After a year, my mother found it was no easier living with her mother than it had been with her mother-in-law and we returned to Niles, to the old neighborhood. Although there were other houses available in town, my father got along very well with Mrs. Andrews, the landlady who owned our old house on Cedar Street and who, no doubt, offered a rental he could easily afford, both in dollars and in the time he contributed taking care of her yard and repairing odds-and-ends around her own home. So, we moved into another house she owned that was previously rented by my music teacher on Seneca Street.
The front room, once occupied by Mrs. Corbett’s piano, was now filled with a red couch, stuffed chair, knickknack table and left-over dining-room chair. The adjoining room served as a place for meals, if relatives ate eat with us. The first floor of the house was completed by a small kitchen, yet one large enough for a table and chairs, allowing us to eat daily meals there instead of in the dining room.
The kitchen was equipped with a gas stove and a real Frigidaire. Refrigerators in lieu of ice boxes had now come into vogue for city living. The grandparents’ houses up-the-hill and on-the-farm had them, therefor my father could not complain too much about this modern appliance in our current home. Now my glass of water could have ice cubes from aluminum trays with a pop-up lever for releasing them. I could also make my own popsicles from flavored Kool-Aid and the flat sticks bought in the grocery store.
The usual pantry and sink adjoined the kitchen. Enclosed stairs from the kitchen led past a landing for the backdoor and down into the basement with its modern washer. We did not yet own a drier. Depending upon the season, wet clothes still hung on lines outdoors or in the cellar.
Access to the second floor was from the front room. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom with the usual claw-footed tub. The house, itself, had been built only three feet away from a two-story apartment building next door. The window-shade in our bathroom was consistently pulled down to preclude a too-intimate communication with our neighbors.
My bedroom gave a view of the Lincoln schoolyard. My desk was located so I could see what was happening outside at any time of the day or evening. Over the next four years, I spent many hours staring out that window and, on many sleepless evenings, listening to the moaning of the train passing through Niles to places I one day wanted to see.
The best feature of my room was a very low, but long, closet under the eaves that contained all of our out-of-season stuff, and a lot of my precious junk, including boxes of comic books my mother later discarded while I was away at college. The collection had been in mint condition, since I did not allow any of my friends to borrow them. My favorite, of course, was Mad Magazine which cost a mere dime! I sometimes wonder what Captain Marvel and Action Comics might be worth today.
Nothing physical had changed since I had left the neighborhood a year ago and reappeared at age fourteen. I missed the new friends I had found in the country. In both locations, no friends my age lived close-by. Nevertheless, in the Ridge the days at school and on the farm had passed pleasantly. I learned there was a difference between being alone and being lonely.