My poor mother! Can you imagine raising this motley crew of 9? You should hear her talk, especially when she's tired or PO'd. It's a cross between a southern and German accent. My father is Japanese (he passed a few years ago) which explains our features. My younger memories of my mother were in Bronx NYC. She was always in a dress, often with pearls and high heels, soft spoken, talked in German because we had our grandparents living with us sometimes. The more kids, the more changes.
Later memories include my mother in capris and tennis flats or even overalls with boots, driving a station wagon, living on a 300 acre farm (mostly woods) upstate New York with Pine trees so old and tall that they reached the sky! Raising goats, drinking goat milk, chickens all over the place, ducks, geese, rabbits. Two cows, Tessie and Bessie, who really were just pets. A horse and a pony. A wildly abundant garden that only my grandmother (whom we all called Oma) and mom could grow. Maple trees that still had their spigots left in them, a broken down sugar house that still had this huge black kettle in it (there were all kinds of sheds and shacks on the property. Acres of apple trees that had outgrew the original orchard but were still productive and blackberries, raspberries and the sweetest, tiniest wild strawberries. There were also patches of rhubarb that we ate raw until we realized too much would give us, ahem...intestinal upset.
There were 3 small ponds, a creek right next to the house, a stream and a spring in the middle of the woods that someone had built a box around. The creek next to the house ran all the way down from the Catskills somewhere. As kids, 11 years and younger, we would try to follow it as far as we could before we got too scared and would turn around and head home. There were 2 decent waterfalls and a thin worn trail. Every once in a blue moon (maybe 2 or 3 times a year, someone would pop out from the woods behind our house loaded down with well worn camping gear, looking a little worse for wear, but always smiling and friendly.
Anyway because of the amount of snow and ice we had along with the occasional blizzard, we had all kinds of sledding and ice-skating gear, I even remember a pair of snow shoes, but although we begged and begged we never could get our dad to buy a snow mobile. When all that snow started melting each spring, it would turn the creek next to our house into a raging river. We weren't allowed to go near it. Other than that though, we pretty much ran wild when we didn't have homework or chores to do. My mother taught me how to catch snakes with my bare hands (which I am too big a chicken to do now), milk goats into a bucket and peel a potato skin so thin you could see through it (and not waste a precious bit). She played tag, ping pong, badminton and board games. She taught us to sing. We knew every song from her favorite movie "The Sound of Music" by heart, all the German children songs, and even Simon & Garfunkel, the Carpenters, the Beatles, etc. It seemed like we sang all the time.
The house itself was an original log cabin that had been added on to. There was a huge front porch with a tin roof that amplified rainfall almost 100 x's. Deafening! The larger addition was to the side of the house and all dilapidated so I could never tell what it's true purpose was except that it was huge and the 2nd floor had a gigantic stage - so I imagine they had music and dancing up there at one time. We had to be careful because the floors were bad and if you weren't paying attention you could fall through. We used the lower level as a massive pantry, an entrance and a place for our German Shepherd, Leah, to sleep at night.
We only lived on the farm for three wonderful years while my father commuted back and forth from the city to be with us on the weekends. In the end, my father got a position in Lexington KY and we had to move. It was the only time I cried when moving and for most of my adult life I planned on returning upstate NY and buying some land up there. Life gets in the way though and also realizations. My family is here in Kentucky now, I wouldn't want to drive to work each day during the treacherous winter season, I like having neighbors within yelling distance, etc. etc. etc.
Back to my mother though, after a few more children she managed to raise the volume and range of her voice higher, would go through all her children's names before she would get to the one she needed (I do it now too - thank God I only have the 3 plus Lucky) and learned to take off her shoe and fling it like a boomerang around corners to find her unlucky target. I'm serious! Her shoe could find you in the middle of a maze! We'd get in trouble, take off running and get hit by a shoe no matter where we went. Her shoe throwing skills are famous! :o)
