Chapter Two of My Life and Welcome into It

How do we learn? What comes naturally and what has to be taught?  Does affection have to be taught? All I knew as a very young child was whatever my 13 month older brother Jerry taught me.  He helped me to stand up in my crib, then when able, how to spring out of that cage by climbing over the bars.  He made me learn early as he wanted a buddy... another child with whom to play, and many games were of his own invention.  It seemed as if we couldn't go a day without being spanked, or at least being shut in our room.  It was a big old room with a window that was above the dining room bow window, which had a little roof.  As soon as we were old enough to lift the window upstairs, we found we could sneak out and sit on the steep little roof.  Once caught, we dared not do that again.  But Jerry had a game of feet off the floor.  We had to circle the whole room without letting our feet touch the floor.  It was bed to window sill to bureau to closet where we'd hold on to the frame above the doors, stretching as much as we could for the bed against the wall, then up to the tall bureau near the door.  When we got that far, we peered through to the hook that locked our room, and Jerry realized we could lift it off the hook with a piece of cardboard slipped through the door.  But... once we unlocked it... how does one lock it again before Mummy finds out we knew how to get out?  I really don't remember that scenario. We probably played ignorant like something else did it.  We had a blamer: the Pink Monkeys.  Don't know how Mom let us get away with that, but maybe it was wise, as we never did unlock and sneak out of the room.  I guess knowing how was good, should there ever be a reason, like the house afire... which, fortunately never happened... until sometime after last time I went back to the next town over where my younger brother Peter now lives with his wife Marie. That was 2011 when I finally got together with my high school friends on just a weekend visit.

I'd just visited Peter before, not looking up friends when my Aunt Daw died, and then in later years when Mom died in her 93rd year.  He took me to my old house while it was still there, and I immediately wished he hadn't.  I found that it whitewashed over the way I remembered it.  Things had really changed.  The little evergreens Mom planted out front were as tall as the house.  The porch where Mom read us The Swiss Family Robinson, and Hedi, was glassed in, and there was no longer a sleeping porch over that used to be porch roof.  I had spent most of my summers sleeping out there.  There were 6 or seven windows around, and screened in so I could keep the windows open and listen the the frogs, croaking from the brook and feel the breeze if there was one cooling off the room after a hot summer's day.  All gone... making me feel like ...well... like I could never go back.

Now, living as I do in rural Pennsylvania, I feel like I've captured that ideal relationship with nature that I learned through Jerry and my experiences of roaming around the paths and following the brook, climbing hills and trees to see how far we could see when a child back in North Woburn.  Maybe we cannot go back, but we can find that lost freedom in retirement.  Tom, who never did have that freedom of responsibility as a child being one of ten on a farm, has learned through me how to let his child out to play.  We both enjoy life to our fullest, and find just staying here all the vacation we need... though he would like to visit Alaska again.  (I think he may have led a previous life as a frontier, tackling and taming the wilderness.) But this is the next best thing: Living on our 10.2 acres of land and his raising beef while I raise the birds: pheasants; turkeys; chickens; bobwhite ...at different times.