The Little House That Grew with the Family

Home. Four small, equally divided rooms in a twenty-three by twenty-three- foot square, one-story wood-frame house without a basement, that sat on one acre of fertile Illinois top soil on a narrow dirt road in P.J. Mersman’s Acres Addition, just on the outskirts of Moline, Illinois. I think Mom took the initiative for getting the loan for the house to get us kids away from the river and the railroad tracks. I heard she went to the bank and applied for the loan herself. The house and land cost two thousand dollars and included a one-car garage and a chicken coop. The little white clapboard house our Mom and Dad bought for us changed many times in many ways over the years. Almost immediately, Dad raised it up and dug out a basement, then poured a cement floor and laid the concrete block walls himself. He built an arrow-straight, red brick chimney to whisk away the smoke from the new coal furnace. He also dug a well, which drew its water through a hand pump until Dad added an electric pump and holding tank inside the house. About that same time, he had to enlarge the kitchen to get room for that kitchen bench we all took turns sitting on. Later on, Dad built two new bedrooms (Bob and I helped him a little) and added city water, a water heater, and a bathroom to replace the outhouse and the narrow wooden planks that led us all out to it through the springtime mud and winter snow. Much later, he gave it green asphalt siding to reduce the painting and heating costs, and then a brand new garage. Somewhere along the line, the chicken coop became our playhouse. Then Daddy built a work shed when he outgrew the garage and lately the house—now Dee’s house—got its white siding back, along with some fine new shutters in forest green. That was and still is the place we all call home. The best part of life on 39th Street in those early years was the freedom to come and go and to play anywhere our hearts desired. Mom definitely had the right idea there. I have only vague memories of my own first years there. I was only six when we moved in on July 16, 1942. I definitely remember me and Bob, who was five, jumping out of the windows in glee. I can see Mom hanging wallpaper and putting shelf paper in the red kitchen cabinets with the glass-paned doors. I see Grampa and Daddy planting the first garden and digging out the basement and raising up the house on giant jacks, but not much else. I do remember Grampa smelled of minted snuff, and gave pony rides on his knee as he sang songs to us and recited limericks. Soon after, I think, Baby Diana came along. I have a sense that the McFarlands were always intertwined in our family life from our very first day there. I loved Virginia because she was like a second mom and because she was a laugher, and Marilyn because she giggled so infectiously, and Pat because she talked so fast you could barely understand her. I was as mesmerized by Pat’s speech as I would have been by a Martian’s. Long after I grew up in this tiny house with five sisters and a much- appreciated brother, along with Mom and Dad and Grampa Williams, I still sense the closeness of our family when we were all there. Somehow, I never think of us as separate individuals, back then. We were an entity—a unit. A moving amorphous blob of humanity. If we’d been a pack of wolves we couldn’t have been closer or more interconnected and interdependent. We were a family growing up and having fun together and I think that was because Mom and Dad planned it that way. Mom and Dad surely loved kids. And, I loved my life there, dearly.