The Front Yard

Viewed from the street our house sat back from Fifteenth Street about in the middle of the lot. There was a large green grass lawn that ran from the main street sidewalk to the house bifurcated by a cement walkway. The front porch was surrounded by gardens on either side of the wide set of three stairs to the porch. On the left side of the porch was a rock garden that held various perennials and sedums making a beautiful entrance to the front of the house. On the right side were various bushes, a very large blue hydrangea and a fence that separated the backyard from the front yard. The sidewalk that ran down the length of Fifteenth Street separated the parking strip from the front lawns and held magnificent maple trees that ran the length of the street on both sides. In the fall they would drop their leaves in the street, parking strip and lawn giving the kids in the neighborhood many hours of chores and a lot of fun piling them up and jumping in them. As we grew older, we found them less entertaining and more of a pain in the butt. In the winter they stood as naked sentinels and in spring they would sprout to life spreading seedling whirligigs across the yards. The most beautiful season for these towering giants was summer when they were fully leafed out and would create a magnificent tunnel covering the entire road, and shading and cooling the yards and houses that they protected.

(Above Karry & Beverly

Circa 1949)

Roller-skating Cracks Me Up

One of the few negative results of having these lovely monarchs guarding our homes was the fact that they were so large and therefore their root systems were likewise enormous. The sidewalk displayed this problem quite vividly where huge roots would gradually heave the sidewalk up and crack apart the cement leaving uneven pavement along the length of the street. Although it didn’t disrupt foot traffic except for the occasional trip of the unsteady walker, it played untold havoc on anyone who wanted to roller-skate, and I always wanted to roller-skate. When I was young every kid on the block had a pair of roller-skates and from the time I was very little I wanted a pair more than practically anything else. I thought it looked like so much fun to glide down the street; it looked like you could almost fly. The kids who had them looked like they really enjoyed them. I thought it was fascinating because boys and girls took on completely different personas when they had skates on. The boys would hunch over and race up and down the street pushing each other and seeing who could make the other one fall over, but the girls coasted by as if they were flowing across space not simply perambulating down the street. Naturally, since I was the youngest of the kids on the block, I had to wait the longest to get a pair of skates, but eventually I did. The roller-skates that we all had were not shoe skates like you might see in roller rinks or on television in a roller derby, they were metal shoe plates that had four, inch and a half metal rollers on the bottom. They were held on to our shoes by a heal that fit over the heals on our shoes and the fronts were held on by clasps that attached to the front of our shoes. These clasps had some flexibility so that several kids could share the skates even if they wore different sized shoes. This was accomplished by the use of a skate “key” that tightened or loosened the clasps. Most kids on the block would wear these skate keys on a string around their neck so that they wouldn’t loose them, and so that they could take the skates off if they got themselves in a jam somewhere down the block, away from their own front porch. When I was finally old enough to have my own pair of skates I discovered that being able to roll down the sidewalk was not as easy as I had guessed it might be. I had to find my balance and it wasn’t easy. My sister really helped me by talking me through the first few experimental rolls, but from then on I was on my own. To my surprise, it took a lot of practice and the result of not learning quickly was a lot of nasty falls on extremely hard and rough cement. As a result of the first few tumbles, I decided that I should only roll horizontally across the sidewalk because this sort-cut would allow me time enough to get my sea legs without permanently scarring my knees. I spent several days practicing before I dared to try to first stand up from the front porch steps and then try to roll up and down the smooth, straight sidewalk in our front yard. The biblical quoting, pride goeth before the fall, fits perfectly here, because I did not consider the differences between the nice smooth sidewalk in our front yard and the root-broken cement walkway of the main street. By the end of the first week of skating I boldly thought I was ready to skate up and down Fifteenth Street, and decided to escape the confines of our private sidewalk. Filled with self-esteem and pleased to be flashing through the neighborhood for all to see, I picked up my speed and headed out onto the main drag. The crash was not a pretty one and both knees took time to recover as did my dignity. Eventually, however, I learned to take it easy around the cracks and to leave the speed to the boys of the neighborhood.

Karry 1955ish