We lived in a two story frame house which was built in 1930. It was a typical Midwestern house with a basement and an ample yard. All my earliest memories occurred in this house -- I was 18 months old when we moved in.
The basement was a great place for exploration and play. It was divided into four areas: the laundry with its early automatic wringer washer, a small storage area where the furnace was housed, a tiny room with a window that opened onto the driveway and a large area that in the early days held the clotheslines for convenient indoor drying.
The small room was the coal bin where shiny black, rock-like chunks were stored for the furnace. The coal trucks would back into the driveway and disgorge their cargos on a chute that extended through the window. It was a cold, dusty process in the middle of the winter.
Sometime in the mid-1950s, Dad had the furnace converted to gas. There were no more coal trucks. Shoveling coal into the furnace and dumping the cinders into the driveway were a thing of the past. The little room was cleaned and scrubbed. The last of the coal dust was bonded to the walls with a coat of sickly pink paint. The concrete floor was scrubbed and tiled with ugly yellow asphalt tiles. Dad installed storage shelves to transform the room into what Mom called the “fruit cellar” and what practically became the pantry.
The pantry quickly filled with all the extra groceries needed for a family of five: the four of us and my mother’s mother. There were canned goods from the stores, glass jars of preserved fruits and vegetables, and the inevitable supply of toilet paper.
If my mother ever had a plan for what went where, it certainly escaped my notice. As a child and a teenager the storage plan was beyond my adolescent abilities of observation to understand. Both my sister and I were often sent to retrieve items for meals and cleaning chores. More often than not, we would trudge up the stairs with nothing in our hands. We had failed to locate the requested item.
My mother in a fit of exasperation would stomp down the stairs, disappear into the dark corner that housed the former coal bin, and triumphantly ascend the stairs with the requested item in her hands. As she confronted us with the goods, she would say once again: “Where were you looking -- on the ceiling?”
