Sounds of six excited children laughing, crying, shouting, singing, brawling, peeing, pounding the upright piano and splashing weekly in a tub of murky, lukewarm water for number four in the queue—water dropped hot and clear earlier into the bathtub from a kerosene fueled boiler.

Crescendo sounds of night crickets give a thunderstorm-warning chorus just like tree frogs do singing fortissimo in the heat of a summer day.

Listening to Enrico Caruso sobbing “Vesti la giubba” from “Pagliacci”on a Victor Red Seal record.

Sounds of dozens of children playing past time to bed down in wet sheets evaporating to cool tired, hot, happy dreamers who catch lightning bugs in mason jars and count shooting stars and marvel at the pulsating aurora borealis in the northern sky.

Sounds of horseshoes clopping in from farms east of town hauling huge metal cans of fresh Holstein milk to the local farmers’ cooperative and the hooves of the blind dairyman’s white dray mare who knows every step of her way and Hod Baldwin’s roan bringing fresh vegetables from his truck garden and the Fremouw’s ice wagon drawn by monstrous Percherons. The sound of ice picks chipping out 100-pound blocks of Cannon River ice stored in sawdust bins south of pipes that empty raw sewage into the river. Grunting sounds of the muscle bound deliverymen wearing thick leather pads on their backs to cradle the huge frozen chunks they lug up the back steps and deposit in the tops of ice boxes.

Smells of lilacs, apple blossoms, chicken manure, winter dust beaten out of carpets, and fresh laundry pinned to a round, rotating clothesline, dog droppings, acrid smoke from firecrackers, grass clippings thrown up by ball-bearing, hand pushed lawn mowers and fresh tar laid down on Fourth Street. Smoke from leaf bonfires and toasty marshmallows.

Taste buds overwhelmed by licks off homemade peach ice cream paddles. Caramel bound popcorn balls. Crisp apples dipped in taffy. Chilled slabs of watermelon and seed spitting duels. Crisp fat carved from boned, rolled prime ribs of beef. Coverall pockets filled with Sun Maid raisins. Cotton candy and bite-sized peanut butter and molasses Mary Janes.

Dancing with abandon in cool, refreshing raindrops breaking a heat wave as we wade in knee deep open street ditches and sail stick boats in the muddy runoff. Face lickings from our fluffy mongrel dog.The tug of a kite string. The pull of a two-pound crappie on a fish line. A leaping, one-handed catch of a softball.

The safe, warm feeling of a mother’s arms hugging me to her deep, soft bosom cures all my cuts, bruises and hurt feelings.

Precious childhood memories that transcend life’s pain and sorrow.

Only three photos of my pre-school years exist. Carol wants each employee to submit one early childhood photo which will be used in a game at the department Christmas breakfast. Who will be able to match the photo with the correct coworker or team mate? I am horrified. Not only do I dislike phony holiday festivities but playing games ranks a close second.

At home, as part of my homework, I urgently rummage through the Ball Canning Jar cardboard box in which I keep family photos. Ours is a family that does not display pictures on the wall for all visitors to see. Nor do we put frames out on dressers, end tables, desks or coffee tables. We pack photos away only to resurrect them for viewing on a dull, snowy Sunday afternoon while we listen to classical music on WJAJ radio.

One early snapshot shows me tottering toward the unknown operator of a black Kodak box camera. The shot is fuzzy but I recognize myself in a bucolic setting attired in a droopy diaper, a nondescript shirt, with my hair helmeted by a millinery creation secured under my chin with a bow. The fashionable trim of matching frill around the face completes the 1947 pre-school look. I totter because my stiff, little shoes, which climb over my ankles, severely limit mobility. My grandmother calls these “botines” or small boots. I am obviously trying to walk faster than my body allows. Such an impatient child! It is summer in the country. Who is the photographer? Who else is in the country with the two of us? How did we get there? Did we take the bus? Did we travel with friends or relatives? Whose home is this? I’ll never know.

The next treasure in the box is a 2” x 2” photo taken at the F.W. Woolworth photo booth. How I love the dress that I am wearing that day! It is taupe with a window pane pattern outlined in dark brown. In each window there is a small, solitary yellow rosebud. I show off my slender arms with short puffy sleeves. Full pleats fall from the waist and a lovely solid, brown bow in the back completes the dress. Surely a three-year old would not take the bus down to the “dime store” on Main Street by herself? Who took me to Woolworth’s? Who deposited the coins in the photo booth slot? Did my Aunt Titi work at the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter at that time? I’ll never know.

The next photo I find is taken by a professional photographer in the studio on the third floor of Peck’s Department Store. The background is dark brown and I am seated on a banquette covered in white fabric. The dress, however, is a disappointment. Instead of my beloved windowpane dress, I wear yellow cotton with a red rickrack design across the bodice. The briefest of puffy sleeves displays my firm upper arms. The dress, which has full pleats since no pleats is not an option, is firmly secured to my body by yellow apron strings which form a bow where the camera lens cannot reach. Always proud of my exquisite taste in lingerie, I display a hint of my chic, white cotton panties which bear the name of the day, “Wednesday.” But the camera is not able to see this exquisite, embroidered detail. Who took me to the studio? Who made me laugh? What kind of a day was it? I’ll never know.

I choose the yellow dress picture to share with my coworkers. No one guesses that I am the subject of Photo Number 8. What a good time we have playing the games devised by Carol. Today, we give time and attention to one another, which is a real celebration of the season.

Mrs. Aller

I hated school from the first day I entered kindergarten to graduation day twelve years later. School was a punishment not a reward. School was a place not to go to but to escape from. I didn’t intend to feel this way. I couldn’t wait to be a big girl, a school girl. During the days of summer I couldn’t wait for September. Little did I know that the presence of Mrs. Aller, my kindergarten teacher, would follow me into every classroom.

We lived on the fourth floor of a red brick apartment building with our windows facing onto the street overlooking PS 225. Outside the kitchen window the iron fire-escape zigzagged up the brick wall starting just above the first floor windows all the way to the roof six stories above. When I was little my mom would hold me tight while I sat on the window sill with my legs outstretched on the iron balcony and watch my sister and the older kids playing in the school yard. I watched as the children came out of school at the end of the day jumping, laughing and talking. They all seemed so happy. I remember my sister looking up towards our window her long blond curls moving softly around her face and waving. Soon I would be old enough to go to school and wave to my mother. Soon I would be old enough to go downstairs alone and play with my friends. After my sister died there was no way that my mother would leave me alone and on the days she cried so hard she wouldn’t even get dressed. So I looked forward to kindergarten and being with my friends and learning how to read.

The first day of school my father took my hand and walked me across the street, through the school yard and up the staircase. Without any effort he pushed the bar on the heavy bronze doors, held it open for me and still holding my hand we walked together to the principal’s office. Suddenly I became shy and held onto my father’s leg and I could feel the comforting warmth of his body when I rested my face against the wool of his brown slacks. Knowing that my father wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, and remembering how much I wanted to go to school I found my voice and asked if I could go to my classroom now.

Mr. Braunawer apparently was pleased at my exaggerated enthusiasm and had me say goodbye to my dad as he led me down the wide hallway to a room that had wooden desks with seats attached to them and one side open so we could slide onto the bench. I saw a room full of children all my neighbors and friends. And I saw Robert Gross the neighborhood bully who tried pushing me off my bike so the next day I pulled him off his and little baby that he was, he went crying to his mother. I knew so many of the kids that I broke out into a big smile and started waving. The next thing I knew I was being punished and before I was given a desk of my own the teacher made me stand at the front of the class and watch her back while she read a story to them. So I stared for the fifteen maybe twenty minutes at her back too ashamed to see if the class was making fun of me. All I remember was ugly grey hair that looked as coarse as straw. I told everyone that Mrs. Aller wore a wig and sometimes it would move from side to side when she scratched her head. When I looked down at her legs the back of her skirt was raised high enough for me to see the garter that she rolled to hold up her stockings. She was so old, even older than my grandma I thought. And she isn’t only ugly she’s got the meanest face and a mouth that smirked when scolding a child.

. After Carol died it seemed as though my family was falling apart and I couldn’t understand the depths of their sorrow. Aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors came to visit my mother and I got pushed aside. Did anybody remember that I was important too? My mother cried all day, my father escaped to his office. Granted I was a talker. Granted I was restless. Granted I needed attention. Sitting for any length of time made my legs want to move and I had trouble being still. Mrs. Aller knew that I loved finger painting so once again and without too much provocation, she would make me stand at the front of the room and watch as the rest of the class got out their aprons and paints. She told my grieving mother that I was a trouble maker. “Your daughter is too spirited for her own good” she said. Mrs. Aller didn’t like me and I hated everything about her.
I’ve often wondered how many children were turned away from learning. Rather than use her influence in a positive caring way she chose cruelty to control thirty five impressionable minds. Sixty five years later the child in me and the adult I’ve become still hate Mrs. Aller, the ugly old lady with the straw wig.

ANGELS AND ANGLES IN THE ORCHARD by Judy Williams

Several years later, I became a committed, born again believer in Jesus. In 1983, under the call of God to feed the needy, I founded Sunshine Outreach, a food collecting charitable organization. Along with thousands of volunteers, we gleaned farms and orchards in Orange and northern San Diego counties. Besides enlisting low-income people to help themselves, many scout troops, social clubs, corporate volunteer teams and churches helped for the 13 years Sunshine Outreach existed in Southern California.

One crisp December morning a group of 7 people came from a church to pick oranges for the needy in their own congregation. I recall the donor’s mini-mansion home on several acres in Anaheim Hills was surrounded by an abundant planting of heavily laden orange trees. Folks were on ladders in 20-foot high trees, filling burlap bags that were cut in such a way as to form an around-the-neck, across-the-chest, under-the-arm pouch. They were collecting tons of oranges and having lots of fun doing it, singing hymns as they worked: Amazing Grace, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, Holy Ground…

One of the ladies with the group stopped to visit with me as she carried her gleanings to their waiting truck. And as we stood there talking, I noticed that one of the men was up over 12 feet high in a huge tree. At an 80-degree angle, he was precariously over-reaching and the right foot of his ladder wasn’t even touching the ground! When I called out to warn him, he leaned back to hear me and his ladder headed backward, out of the tree to a 110-degree angle, toward the hard earth.

“O my,” I screeched, “you’re falling backward!”

“Holy angels of God, bear him up!” the woman talking with me yelled out with authority.

Amazed, I witnessed the ladder immediately move back into the tree. The man was safe. And I realized that just as the volunteers had been singing, we truly were “standing on holy ground” and I knew “that there were angels all around.”

That little band of workers picked enough for their needs and then filled the back of my pick-up truck brimful with oranges that I delivered to several shelters along the freeway heading south toward home in Mission Viejo, California.

Twenty-five years later I can still see in my mind’s eye that ladder defying gravity as it abruptly ended its perilous fall and reversed direction back into the tree.

The future has found me invoking, “Holy angels of God, bear me up!” more times than I can remember. But you will be privy to more of these stories─I promise.
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“When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and for the stranger.”
Leviticus 19:9-10
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To me, it was magnificent! It was a world that I could retreat to to read my Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew books. It was a place to think, to contemplate, to plan. It was comfortable and it felt safe.
My two brothers, one older, one younger,had to share a room, but this room was all mine.

It used to be blue --powder blue. I had picked out the color. The furniture was blond. I didn't know anyone with blond furniture. I hadn't picked it out,and looking back, I can't say I was crazy about the color or style, but I liked the fact that I had two nightstands, a double bed, and a large dresser, complete with a full-sized mirror. And in that mirror, I talked back to my mother, argued with my father, and practiced kissing imaginary future boyfriends. I had my things on the dresser, my clothes in the closet, and after working a summer baby-sitting job, I bought a small black and white television which sat on a chair in the corner; it was a haven, a sactuary, a place where I could be me.

When I was about 17 I went to Wisconsin for the summer and when I returned home, my room had been painted lavender. There were new curtains on the window and a new bedspread with little lavender flowers. My mother was so excited as she stood in the doorway and watched my reaction, I could see her reflection in the mirror. So I smiled and said, "I love it" but I didn't --not really.

It never seemed like my room after that summer and, to this day, I don't like lavender.