Page 19 - letmetellyou

church and it didn’t stop her bingo playing either, however. She just found another way. Poor grandma wanted all of her sons, of which there were three, and all of her daughters, of which there were six, to become priests and nuns. None of her sons became priests but each of them had only one wife while her six daughters provided her with an abundance of sons-in-law. My mother was never disrespectful to my father’s mother but she didn’t waste any time finding her own home even though it was a condemned house three doors away. So desperate was my mother to escape my grandmother’s house, she somehow convinced the authorities to allow her to move there if she would correct the health problems, which she did. My mother could be a very persuasive person. Shortly, thereafter, we moved across town to the south end and then to the country. During this time, I attended my first two grade schools: St. Francis de Sales and St. James.
Somehow my mother had found a very small farm (only thirteen acres) with a very large house for rent just a couple of miles outside of Sylvania, Ohio a middle class farming village about ten miles from Toledo. My father had found a job with a large automotive firm in Toledo and he agreed to commute. Frankly, I think that if he hadn’t, there might have been a divorce. It was in this home, at this time, that I was at my happiest. My mother was happy, my father was happy and my older brother was only beginning to bully me. Most importantly, we were a family, again, doing family things.
It must have been her Serbian peasant roots that made my mother believe that she could succeed as a farmer. She didn’t. Her first project was to raise chickens, from scratch, in the winter time. I’ll always remember her arriving in their 1930 Chrysler, the family car (this was 1947), loaded down with cardboard boxes with holes punched in them so that the little baby chicks could breathe. I helped her carry them into the house, up the stairs, across the hall and into the unheated sun room which was to be their home until they were old enough to occupy the chicken house located about seventy-five yards from our house and then full of cast off furniture and useless, discarded farm supplies. They had to be in our house, even in an unheated room to which my mother would add portable heat lamps, in order to survive the cold and, of course, to be hand-fed by you know whom. I don’t recall whether that winter was colder than normal or not, but it must have been because the little baby chicks, despite our best efforts, never made it to the chicken house. They all died, every last one of them, and it was months before we were relieved of their smell. But mom was not deterred. She, immediately, acquired more livestock.
11
The Early Years