Back Yard: Sleeping Outside & the Lath House

Sleeping Outside

Another entertainment that we enjoyed when we were little was spending the night out doors sleeping under the stars. We didn’t do it every weekend night in the summers but often we were allowed to get out the sleeping bags and bundle together in the backyard. Often we did this when we had friends over to spend the night. It was always somewhat scary because it was dark, and this was always exacerbated by the fact that the older kids would often tell frightful stories of ghouls and goblins and things that go bump in the night. This, of course, would scare the littlest ones (me and my friends) into scooting into the house. The older ones thus given a respite from the boring little brats. As I got older, I learned to stifle my fear, and often my ears, and never show a bit of fear so that I could finally stay outdoors and share the evening under the stars.
Once in a long while Mom would let us have a slumber party where there were a bunch of girls and we could all sleep in the backyard. Often we would hang several white sheets on the clothesline and get one of Daddy’s shop lights (a big reflector with a light bulb in the middle) and set it up on the other side of the sidewalk. In this way one group of kids could put on a shadow play for the other group of kids who were sitting on their sleeping bags and watching the “show”. It was always great fun and we often made it into a guessing game making one group guess what the other group was trying to portray. It usually ended with a pile of girls giggling hysterically until Mom and Daddy were forced to growl at us about making too much noise.

Beverly's Second Birthday 1947

The Lath House

Mother kept fuchsias for many years; this was like a hobby for her. She had many different species and was very proud of her collection She spent many hours working with her plants. She would take cuttings and prune and pot and nurse these flowers every year. One year Daddy built her a lath house in the back yard. It was green and had shelves to hold her potted plants and hooks to hang her baskets from. I think she was quite successful with this hobby, and as I recall she had over a hundred different varieties of fuchsias. We all got in the act in some ways, even if it was only helping to water the plants. This particular kind of plant had to be kept watered daily especially in warm weather. There were large galvanized tubs were dragged out into the middle of the back yard and filled with water. Then we unhooked the hanging baskets and dunked them in to the tub and let them soak for a while as they greedily slurped up the water. The fun part of this chore, of course, was that we got to play in the water and still do a chore! I can remember how difficult it was to hang the saturated pots back up after they had been watered. They weighed much more than they did when they were dry and the dirty water would run down our arms as we stretched to hang the pots on their assigned hooks. By mid-August the sport of watering the fuchisias became a pain and a task that I did not look forward to. I learned to loath the chore and eventually the flower species.

In the winter Mother would have to bury all her fuchsia plants in sawdust so that they wouldn't freeze. There were a few of the hardy variety that could simply be covered in leaves to protect them, but the annuals would be cut back and buried in peatmoss and saw dust, and then in the Spring we would dig them up again. The amount of work she put into this hobby was incredible, but the beauty of her lath house was incredible too. You knew that she really took pride in this endeavor. Our great pleasure was to go out when the blossoms were just about ready to open and pop them. This made a delightful sound and felt wonderful to our little fingers. Naturally, this was not beneficial to the plant and Mom used to blow her stack when she'd go out and find that her prize buds had been prematurely burst and would never be the hoped-for blossoms that she'd worked to develop the whole season. It never entered our heads that we were being destructive, it just felt good. I have looked through all of the old photographs and cannot find one picture of the lath house. I suspect it was torn down by the time I was graduated from high school. I am sure I did not mourn its demise.

After I grew up and became a mother, it became a habit for Jim and the kids to get me a beautiful big fuchsia for Mother’s Day. For years I smiled and hung the lovely plant in a tree or on the end of the carport never saying anything negative but secretly hating the watering ritual that was necessary to keep the darned things alive. Almost every summer I would eventually let the pot die from lack of water, simply because I hated that daily ritual held over from my childhood. Eventually, I told Jim that I didn’t want him to waste another penny on trying to please me with the Mother’s Day gift that I didn’t really appreciate.

Beverly at her 8th grade graduation 1959