THE RIGHTOUS ANGER OF A THREE-YEAR-OLD

          This post contains the first essay I’ll be including in my book on growing up in Monmouth Oregon during the 1950s and 1960s.  If you have been following my blog you have already met Mrs. McLaughlin in the post entitled “Old Women Don’t Have to Be Quiet”.  She continues to live on in my memory. 

          A smile spreads across my face as I drive along the Oregon side of the Columbia River where the Deschutes empties into the Columbia River Gorge.  My smile isn’t in response to the beautiful scenery, though that too can lighten my mood as I recall many pleasant trips along this route.  No, this smile is different than most as I make the familiar trip from Sunnyside Washington back home to Salem Oregon.  It is an indulgent one, an adult’s response to remembering the angry promise of a young child being forced to leave her home, her friendly neighbors, and her big sister. 

Seventy plus years later I find the scene very humorous when, as an adult, I look at the child from the outside in. I see my three-year-old self, riding in the back seat of my parents’ car, ridged and seething with as much anger as a normally adventurous, happy-go-lucky child can muster.  I see the crossed arms and intense glare from my pouty little face as I silently declare that Sunnyside will always be my home no matter where my parents take me.  

Of course, I would never have verbally expressed my disapproval or anger to my parents.  That simply wasn’t done in my family – respect your parents and elders and never talk back.  Expressing my feelings would have been considered a form of talking back.  So, no that was never an option, but then, I didn’t talk much at that age anyway. 

I was silent, but never shy.  I was stubborn, independent, and went my own way often despite the stinging switches on my bare legs when Mother would catch up with me. 

After Mother found that I had escaped the yard once again she would break off a piece of the long hanging branches from the weeping willow tree in the front yard.  With that switch she would herd me back home after I had wandered off to visit neighbors or my big sister who had recently married and left home. 

The whipping was never so severe as to make me want to stay home.  There were interesting neighbors to visit and delicious rewards to be gained. 

Mrs. McLaughlin was one of my favorite neighbors.  She had a fascinating weathered and wrinkled face that I loved to silently study.  She lived in an unpainted old house with creaky steps and a creaky front porch.  I’d climb her steps, cross her porch, and knock on her door.  She’d always let me in.  I followed her into her living room where I sat on her torn up old couch while she sat in her rickety old wooden rocking chair.  We silently watched each other as she studied me studying her.  Soon she would ask if I wanted a cookie.  I nodded “yes”. She would slowly get her bent old body out of the rocking chair and go into the kitchen, returning with a homemade cookie which I ate in silence as I continued to stare at her face and into her eyes.  Before long I would get up to leave. She’d follow me to the door and let me out – other than offering me a cookie, not a word was spoken between us the entire time I was “visiting”. 

Every visit was the same and I loved her for her calmness and her silence.  Even then I believed that sometimes words just get in the way.  The cookies were a bonus, but never as satisfying as our silent communication.  There was something magic in our unspoken bond. 

My visits with Mr. Bell were anything but silent even though no words were spoken between us either.  No rocking chair for him, no unpainted boards on his house or old creaky boards on his porch.  He was a man of action, doing things, keeping things in tip top shape.  My favorite thing to watch him do was sharpen his axes and his garden tools. 

He didn’t use anything as quietly boring as a metal file like my Daddy used.  Instead, Mr. Bell rode a large contraption consisting of a stationary seat and peddles like a bicycle, but no wheels except for one.  Attached to the bike was a huge round stone wheel.  He peddled and the stone turned.  He peddled faster and faster and the stone whirled round and around at a dizzying speed.  Then he’d bring the metal edge of an ax or a hoe or a shovel up to the edge of the stone and sparks would fly in every direction.  Although I’d heard it many times before, the loud grinding sound of metal on spinning stone would always send my hands flying up to cover my ears.  I loved Mrs. McLaughlin’s silence, and I loved Mr. Bell’s explosive noisy grinding.

I never told Mother when I was leaving on one of my adventures.  She would have said no.  So, I’d sneak out of the house, and off I’d go.  Since swatting my legs all the way home didn’t keep me from wandering off time after time my parents decided to fence me in. 

I wasn’t the only wanderlust in the family.  We also had a very large, mostly German shepherd, mixed breed dog named Hash.  Hash got his name because one look at him and you’d know he came from a mother who also had a wandering spirit. 

Daddy built a fence around the yard to keep both Hash and I safe and sound, free to roam only within the confines of our backyard.  Much to the frustration of both of my parents Hash jumped over, I crawled under and off we’d go.  Not together and not at the same time, which was good.  If that big old German shepherd mix of a dog had been with me Mrs. McLaughlin never would have let me in her front door. 

Finally at wits’ end, my mother sewed a bell to my stocking cap thinking she’d know from the diminishing sound of the bell if I was venturing outside my boundaries.  That didn’t work either.  My mother was too easily distracted to listen to the bell.  She was 45 years old with a new baby who had been born very prematurely.  It was touch and go for a long time with my little brother as his lungs ever so slowly continued to develop to life sustaining size.  Mother had to keep a very watchful eye on him.

At last mother hit on a solution.  She pinned a sign on the back of my shirt that read.  “Don’t let this little girl into your house.”    Sadly, my solitary travels came to a halt.  It wasn’t long after that before my parents moved me from Sunnyside Washington to Monmouth Oregon.

I was furious!  I was being forced to leave the house where I was born, from a neighborhood that even at the age of three, I felt a sense of who I was and how I fit in there.  It was where I belonged.  There were no kids in my neighborhood, but it suited my quiet personality and held all the adventures I could ever want. 

Worse than leaving my neighborhood behind, we were also leaving my big sister behind.  She was married, and had a home of her own in Sunnyside, but that was my second home.  Although it was across town it was another place I would wonder off to when given a chance.  I was having to leave both my homes through no choice of my own.   So yes, I made a solemn, angry, and determined promise to myself that Sunnyside would always be my home.

About four years after we had moved and were on a visit back to Sunnyside Mother and I visited Mrs. Bell.  I already knew Mr. Bell was dead, but I didn’t know about Mrs. McLaughlin.  When I asked about her my mother and Mrs. Bell exchanged a long glance.  After an even longer pause Mrs. Bell finally said Mrs. McLaughlin had gotten too old to live alone, so she was living there with her.  She brought an old woman out to the living room, saying she was Mrs. McLaughlin.  I had spent too many hours studying Mrs. McLaughlin’s fascinatingly wrinkled face to be fooled.  I didn’t say anything to Mrs. Bell, that would have been rude, but I knew right then that Mrs. McLaughlin had died, and Mrs. Bell didn’t want to have to give me the bad news. 

Oddly enough, I didn’t feel a loss over Mrs. McLaughlin’s passing.  Because enough time had passed since our silent visits, I already knew that we didn’t have to be sitting across from each other for my memory to keep us connected.  It didn’t matter whether I was in Monmouth Oregon or Sunnyside Washington, Mrs. McLaughlin was still very much alive in my memories and still is.  

Now, driving along the Columbia River and thinking about all the places I’ve lived in my seven plus decades, my smile broadens.  Houston, Syracuse, Waterbury Connecticut, Albany New York, Dallas-Fort Worth, and yes, even Fort Smith Arkansas, and Lubbock Texas, all places I’ve lived in and would willingly call home again.  The only place I have no desire to move back to is Sunnyside Washington.  I am grateful for the move my parents made all those years ago which opened a whole new world for me. 

To paraphrase and personalize an old country song by Mac Davis, happiness is Sunnyside in my rearview mirror as I head on down the road once again.