Author: Linda Duval

   After Daddy left us in Minnesota to go “help out” his folks down in Missouri, things in Minnesota got rough. With no central heating, the castle got pretty nippy.

   The first storms came in October, roaring around the drafty old house like angry dragons, breathing ice instead of fire. We huddled under mounds of blankets and quilts at night. Mornings, Mother would warm our robes and slippers by the glass-fronted gas fire downstairs, then run them up to us. She’d shove them under the covers for us to put on, then count, “One, two, three, GO!”

  We’d hit the floor running, tear down the L-shaped flight of stairs and hit the front hallway – which wasn’t heated. The floor would sparkle with frost (sort of a “Dr. Zhivago” effect) and, as our warm slippers hit it, turn into an ice rink. We’d spread our arms wide and slide till we hit the swinging door that went into the kitchen.

   What fun!

   At first, we took the bus to school. Andrea – four years older than me – and I would walk down to the end of the long driveway in the semi-dark on those frigid Minnesota mornings and stand there, flapping our arms to stay warm, crying from the cold, the tears freezing on our cheeks. (Cindy hadn’t started first grade yet.)

   Once on the bus, being the new kids (which we remained for years) in a small-town ,we were teased relentlessly about our last name – Pigg – which we didn’t even know was funny till we got here. (It was a common name in Missouri, where Daddy grew up. There’s even a whole Pigg Family Cemetery there!)) We whined about riding the rickety bus with the local bullies – mostly (and ironically) the Wurm boys.

 It didn’t help that we’d adopted two runt piglets that Uncle Bill was going to kill, and hand-raised them that summer. We named them Red and Annabelle, after some friends of our parents, and the runts thought they were dogs. They slept on the back porch, ate out of a dog dish, and followed us everywhere.

   Even to the school bus stop that fall. Then they’d chase the bus! Short little legs pumping, squealing and running, curly tails spinning, till they ran out of steam. Pigs can’t run real far.

   “Hey, your sisters are chasing the bus again!” the boys would taunt. My face would burn. Andrea would glare at them. She gave at least one of them a bloody nose. It didn’t help.

   The other kids would oink as we got on the bus, or walked by them in the hall at school. Andrea punched out a few more of them. I cried.

    So, when the weather got warm enough for the roads to be passable by our old blue Studebaker, Mother drove us. She didn’t have a driver’s license (never bothered or even had a chance, really) but details like that never stopped her. Some of those rides were terrifying.

  One muddy spring day, we were headed home from school and Mother started sliding as she descended a little hill lined with saplings. The car swerved and spun and pitched and jumped and hit at least one tree. We flew around the back seat, grabbing each other, door handles, whatever was handy. But when we finally came to a stop, we were headed back the way we came.

   “Well, that was fun!” she said, laughing.

   She just pulled into a neighbor’s driveway, turned around and tackled it again. Slower this time.  When we got home, she surveyed the car.

   “Not a scratch,” she proclaimed. The next day, the school janitor asked her why her front bumper was off-center by about a foot.

Next:  Happy Holidays?

   From a child’s-eye-view, the decrepit, peeling three-story house looked like a castle. Dormers, stained-glass windows, and a steep roof gave it a lofty appearance. Surely, at some point, a princess had lived here!

   In rural Minnesota, places often get their names from the family that built them, or lived here first. There was the Pribyl Farm, the Zanders House, and so on.  This was the Elsenpeter Place. Not quite a farm, but more than just a house. Woods. Small fields. And a rock pile between them.

  My little sister, Cindy, and I didn’t know it was a dump. Through 5- and 6-year-old eyes, we saw an exciting place, a world to explore and have adventures. The broken latticework around the base of the sagging front porch surely led to a great hidey-hole. (We hadn’t considered spiders at that point.)

    Moving to Minnesota in the early 1950s was just the latest in our uprootings. Cindy and I, born in Oklahoma City, had also lived in Wichita and rural Missouri in our young lives. Now, we had moved near our maternal grandparents in Maple Lake, where Daddy, a newly licensed plumber, was going to work for a guy who owned a plumbing and heating business.

   We moved to Minnesota in June, when the ravenous mosquitoes were hatching and muggy days were unrelieved by muggier nights. Some nights, even our thin cotton nightgowns lay upon our clammy skin like woolen winter coats.

   A small lake behind our woods was a good spot to hang out, wade and to fish – well, our cane poles lay on the bank, bobbers bobbing on the water’s surface, while Cindy and I played tag or made mud castles on the shore.  Once in a while, we actually caught a little perch or catfish and chased the pole into the water before our “catch” got away.

   We’d dig worms, making sure Cindy didn’t eat any, and take them, along with our bologna-and-Miracle Whip-on-white-bread sandwiches and red Kool-Aid (Cindy’s favorite “flavor”) to the lake. We’d catch polliwogs, and once we got chased by a skunk who didn’t appreciate our dog, Queenie, sticking her nose into its burrow.

   I had no idea we could run that fast, or that we could scale a nearly vertical bank in just seconds.

   She was a good hunter, that Queenie. But she was too smart to mess with a skunk. On her short little dachshund-mix legs, she outran us, leaving us for skink bait!

   That summer was idyllic. Daddy never paid much attention to us unless we got into trouble, and Mother was busy trying to make a home out of this place – no easy task. So, pretty much unattended, we girls ran and played … and dug a pit in the front yard for a fort.

    Daddy paid attention to us then. He stood guard while we fetched all the dirt and filled the hole back in.

   We played in the rock pile, tucked between woods and fields, until one day we disturbed a nest of mice and had to scramble up the spindly trees, calling Mother to come rescue us. She wouldn’t.

   “Just jump down and run,” she kept hollering from the safety of the back porch. Turns out, she hated mice as much as we did. (Remind me to tell you about the “mouse house” sometime.)

   One of our favorite spots was in the center of the woods. Here was our magic tree. About eight feet tall, or so it seemed to us at the time,  the dead trunk probably had been struck by lightning years before and now stood, weathered silvery smooth as paper. It was the perfect canvas for two little girls who wanted their own totem pole and had the cigar box full of broken crayons needed to do the job.

   I often wondered if, after we moved, and the woods were cleared to make more farm land, if the guy running the bulldozer didn’t stop and marvel for just a minute before toppling our multicolored totem tree.

    Come fall, Daddy decided he didn’t like working for his new boss (he never did, which is one reason we’d moved so much) and took the train back to Missouri to live with his folks on the farm for the winter. The farm barely supported my grandparents and uncle, much less us, too. He seldom sent money.

   So there we were. Mother and three little girls (including our older sister, Andrea), miles from town on a rutted dirt road, with an unreliable blue Studebaker for transportation. The drafty old house had no central plumbing or heating, and no insulation.

   We stayed, and he left, on the eve of a brutal winter.

Next: Colder than hell.