In the middle of our front yard is a maple tree that dad planted when I was a child and which now towers over the house. Across the driveway was a depression in the ground where once had stood a large and very old elm tree. When I was still very young, dad cut the dead tree down and, because this was the country, began to burn the pile of branches and logs at the corner of the driveway. It wasn't long until there was a roaring blaze that lit up the street. I slept right the through the arrival of the volunteer fire department.

When my bed was against the wall, the head in the corner between the two windows, I could look out at the houses on Race Rd. and Sugar Ridge, could see the cars driving by, the older kids allowed out long after my bedtime. I sat on the bed and stared out the window, jealous of their freedom. On Friday nights I could see the glow from the lights at the high school football field. The glow of those distant lights seemed magical.

The east window was summer, the sunshine warming the morning, the sound of the school bus and the garbage truck, milkmen opening the box on the front steps and leaving off three quarts, the smell of fresh-cut grass and summer night air, the sight of lightning bugs glittering in the lilac bushes accompanied by the music of frogs and crickets and the occasional hiss of rubber on asphalt. My parents sat side-by-side on the front steps, watching me twirling, jumping, barefoot on the front lawn as night approached.

The south window was the winter window. I remember most, a picture I took from that window on a typical winter's day - the farmer's field that bordered our house, barren of the corn that filled it during summer - now a frozen white-wash of snow. At the back corner of our lot, the southwest corner, I could see another, smaller, elm tree. On the summer it was the perfect place to read and daydream. In my winter picture, however, the tree stands like a sentry against the winds that whipped across the flat expanses of ice and snow. It was the contrast of tall tree against flat snow that set in me the idea that we lived in the middle of the tundra - the Race Road houses gathered together for protection against the gathering storms and cold.

Summer and winter. The extremes predominate in my memory. I can't tell you much of fall that has to do with the house and spring remembrances consisting mainly of rain and mud. But summer and winter - the tests of one's abilities to dream and to endure - those are the times I remember best.

One summer we got a new refrigerator and, in time-honored fashion, a window and doors were cut and it turned into a clubhouse for me and Ronny Alwin and Dennis and Diane Thompson. Was I six yet? I don't know, but I remember vividly that it was August and the farmer's corn in the south field was taller than we were. We were convinced ( Aunt Eva next door gave serious attention as I whispered the "secret") that there was a monster in the corn. I never say it myself, but the Thompsons, Diane prone to plentiful imaginings and Dennis cheerfully untruthful, both claim to have seen it just prior to their screaming arrival inside the cardboard box. Why a monster would be in that particular stretch of corn and what manner of monster and what we were going to do about it were irrelevancies that had no place in our child-minds.

One winter, four or five years later, the farmer had planted summer wheat, harvested the wheat but had never gotten back to bale all of the straw. Ronnie and I built snow forts in the big field behind our house, gathering straw into circular fortifications and covering them with snow. They were, we knew, the absolute best forts ever built. We had pride of ownership and a sense that here, on the prairie, against the elements, we had staked out a place of our own devising - a triumph of kid-hood!

In summer, I could climb the twin plum trees on the south side of the house, sit on the perch Dad built and study the texture of the bark, black, ragged, with amber sap flowing into pea-size welts along the trunk. I could sit up there, eating Mom's cream cheese sandwiches while watching for the mailman and study the ants at their work in the branches. I could eat plums: purple grape-size plums picked from stems mere inches from my face - from tree to me with a short stop for polishing against my shirt sleeve. That was the same perch I once fell out of - landing on my back and knocking the wind out of me. I got up and walked, not ran, into the house crying and gasping and bleeding. I had fallen with my tongue out and teeth snapping shut. Fortunately I hadn't bitten all the way through and the trip to the Emergency Department was less traumatic for me that it probably was for my parents.

In the winter our house was cold. We had a coal-fired furnace for may years. There was a coal bin in the basement and the coal man would bring his dump truck, slide a chute into the window space and dump in the coal. I barely remember, but my brother told me that in the early mornings, Dad would go down to the basement and stoke up the furnace. Though we later got a warmer, cleaner oil furnace, what we didn't have was insulation. The house was a wood construction with asbestos shingles. Sometimes it seemed as though the wind whipped through the house. There was no heat register in my bedroom and I got whatever hear heat floated up the stairs and down the hall. I had a sheet and three heavy blankets. Once I had warmed the sheets, I was as warm as could be.

It was a great place to grow up and I'd trade a lot for a few more of those summer days at home.
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