Childhood Warmth at the Old Brass Register

The second daughter. The fourth child.

There is an old brass heat register in the living room of the house where I grew up. It is located at the base of the wall near the door that leads to the kitchen and has been there ever since Daddy added the basement and installed the furnace, in around 1943. Through the years, many little bodies stood in front of it to take the chill off on a winter’s morning. Many feet and hands were warmed there. Many boots and mittens were dried there. The room where the old brass heat register stands has been painted, wallpapered, and remodeled over and over again through the years, but the heat register was never upgraded, never polished or covered with paint. It was just always there and still is today. And even now, when I return to the old homestead, I find myself standing in front of that heat register and memories of my childhood come flooding back…

ON THE DAY BEFORE Christmas Eve in 1938, my mother was in the living room trimming our Christmas tree when all of a sudden she started having contractions and decided it was time to go to the hospital to have her baby. At 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, December 24, 1938, I was born to Ethel and Floyd Guild at Moline Public Hospital in Moline, Illinois. My mother was twenty-nine years old and my father was thirty-two years old. My father named me Carol Mae in honor of the Christmas season, and I went home to an apartment at 127 35th Street, Moline, Illinois, to join my sister, Iris, and my two brothers, Bobby and Bernie. After I was born, my mother had three more daughters, Delores, Diana and Barbara, making me the true middle child. (The well adjusted one, ha!) My weight is not recorded on my birth certificate, but I was told that I was very small and Mom carried me around on a little pillow. Mom kept me in an oval wicker basket on a shelf in the bedroom so my little brothers couldn’t get at me.