, touching, stroking, hugging.  And they coo'ed to each other, all talking at the same time in soft voices.  My dad, observing, said "Like a covey of quail."
      I loved watching my aunts and my mother together like this.  They seemed happy to be together.  They had so much to share with one another and they seemed genuinely to love each other.  As a little girl I picked up on this harmony.  I studied it and fed on its happiness and I wanted the same warmth for myself.  It was my resolve from early childhood, observing my mother and her sisters, that when I grew up I would enjoy this kind of relationship with my sisters.  I wanted that happiness and the security it seemed to offer.

Snow Long Ago 

A fond memory surfaces for me often on a winter day when the snow falls.  
It is snowing today and I am remembering the 1940s and my childhood in the hills of 
Tennessee.   For my family a heavy snowfall signaled a hunker-down, in-house camp-out 
with no fights or squabbles for maybe two or three days.  Snowfalls seemed deeper back
then.  If the power went out we all gathered close together around the fireplace, bringing 
our blankets, pillows, books, crayons and coloring books as well as writing pads with us.
My father kept the fire going; my mother had a long-handled pot containing chili or soup and she held the pot over the fire until the contents bubbled.  There were crackers and cheeses, 
cookies, and there was apple cider warmed in a similar but smaller pot.  Sticks and twigs
collected outdoors earlier lay on the hearth next to a bag of marshmallows.  

Fortunately we were all readers and writers and it was a fun time, sharing books.   Many
letters, sometimes to each other, were written.  There was no agitating about how soon
the power might come on; complaints were not permitted; cooperation was expected,
and certainly neither my sisters nor I wanted to be exiled to cold bedrooms for even a
short time-out reassessment of priorities.  Snow was a natural event of the winter season
and the bonus is now the memory and sense of family we each and all carry with us in 
these later years.

There were at least two or more deep snows per winter in the 1940s.  At my mother's 
calculated proper moment she would call for us to climb into our snowsuits in preparation
for an excursion out into the white world.  Dressing-out three little girls in snowsuits took
30-45 minutes of intense struggle by all involved in the process.  The snowsuits were thick
heavy wool with zippers that literally zipped us into respective body bags.  The little brother
Randy, in the popular movie The Christmas Story wears the garment described.  The 
material was so thick it was difficult to bend one's arms, and took a while to get our legs
in motion.  Our mittens and gloves were the same thick wool and once we were out in the, snow, large crusts of ice clung to the finger end.  

When finally we were encased in our snowsuits and rendered almost useless in helping
ourselves, our mother would cram our feet into huge hightop galoshes.  I would watch my
feet disappear into these rubber montsters, fearing I would never again see my toes.  
Once the galoshes were on and securely buckled, my feet were entombed, perhaps I 
feared for eternity.  I dreaded the persistent itch between my toes or on the bottom of my
sweating feet, the only solution being to stamp my foot or dash it against the nearest 
tree or rock.

After this major preparation was complete we ventured forth into the snow with our father
leading the way.  I believe I inherited my dad's love for all kinds of weather, and certainly 
I remember how the snow invigorated him.  Our mother would wave an encouraging 
goodbye.  Now I understand why.  It meant a quiet house and the warmth from the fire-
place were all hers for the several hours we were out of the house.

My dad and his three small daughters walked through the snow, sometimes on ice, across
Lookout Mountain 1 1/2 miles to the small community center.  This 'business center' on 
our mountain was composed of one service station, known to us as a 'filling station', a 
drug store, a small grocery store, and a hardware store and postoffice.  The 'filling station'
was owned and operated by Mr. Massey who chewed tobacco.  Mr. Massey was a special
friend for me because I gave him undivided attention while observing the methodical 
motion of his jaws.  His brother, another Mr. Massey, was a green grocer.  His store 
contained bins of beans, and rice, and baskets of fresh vegetables and fruits, and a small
selection of canned goods.  Mr. Robinson was our pharmacist and owner of the drug
store and popular soda fountain.  He gave me my first job when I was fifteen years old as 
cashier in his drugstore.

We trudged the 1 1/2 miles in the snow to the drugstore, and to the more important soda
fountain.  Dad sat his daughters in a booth, puddles of water forming on the floor as ice 
dripped from our galoshes.  We waited for our zippers to thaw so we could unzip our
snowsuits; the warm air creeping in between the soggy wet wool and our chilled little 
bodies.  The much anticipated hot chocolate soon arrived, topped with real whipped 
cream and a cherry on top of each.  After consuming the warm liquid it was inevitable 
that my sisters and I had to pee.  Thus began the laborious proceess of peeling the 
snowsuits down far enough to allow us to walk, hobbled by the trailing wet fabric to the
bathroom.

After we had sufficiently been warmed, and our bladders emptied, we bid Mr. Robinson 
farewell and out into the snow we went for the 1 1/2 mile trudge home.  My younger sister
was so small and she simply stopped, sat down in the snow, and demanded to be 
carried.  Dad obliged and we continued to trek homeward.  My older sister began her
complaining.  She whimpered and wailed that her back hurt and her feet were frozen
and this continued until Dad boosted her piggy-back .  I had no complaints and I marched
behind my father, placing my iced galoshes in the holes his boots made in the snow.  
Each imprint of his feet left a new and different shape in the snow, and I imagined faces
and animals and birds.  This is fun to do with clouds but equally so with snow.

Even as a very small child I  marveled at my father's strength, trekking along, a child on 
his back and one in his arms.  He was not a tall or large man but he was physically fit
as well as startlingly handsome.  I felt his strength and loved his beauty, and he was my
hero.

Walking, even in snow was considered by my parents a valuable gift and privilege.  We
were a one-car family during the '40s and we rationed gasoline carefully and treasured
our four tires and one spare throughout WWII.  Any use of the car was carefully considered.
I knew every creek and curve and rock on Lookout Mountain because I walked and ran 
along the brows, and across the mountain many times.

"One foot in front of the other will get you there," my mother was fond of saying.

Francie Troy
January 2008