Childhood Memories

Mary and John

Mary and her little brother, John, had many places to play on the property and enjoyed much freedom. Mary’s tale of one such play centered on the point of land between the Rum and Mississippi River just below their home:

That land, during a spring flood, was covered with water from one to five feet deep and we {Mary and John} having a barn or cellar door that we salvaged from the flood wreckage, joyfully poled it around in the shallow inland sea between the Rum and the Miss. Why we were not swept in the boiling Mississippi flood is one of the eternal mysteries necessary to permit healthy and adventurous children to grow to maturity. Or, as a neighbor anxiously put it less elegantly: “Those born to be hanged cannot drown.”

Those two children were a bit mischievous, as another story from Mary explains:

The log drives were always interesting incidents in our young lives and our activities with those in the Rum River, I think might have rendered us liable--if not to imprisonment, at least to summary justice in some form, for my brother John and I, at the tender age of eight or ten, had discovered that the cause of log jams by our house was almost invariably a long log being held across the middle of the river by two large boulders conveniently placed. As it was one of our great joys to watch the river-drivers break these jams, it logically followed that when they did not materialize often enough to give us this pleasant excitement, we rowed out and towed a log into the required position across the rocks. Then went ashore and established ourselves comfortably on the high bluff above the river to await developments. It seldom took more than an hour for the logs to pile up most satisfactorily and the red-shirted young giants would arrive and perform miracles of agility and skill in dislodging them, little dreaming that the innocent appearing children so gravely watching the proceedings were responsible for all the turmoil.

Perpetual childhood

The grounds and yard were the perfect place to play, and Barb Johnston took her turn there, just as Dwight, Mary, John, and the Shaw children had in their time. If the winter weather ended just right, the bowl-like depression in the center of the horseshoe driveway became a skating pond. There was always a tree that was perfect for a swing, and one memorable summer, Barb even had a pony in the yard. That didn’t last too long, though. Modern city ordinances took issue with a pony on the property. A pony wasn’t the only issue Barb remembered with the yard.