The Elsenpeter Place

   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.