MEMORIES OF THE HOUSE ON THE ROAD

     My great grandparents Charles Wesley Shelton and Rose Anna Spencer Shelton came up from southwest Virginia and bought the property on Popes Head road and lived in the old house while a brand new home was built with the back of the new house butting up against the front porch of the old house.  It's been said that Great Grandmother was well off in her own right and that it was her money that bought the property.  I've never heard any description of the old house but my grandmother, born Anna Virginia Shelton and was called Ginny, told me about when she was a little girl and she and her cousin Nellie Spencer were playing on the upstairs landing with their dolls and Nellie fell out the window onto the  porch roof of the old house.  She wasn't hurt just surprised.

Rose Ann Spencer Shelton

     The house was wood framed and painted white with a mansard roof and a cousin also told me that the seams on the roof were painted red by Uncle Claude who was the eldest son.  There was a front porch and a kitchen porch and I spent many a day as a child dreaming on those porches and playing with my third cousins Bruce and Earl.  Uncle Harry, the brother that was closest in age to my grandmother inherited the house from his mother when she passed on January 1, 1946.  My grandmother inherited the 7.58 parcel next door where a house was built in the early 50's by my parents.  Uncle Harry used to give haircuts on the kitchen porch to all the boys in the family and probably half the males on Popes Head Road in the 1950's.  This is the house he raised his family in.
     Grandmother said her family moved up from Grassy Creek, Marion County, Virginia.  She came up in a wagon and said she held her cat on her lap all the way.  Her papa was a photographer and she said she helped him develop pictures.  I have a box full of glass negatives that were handed down to Grandmother from her older brother Byrl, then to Mom then to me.
     Great Grandfather was twice a widower when he met Great Grandmother.  He was in his thirties and she was eighteen when they married and she helped him raise his children from his first marriages and they had children of their own.  I knew Uncle Oscar who stayed close to his new half brothers and sisters and who loved his stepmother very much.  I've heard the story that when great grandmother was dying of cancer she told Oscar she thought she could hold down some squirrel soup and he got the shotgun and went out to get some squirrels for her.

Anna Virginia Shelton 

         I've written before about grandmother's family in a previous story about their runaway brother Brian I call "The Richest Shelton Known".  My grandmother was the next to the youngest of her family and was born in 1910.  She passed away at seventy-six years old in 1986.  
     The house on Popes Head Road was two story.  There were two front doors from the front porch with the first one leading into the parlor which was never used and the second door leading into the sitting room.  The parlor had three big windows that were side by side looking out on to the side yard giving a wide view and their was also a single window looking out the front of the house.  On one wall was a carved mantle but the room was heated by a bot bellied stove which set under it in the old days..
     The other front door from the porch was the door everyone used and it led into the sitting room.  The sitting room had a front window and two side windows and a staircase to the upstairs.  The room was heated by a black bot bellied stove and I remember it as a little girl with a coal bucket beside it and someone  maybe Uncle Harry stoking the fire.  It was in this room my Aunt Bill helped my mother make an angel costume for a play, "The Littlest Angel", when I was in second grade.  Aunt Bill was Uncle Harry's wife and I loved her very much.  The parlor and the sitting room were divided by great wooden paneled pocket doors that were always closed when grandmother was a little girl.  There were beautiful dark red velvet curtains hanging on each side of the entrance called portieres (por'-teers) which grandmother still had in a trunk when I was little.
       The only time the doors were open when Grandmother was little was for Christmas Day and if her parents threw a party.  A party would consist of opening the doors to the parlor and rolling back the rugs making a big dance floor.  A fiddler would play music and the adults would dance and then my great grandmother would serve a "midnight supper".  The supper would be a ham or fried chicken, salads, biscuits, and two cakes one chocolate and the other banana.  Grandmother said they'd put the cakes in a double boiler with a lid until it was time to set them out and they each one would perfume and flavor the other.  I imagine but Grandmother never said that cold sweet tea was served it being the table wine of the South and I don't know and it's never been said to me whether spirits were served.  This part of my family were never big drinkers.
     The kitchen is always the heart of the house and here is where me and my family would sit and visit with Uncle Harry and Aunt Bill when we would drive up from Alexandria in the years after WWII  and before the house was built on Grandmother's land next door.  I remember in the summertime sitting at the big table with the door and windows thrown open with just screens and millers flying around the ceiling light overhead in the evening because after all this was the country.  I loved listening to the adults talk.  When Grandmother was little and before electricity you canned food in jars and if you needed refrigeration you had a spring house.  A spring house was a shed over a spring or creek where you would set jars of food and milk and tea down in the water to keep them cool and prevent spoilage.  Mom told me about going down to the spring house one time and a snake was in a tree over the spring house after baby birds in a nest and she got out of there fast.
       I remember one time when we drove up and the road was still a gravel road and I was about three to five years old and when we pulled up all my cousins were standing in the road looking at a big dead snake.  Uncle Carroll, who was Momma's baby brother, and I walked out to see it and along came Robert Payne in the taxi cab he drove in Washington, DC and run over and squashed the snake.  Well, that dead snake splashed all up on and over me and Uncle Carroll and someone picked me up and ran with me to the house and as my mother, grandmother, and aunt were cleaning me up I heard them exclaiming "and it's even in her mouth!"   I remember my mom saying days later after taking me out of the bathtub that she could still smell that old dead snake in my hair.
     The fourth room on the ground floor had a door from the kitchen and a door to the parlor.  I don't know what it was used for when grandmother was a little girl but I suspect it was a dining room.  No one ever said but I know at different times over the years it was used as a bedroom.  When Great Grandmother was widowed and during The Great Depression she and Aunt Margarette (called Margui and pronounced with a hard G), slept here.  Margui was the baby of the family and I believe was five years younger than Grandmother.  Other members of the family returned home with their children during the hard times and occupied the four bedrooms upstairs and the attic room.  My own mother and  her two brothers lived with their grandmother when they were  little while my grandparents lived and worked in Washington, D.C.  Mom told me that every Friday she would tell all the kids at school that she was going to live with her parents and every Monday she had to go back to Fairview Elementary School at Fairfax Station.  The Great Depression was hard on little kids especially.
     The staircase from the sitting room led upstairs to a landing.  To the right you entered a bedroom that led into another bedroom.  If you turned left and walked down the landing there were two individual bedrooms and the end of the landing led to a small sitting room with a bay window looking out from the front of the house.  Off the upstairs sitting room was a door and then stairs to the attic.  The attic was long and narrow with a window that was just above the bay window of the sitting room.  Grandmother said the house was unusual for the time because the bedrooms had built in closets.  She also said that every family member had a trunk to keep at the foot of their beds.  Also, they had feather tick mattresses when Grandmother was little and the community got together and took a whole day to stuff and make new mattresses.  Mom said that those feather tick mattresses were so comfortable and you'd sink right in.  Another thing I loved that was left over from that time,when I was little, were patchwork quilts made from the cloth of men's wool suits.  They were heavy and boy they were warm.    
     Of course, the house being built sometime between 1915 and 1920, did not have an indoor bathroom and water for the kitchen was pumped from an outside well.  I remember when my uncle had a bathroom put in at the top of the stairs in the 1950's.  I've been in a lot of old houses where the bathroom was added way later than when the house was built.  In most cases a bedroom was made into a bathroom when the inside plumbing was installed.  In this case there was enough room in the landing at the top of the stairs to install a bathroom and this included the window that grandmother's cousin Nellie fell out of years before.  I don't ever remember the kitchen not having a running water sink but when I was little the outside  well pump  still worked.  I also remember using the outhouse when I was little which was down from the house on the way to the pasture and cow barn.
     When grandmother was little the family had a horse which pulled a carriage and her name was Maude and she had a baby whose name was Dixie.  Towards the end of her life Great Grandmother and Aunt Margui who was still in school went to live in Washington D.C.  where her older children were living and working.  Uncle Claude was a DC policeman and owned taxi cabs.  Uncle Harry was a bus driver and his wife Aunt Bill was a nurse at Sibley Hospital.  Uncle Kline drove cabs and Aunt Lena who had been a nurse at St. Elizabeth's Hospital was a homemaker with a large family.  They put all of Great Grandmother's household in the attic and left Maude and Dixie on the home place and leased out the house.  I understand they heard that the horses were being mistreated and the attic had been broken into so Great Grandmother and Aunt Margui returned to the country.
     As a little kid I lived next door in a house built by Grandmother's brother Byrl Shelton who was a local builder and who had built himself a beautiful home on Popes Head Road.  I spent as much time next door at Uncle Harry's as I did in my own home.  We kids especially liked to roam the fields, chase imaginary rabbits, play in the creek, and all of this with our boxer dog Mac as a constant companion.  This was the early 1950's until my parents moved us to The Town of Fairfax in 1958.  The catalpa tree in the side yard (also called a cigar tree) was the best place to climb and I swear my sister Linda lived in it all those childhood summers long ago.  We all belonged to Jerusalem Baptist Church out on Ox Road and Uncle Harry who was a deacon took Linda and I to church every Sunday.  I have such warm memories of being part of a warm close knit family.  My heart is full.    
     The original lot was almost sixty acres.  An acre was divided off and a house built for a widow lady with a daughter a long lime before I was born.  That home was occupied by the Dolingers when I was little and their daughter Nancy who was my age and good friend.  When my great grandmother died in 1946 the property was divided up into pretty equal plots inherited by my grandmother and her brothers and sisters.  All the lots were approximately 7.58 acres and all grandmothers family at one time or another have lived on the road.  Uncle Harry as I've said before got the plot with the house and he sold it to his son Bruce in the late 1970's and Bruce sold that house out of the family in the early 1980's.  The house burned to the ground about five to ten years ago and a new monster log cabin mansion has been built on the site.
     

PORCHES

I love a house with porches.

My parents back porch was a nice place to sit and drink coffee in the morning.  I used to like to rest my feet on the lower porch rails and watch the mockingbird in the top of the fir tree sing and make noise and bob up and down in the very top of the tree.  The back porch looked out over my Uncle Harry's cornfield when the house was first built in the 1950's.  You could see all the way over to Nancy Dollinger's and Mr. Day's and the drive ways to Debbie Lyons house and my cousins Lew and Annette Crites.  My Uncle Harry lived next door across the cornfield and there was always a path to his house.  Woods have replaced the cornfield more than fifty years later but I bet if you walked down to the corner of the yard you could still find the path through the woods.

When my nephew Freddie was about three years old we would sit on the back porch and he'd sit on my lap and we would sing "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that's amore" at the top of our lungs then we'd laugh and laugh and even though he was so little my nephew had a wonderful sense of the absurd.  We were in the country on Popes Head Road back before the Springfield Bypass was built and bisected it so there was no neighbor close enough to bother.

A pear tree grew in the middle of the backyard.  When the pears were ripe the white tailed deer would come out of the woods and eat them off the ground or from the lower branches.  Every once in a while a doe would bring her fawn and it was fun to sit on the porch and watch them.  They weren't afraid and didn't run and it was kind of magical.  One time I was sitting on the porch and I heard this commotion down in the woods and all of a sudden five or six deer came crashing out of the woods and along the side yard towards the front yard...seconds later a dog came out of the woods but it headed in the opposite direction of the deer.  I ran through the house to the front porch but the deer had run across the road into the trees on the other side into Glendalough Subdivision..

A porch swing is a wonderful thing to have.  My Grandmother in Herndon had a wonderful one on the porch of her old Victorian.  It was painted the gaudiest orange and green almost carnival ride like but it seemed to fit the style of the house.  The slats of the back were pierced and fancily cut like a doily and very comfortable.  I loved to hear it creak as we swung.  

In the evening I used to love to sit on the front porch of my house with my glass of cold tea and a good book till the lightning bugs came out at dusk.  It was too dark to read then but I liked to sit and feel the summer whisper by.  

A STOP ON THE KITTY CAT SUPER HIGHWAY

     We said good-by to Toupee today and Rod buried him under the pomegranate tree in the back yard.  Toupee used to sit under this tree and snooze.  I wonder what he dreamed of and I wonder what he had to dream about since we don't know what his life was before us.  He kept to himself and never let us pick him up and he wasn't too bad to the other cats.  Toupee was an abandoned cat, a stray, that showed up just after Christmas year before last.  He was a whole male all white except for a dark tabby tale and a round spot on his noggin that included his ears that looked just like he was wearing a toupee, hence the name.  His eyes were pale celery green, so unusual.  For some reason that time of year seems to be when cats get abandoned by their people.  Every year between Thanksgiving and the first of the year we seem to have a new cat come around.

     Pumpkin was the Monday after Thanksgiving close to ten years ago now.  This was before we took permanent residence here in the country and we had been up from South San Francisco to have Thanksgiving with our family.  Rod was taking the turkey carcass out to throw in the trash and around the corner came this long haired, short legged (we say he's part dachshund) orange cat.  Rod whistled and he came over when he spied the turkey.  He came in the house and crawled on my lap and Rod and I looked at each other and he ended up riding back to the Bay Area with us that night curled up in the plush lining of Rod's jeans jacket on the front seat of the Suburban on the bench seat between us.  The rest is history.  He became our baby and used to ride between us on top of the lid of a small container that held his personal stuff  on the bench seat of the Burb when we would travel back and forth the 150 miles north to the country.  We used to get big smiles at the toll plaza for the Carquinez and Bay Bridges.  A curious thing about Pumpkin when we first had him his whiskers kept breaking off and the vet said this was because of poor nutrition.  We think he'd been on the road for a while.

     The next winter in January a small grey cat showed up and took up residence in the out building.  She and Rod became quite good friends and I swear she's as smart as Cleo had been (see the story Cleo, 12/19/11) .  That winter had been so rainy and she was worried, worried, and we soon found out why.  She was carrying kittens and afraid that the floor of the outbuilding where she was nesting would flood.  Rod dug a trench away so the water wouldn't flood the floor and then we made her a nest on top of his old '68 Chevy Camaro hood with two nice sized cardboard boxes one inside perpendicular to the other to form a little roof and we put a nice clean towel inside.  She loved this.  She couldn't make Pumpkin accept her though and from then on they were each other's nemesis.  Oh, I forgot, she was solid grey and small with apple green eyes.  Because I'm from the South we named her Mosby after John Singleton Mosby, The Grey Ghost of Civil War history who was from my state and this name has evolved into Miss Mosby.  She had two kittens who Pumpkin loves and we named them Ranger (small and black) and Silver (white Siamese with black points).

     Silver and Ranger got  pregnant before they were a year and we could spay them and each had seven kittens.  I spied Silver with probably the father of her kittens high up about twenty feet in the blue gum eucalyptus tree in the side yard.  That was amazing to see.  Silver called and called when she came into heat but we never heard Ranger.  For a while there we were overwhelmed with cats but time and the "road" have dwindled that number.  Other than Pumpkin, Miss Mosby, and Silver we still have:  Spot-a tabby with stripes and spots, Skye-a tabby with a white muzzle and paws, and Jet-solid black.  We lost Silver's kitten Judy and she's buried in the roses in front of the dining room window.  She got hit by a car and Rod's brother Bob, next door, found her in his driveway while we were away and he buried her in the soft earth around his burn pile.  When we got home Rod dug her up and reburied her in the roses.  She was the first to stand at the family room door till we let her in and she'd sashay to the entry hall through the dining room and pantry to the garage door multiple times a day. 

     Over the years two other strays showed up one was a short haired orange whole male that was a marauder and all he wanted to do was bugger the other cats even Pumpkin.  Sorry to say we never named him and we were glad the road got him.  The other was a sweet long haired solid gray probably fixed male who Miss Mosby loved and we named him General Lee (after guess who!) which evolved into Mr. Lee.   Miss Mosby by this time had taken up residence in the garage on top of the water heater but she would come outside for General Lee.  I found them one day playing together with Mosby on top of an outdoor furniture end table and General Lee underneath playfully swatting at each other.  It was so sweet considering Miss Mosby growled at Pumpkin and never came out of the garage.

     At Christmas a year ago a wonderful event happened.  A tiny tiny baby kitten showed up at our patio door.  He was so tiny I know he was too young to leave his mother but what we found out is he wasn't afraid of the raccoons and even was swatting and playing with them when they came to finish off the cats dry food.  What we think is the raccoons had found him and adopted him because he was too young to fare for himself and the raccoon family included young kits of their own.  He finally decided to stay with us and we had him neutered and we call him Ruffles because his coat is swirly tabby markings with a white breast and paws.  He's as sweet as he can be and so much fun to watch playing..

     We believe Toupee, being a whole male, has probably been keeping away any new strays but now that he's gone there's sure to be more in the future.  Anything that stays gets spayed or neutered we learned our lessons long ago.

           

    

THE SCHOOL OF LIFE

The one place where I learned lessons that taught me about life, how to make a living, how to treat others, and to know how I wanted to be treated, was at the University of the School of Life.

1.  Never trust any woman around the man that you love because if it's good every other woman wants your man even if she has one of her own.

2.  Don't trust your mother because if she doesn't like him she'll do anything she can to sabotage your relationship because she "knows best".

3.  Trust your mother's opinion because she's been out there living far longer than you and knows life.

4.  Life's a dichotomy.  A phrase I learned working at an engineering company was "neat, logical, and wrong".

5.  Love your parents and learn by their mistakes.  No one is perfect not even parents.

6.   Anytime you have the opportunity to learn something that might make you employable don't pass up the chance.

7.  Sometimes your children, even at a very early age, have great wisdom.

 8.  Listen to criticism even if it makes you angry you might learn something.

 9.  Treat your dear friends with great respect and don't take them for granted you never know when you might miss them forever.

10.  Respect for others is respect for yourself.

11.  Work is like money in the bank always there and collects interest.  Play is like money in the pocket easily spent and instantly gone.

12.  Don't forget to play.

13.  There's no place like home.

14.  Love your companion be they human or not.

15.  Even if the ends justify the means don't rob yourself of rest.

16.  If at all possible always be prepared for the other foot to fall.

17.  Work hard.