Imbolc Valentine Moon
Woke thinking about the subtitle to the book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the Right. I realized I knew this one from personal experience.
In 1956 my family, then Mary, myself, Mom and Dad lived at 311 E. Monroe Street. I was nine. Diane Bailey lived next door, the Kildow kids and the Meyers kids lived about a block away as did Candace. The Carver boy, whose name I can’t recall, lived at the bottom of the hill, Ronnie Huffman lived a block back toward Lincoln.
These were all modest homes, not Baltic Avenue, but maybe Tennessee, Virginia. Ours had an oil burning stove in the middle of the second room on the ground floor, a grate above it allowed the air to rise to two small bedrooms upstairs. A smallish living room and a kitchen completed the downstairs. In the living room, unusual for this time period, sat a small black and white television, a gift from the owner of the newspaper, The Times-Tribune, for which my Dad was editor.
Summer days and nights found all of us kids out, playing with each other, coming home at supper time or after dark. We had secret forts in the field, empty ground about two blocks away, a baseball diamond in the Carver’s side yard, a hill down which we rode bicycles and sleds, often putting up ramps for jumps. Once it got dark we’d play hide and go seek or kick the can. Sometimes we’d throw rocks up in the air to watch bats swoop down after them. It was not an unusual childhood, not for those times.