Humble Beginnings

Once upon a time, in real time, there was a girl named Laura -- and that'd be me!

I was born on New York's Upper East Side. The Upper East Side isn't exactly the premier hotbed of excitement and "wow" things to do, but as neighborhoods in Manhattan go, it's one of the more pleasant and relatively quiet ones to grow up in.

One day when I was about four years old, and my brother six, our mom was strolling us down the street. Chances are I was holding a box of Trix in my lap and happily munching away on them -- these were the days before Mom turned all health food on us, and replaced sugared cereals with bags of puffed corn, millet and/or rice. Oh, yes -- there was also puffed wheat -- how could I forget that? Ever have the displeasure of eating one of those styrofoamy cereals? Lucky you if you haven't, especially if you were a kid.

So anyway, on this one fine day our mom was struck with a revelation. She looked up at the sky and thought, "I know there's more to life than this."

My parents soon divorced (never underestimate the power of a revelation). Mom moved our family of three to Poughkeepsie, a small city about an hour and half away. She wanted us to be out of New York, but close enough so my brother and I could visit our father on weekends. Poughkeepsie seemed to fit the bill. It was okay for a start, but it never felt like "home."

We lived there for two years, until our mom found an affordable house in the beautiful country town/artist's colony of Woodstock, N.Y. Mom had an interest in living in Woodstock ever since the festival, which she thought was phenomenal. (Both of my parents attended -- to this day my father still smokes the occasional "J.") My brother and I continued to visit our father on weekends, because Woodstock is an easy two-hour ride from Manhattan.

Mom must have read a book somewhere on early pioneer homesteading, because the way my brother and I grew up seemed like it took place in a Little House on the Prairie time warp....

Sparing no formalities and cutting to the chase, I grew up in a shack in the woods. Yes, I did, and I'm proud of it. (Sort of.) The dwelling was up a quarter-of-a-mile dirt road. It had no central heat, just a wood-burning stove and a fireplace. The house had its own well for water, and early on Mom instilled a fear in us kids that one day the well might run dry.

To avoid this horror coming to fruition, we rationed water at all times. This meant taking quick showers, washing the dishes using as little water as possible, and... not flushing the toilet until it was in dire need. ("Dire need" being at the discretion of each individual.) In other words, our toilette often went beyond the quaint, "If it's yellow it's mellow, if it's brown, wash it down" saying.

The bathroom plumbing system was old and temperamental, and the toilet would clog if you did something as simple -- and seemingly harmless -- as put paper down it. Toilet paper, toilet... don't these things, like, go together? Nope -- not for us -- toilet paper was placed in a nearby wastebasket. How'd you like to be a kid in high school (where impressions are everything!), and when one of your friends was over and asked to use the bathroom you had to say, "Um, don't put any paper down the toilet, and don't flush it no matter what." Our bathroom rules were known to kind of freak visitors out from time to time, understandably so.

Recycling was a way of life for us long before it was considered fashionable and/or "socially conscious." Garbage had to be separated into five categories: Burnable, Glass, Metal, Compost pot and Chicken bowl. My brother and I took turns burning the garbage in a specially designated "garbage-burning pit." The glass and metal garbages were periodically brought to the dump. So as not to take up unnecessary space until it was time for a dump run, metal cans were prepared for recycling as follows:

Step #1: After opening a can, it was rinsed.

Step #2: The label was taken off and placed in the burnable garbage.

Step #3: The other end of the can was removed with a manual can-opener. (We didn't have an electric one at this time -- a shocker, I know.)

Step #4: The can was flattened by stomping on it. The flattened piece of metal, and the top and bottom parts were then -- and only then -- placed in the metal garbage.

Being the scavenger-at-heart that I was (and still am, and always will be), I used to think it was fun to accompany Mom on dump runs, so I could rummage around the vast junkyard in search of stuff. One time I found a swanky Cross pen in an abandoned can of pens and pencils -- not bad for a little kid!

The "compost pot" was for organic wastes our chickens wouldn't want, like coffee grounds, nutshells, banana peels, et cetera. It was emptied every morning, hopefully before it became nasty smelling and a source of attraction to fruit flies or ants.

The "chicken bowl" was for treats for our chickens, like melon rind and seeds (the rind had to be cut into small pieces), eggshells (had to be crushed between your fingers), and assorted vegetable trimmings. The chickens went positively gaga when the contents of the bowl was thrown into their coop. Whoa, now -- control yourselves, please! This is not the second coming of the Christ -- it's just some spinach stems and potato peels from last night's dinner.

Life was hard in the winter -- it was always a battle to stay warm. To keep the stove cranking out heat, it had to be fed it lots of wood and given plenty of attention. Before going to bed we'd pack the stove to capacity, but sometimes it wouldn't last the night -- we'd wake up to find a pile of dusty grey ash, and a house that was around 40 degrees. It was so hard to get out of bed on those mornings! Even when we got the stove roaring and the main living area back up to a decent temperature, the kitchen, and front and back rooms were still chilly -- "chilly" as in, you could see your breath -- now that's chilly!

Another place you could often see your breath was in the bathroom. Taking showers during the winter months was not a pleasurable experience -- it was more like a chore, a necessary evil. I say that because I really dislike being naked, wet and shivering cold at the same time -- but hey, that's just me.

One winter I thought up this seemingly great idea to remedy the cold-bathroom-while-showering situation: bring a bucket of hot coals, scooped out from the stove, into the bathroom with me! Mom didn't approve -- she feared the bucket would burn the top of our plastic toilet seat (the room was too small to place it anywhere else). I assured her I'd be very careful....

The "bucket of hot coals" trick worked great. It heated the bathroom nicely, and created a "steam room" of sorts. Everything was swell, and for a while I luxuriated in my winter shower-taking. That was, until the time I accidentally leaned my bare butt into the metal bucket as I was stepping into the shower. Yowch! My little trick was never the same after that - dammit, that bucket was dangerous! The toilet seat remained okay through it all, though.

Another thing to look forward to in the winter months was our pipes freezing on especially frigid days. That meant there'd be no water until they defrosted (usually a day or so), during which time we had to melt snow for household use. When it snowed, I never thought, "Yeah! Snow!" It was more like, "Oh, great -- more shoveling, and more problems getting up the road."

Speaking of "getting up the road," in hindsight, Mom was a bit out-to-lunch regarding her choice of vehicles when I was a kid. She should have been driving four-wheel drive Jeeps, which would have been much safer, and stood a much better chance of getting up our road. But no, with a mindset stuck in the 60s, instead she opted for dinky (but cute) VW bugs. In the snowy winter months I remember many a time grasping my seat and holding on for dear life as Mom gunned it up the road in her light-as-a-feather VW's, backs weighed down with bags of cement or cinder blocks.

Yeah, someone had told my mom to weigh down the back of her car to give it added traction on icy roads. Thanks to the heavens above we never had any mishaps from this, but didn't Jackson Pollock's final demise come when his car, weighed down with something in the back, flipped off the road when he sped around a bend? Granted he was probably under the influence and going too fast, but still....

One time after a big grocery-shopping trip, Mom, her car, and our snow-covered road had a showdown. She decided to call it quits halfway, rather than attempting the road's second and most scary hill (better to be safe, and walk the rest of the way, than be sorry, and wind up off a cliff or stuck in a ditch). We trudged home carrying a bag of groceries each, but guess who had to go and get the rest?

Instead of snuggling in for the night, when I got home I had to head right back out. I grabbed a sled and carefully walked down the slippery road to the car. I tied the remaining bags to the sled, and then attempted to drag the sled up to the house. (Where's a good sled dog when you need one, I ask?) Barely making it up the highest hill, I remember waging a full out tug-of-war with that loaded-down sled.

Our humble abode had a TV, but no cable service -- an antenna on the roof was the sole source of reception, shoddy as it was. The antenna would rotate with any sizeable gust of wind, making reception turn poor. My brother and I had a method of dealing with this recurring, bothersome problem: one of us would go outside and climb a ladder to the flat part of our roof, then walk to the antenna and rotate it slowly, while the other shouted commands from the dining room window: "Turn left! Keep going -- keep going -- a bit more -- okay! Stop there! We've got a good picture now. You can come down!"

As a two-person job this worked fine, but it was exasperating when the picture was terrible and I was the only one home. After about three times up the ladder, down the ladder and into the house, rotating a bit each time, I would be so annoyed I'd watch TV with any kind of reception.

Excitement for us was when we would wake up in the middle of the night because the chickens were making a big ruckus. Usually that meant raccoons were terrorizing them. Raccoons have killed many of our chickens over the years -- they are vicious, sneaky animals, not cute little ones like Kodak portrays. Nasty raccoons, sniffing out their next meal (a.k.a. the family chickens, kept as pets and for their eggs) would often find ways into the coop.

Emblazoned into my memory, this one evening I was the only one home. I must have been about sixteen. I heard a commotion in the coop, and as protector of the property, I had to find out what was going on. I threw on a coat, grabbed a flashlight, and headed outside. In the dark of night, my inquisitive beam of light came upon two piercing, reflective eyes -- the dreaded eyes of a raccoon, licking its chops after having feasted on several of our chickens. It was time for the raccoon to meet its maker....

I ran inside and grabbed the largest kitchen knife I could find. Returning to the scene of the crime, the raccoon was on the inside of the coop, clinging to the wide mesh fencing -- he'd gotten in and now he couldn't get out -- gee, too bad for you. I grasped the knife and raised it above my head, with visions of reenacting the shower scene from Psycho. Before going in for the kill, first I gave the raccoon a little "test" poke. Mistake. When I felt its soft flesh give, I just knew there was no way I could go through with it. Stab a raccoon to death in cold blood, when I can barely even touch a piece of raw steak? Who was I kidding?

On another occasion, our chickens met with an unfortunate end due to a certain non-raccoon related accident. Mom had bought a book on identifying mushrooms, inspiring her to go mushroom picking in the woods. Returning home from her expedition, basket filled with a glorious assortment, she proceeded to look up each variety in the book. Several were identified as Amanita Muscaria, deadly poisonous. Without thinking too much about it, Mom tossed the mushrooms in the compost pile.

This was during the time we let the chickens roam around the property during the day -- the next morning they were all found dead. The poor, unsuspecting birds had eaten the poisonous mushrooms out of the compost! It was a sad day indeed. I, for one, was particularly disappointed, because they were a special breed that were supposed to lay pastel-colored eggs, but they died before they had a chance to lay any. We went back to keeping hearty, brown egg-laying hens after the mushroom-eating incident, and the chickens were kept coop-bound.

Oh, how my mom loved mushrooms! Upon her request, I helped impregnate these logs on our property with shiitake mushroom spores. (Drill hole in log, insert treated "plug," seal with wax.) In the spring and fall, the morning after a good rain I'd check the logs to see if any mushrooms had sprouted. Harvests were rare and special, and when we'd get one I would run inside screaming, "Mom! Mom! The logs! You have to see the logs!" Fresh shiitakes are a real treat.

Mom also loved Puffball mushrooms, and she was always on the lookout for giant Puffballs growing on people's lawns. If she spotted one while driving, she'd quickly pull over, get out of the car, walk to the person's front door and knock on it. "Excuse me, do you want that mushroom on your lawn?"

Often the person would be a tad taken aback, until he/she realized my mom was just a harmless mushroom enthusiast. "Uh, no... you can have it." After saying her thanks, my mom then would traipse over to said mushroom. Using the knife she kept conveniently in the glove box of her car, happy as a clam, she would remove her bounty. Note: Puffballs are tricky -- what looks the same on the outside can be very different inside. They're either white, the good kind to eat, or black, which are inedible.

Throughout my growing up it was country bumpkin livin' during the week (so to speak), with trips to NYC every other weekend to visit my father. Excursions to Chinatown and Canal Street, dinner at nice restaurants, and seeing many a cool band at The Ritz were just a few of the fun Big Apple activities that added variety, excitement and culture to my otherwise modest childhood life.

On the note of "modest," Mom didn't believe in allowance -- she preferred to call it "Payment for Services Rendered." In other words, if the services (feeding the chickens and birds, stacking wood, burning the garbage, shoveling, turning over the compost, so on and so forth) were not rendered, payment would not be given.

But I'm not complaining, really I'm not. I'm so glad I grew up the way I did -- it's given me an appreciation for things most of us take for granted.

Like the heat that comes out of my radiators -- it's amazing! It pours out steadily all winter long, keeping my apartment toasty warm no matter how cold it is outside, and I don't have to do a thing. (Except pay my rent.)

And Laundromats -- love them. Uh, huh, I do. You think I'm joking? I assure you I'm not....

The Loathsome Laundry Process

When I was a kid growing up in Woodstock, doing the laundry was quite a loathsome process. Our washing machine was located in the "back room" of our house (a no-frills workroom with concrete floors and no heat). The entire process took about two hours of continuous, labor-intensive work. Most of the time, I ended up doing the laundry.

For over ten years, our household used the method described below. You know that old saying, "You learn something new every day"? Well, today you're going to learn about a laundry process you never knew existed in supposedly modern, civilized times.

A "How to" Guide for Doing Laundry in our humble Household:

Step #1: Fill the machine with five buckets of water (the nearest sink is in the kitchen -- it's a bit of a schlep, sorry), and pour in some detergent.

Step #2: Separate the laundry into various piles. The laundry isn't ever actually rinsed, so the purpose of the piles is, "What's going to show the dirty water the least -- is it the whites, or the jeans and socks?" The first pile to go in, logically, are the whites and undergarments.

Step #3: Put the first pile in and turn the dial on the machine to the "heavy soil" mode, which lasts about five minutes.

Step #4: After the wash cycle ends, pull the soaking wet clothes out of the "wash side" and slop them down into the "extractor side" (which spins out the extraneous water). Try to avoid splashing water on yourself while doing this. Trust me -- you won't enjoy working in wet clothes in a room that's often pushing 50 degrees.

Step #5: Press the wet clothes into the extractor and close the lid (thus starting the extraction process), making sure to hold the hose coming out of the machine down into a bucket. If you don't hold down the hose, the extracting water will jettison out all over the floor, most certainly adding to your misery.

Step #6: Dump the bucket of water from the extraction process back into the "wash side" of the machine.

Step #7: Put the next pile of clothes in, set the dial, and start those clothes "washing" (if you could call it that).

Step #8: Repeat 4, 5, 6, and 7 for each pile of clothes.

Step #9 (for Laundry-time in winter or inclement weather): While each load is "washing," hang the damp clothes from previous loads on the many crisscrossed clotheslines set up in the back room.

Step #10: When all of the loads are done, empty the water from the machine by the bucket loads, and toss them outside into the woods.

Step #11 (for Laundry-time in nice weather: Hang the clothes on the outside clothesline to dry. Unfortunately, the clothesline is quite a ways away -- walking this distance carrying a heavy basket piled high with damp clothes will be pretty strenuous. But at least it means you're nearing completion of the laundry ordeal... this time.

After the third or so load went through the cycle, the water would already be noticeably dirty, but I just kept going and going until all of the loads were washed -- usually about ten in all. By the time the last load of jeans and socks went in, the water was murky grey and foaming, with who-knows-what breeding within its depths.

My brother despised doing the laundry above and beyond all other household chores, so if I did it I racked up high bartering points for trading chores. Despite the unpleasant process I agreed to the trade, because younger sis was in fact a smart little cookie. Aside from getting a more-than-substantial trade of chores in my favor, I had a secret agenda: if I always did the laundry, I could put all of my clothes in first, and therefore they would never have to set foot in the swamp-like water my brother's clothes went through.

You might be questioning, "Why didn't your mother just bring you to a laundromat?" Yes, that's a very good question indeed, up there with, "What's the meaning of life?" To answer for my mom, I guess she figured, "We do have a washing machine, it does work, why not use it?" Yeah, easy for her to say -- she wasn't the one dealing with that formidable process every couple of weeks.

And if you're wondering, "Why that choice of washing machine?" the answer to that one is rather straightforward: it used less water than other types, and due to our temperamental old well we had to continually ration water.

I have since come to realize that my laundry toils of childhood have made me delight in doing laundry at the friendly neighborhood laundromat. It's so easy nowadays: I simply toss my whole load in, drizzle on some detergent, feed the machine a few coins (it's my pleasure, really -- take my money, take it!), come back in half an hour, and presto - they're done. Now if that isn't a modern technological marvel, I don't know what is.

So, if for one fleeting moment you even think of complaining about having to do your laundry (in the modern, civilized way), think back to the ten years of how I had to do it and then I dare you to complain!

P.S. The best part of writing this story was e-mailing it to my brother when I finished, with a note at the bottom saying, "Call me." When we spoke, I cracked up on the phone -- he wasn't nearly as amused. A nostalgic conversation ensued:

Brother: I never knew you did this! I can't believe you made me wear dirty clothes!

Sister: [Recovered enough from laughing to speak] Oh, they weren't that dirty. And anyway, you never noticed. [More laughing]

Brother: It's not funny! I can't believe you! You're cruel. My own sister made me wear dirty clothes, when I thought they were clean.

Sister: [still cackling] You deserved it, for all those times you picked on me when Mom wasn't home. At least when I did the laundry your clothes looked clean, and came out the right colors. Remember that one time you did the laundry and all of your underwear turned pink?

Brother: Oh, yeah -- I must have put a red shirt in the load. It was embarrassing changing for gym class when I was wearing pink underwear.