Walking softer on the earth

We would lie on the mattress in the attic and listen to the rain. Up there, with the homemade lye soap drying in cotton string net bags that once held oranges, we were washed in the sounds that my grandmother told us were beautiful. And they were. A pianissimo rain that spattered the roof with tiny drops lulled us to a soporific state where the heat, the bugs, sunburns and mosquito bites of those 1940s summers disappeared. A heavier rain washed the summer-hot roof, sending oceans of delightfully cooler air through the attic windows. The rain filled the cistern and the rain barrels. The cistern fed the bungalow’s needs for water in the kitchen and bath. The rain barrels were the source of water for the vegetable garden and for washing our hair. Hot water for dishes and baths came from a nightly fire underneath a large pot in the back yard. Potable water came in gallon glass jugs that we filled from the springs on Beekman Drive. The sights and sounds of those frosted bottles wrapped in dish towels, clinking in the red wagon as we brought them home, are still fresh in my memory.

Our summer weeks with our grandmother were far removed from the hot streets and the even hotter tiny bedrooms of our ancient row house on 55th Street in Brooklyn. Even the rain was different. A thunderstorm would leave us with a few moments of exquisitely clean air. We would rush outside and breathe deeply of the ozone-freshened air, too quickly gone. For children growing up in the city, a thunderstorm in the country was a treat.

My grandmother’s house was at the top of Ogden Road, a road which connected with Route 52, across which lay the smaller of the two bodies of water that made up Lake Carmel. We had a rowboat, a dark green, wooden, flat-bottomed boat that my father rescued from the swampy end of the lake. It was tied up at a makeshift dock at the point where the two roads intersected. The boat was a magical thing, giving us the freedom to row about, go fishing and even earn some money by renting it for the princely sum of $4 a day. The boat taught us about responsibilities. Unless we cared for it, which meant scraping it each year, replacing the caulking and repainting it, the boat would respond by leaking furiously and making any of our waterborne adventures into continuous exercises in bailing.

Over those childhood summers we all learned, perhaps not with style but with determination, how to swim and we spent hours at the beaches around the lake, inventing stories that required underwater activities and breath-holding contests. Our bathing suits - no one had anything called a swim suit then – were, in a word … awful. My mother didn’t believe that children needed to look fashionable and therefore most of what we wore were adult garments, purchased at the Good Will on Third Avenue, bleached to a dull grey for sanitary purposes and remodeled appropriately for pre-pubescent girls. At least I got to wear the first remodel, but my younger sisters got hand-medowns from me and then each other. Just awful! One in particular stands out. It was made of the lining of a bathing suit, a grey wool affair made for a woman of more ample proportions and tucked here and there to fit a 10-year-old. I tried to make it less ugly by sewing tiny bows made of checked seam binding on it. My laments about ugliness, about what the other girls wore, grew in volume and number as adolescence approached. They were heard and heeded by my wonderful grandmother who bought me my first new bathing suit when I was 13. And didn’t I think I looked swell?

In our lives, we sometimes think that “things” in the past were simpler, often, as in Marvin Hamlisch’s song, “Memories,” fading into a kind of watercolor reality. In truth, things were simpler, not just because of a simpler technology, but because, out of necessity, we used less of the world’s resources. There was just enough electricity in my grandmother’s bungalow to have a light in each room. Without a well, we depended on water delivered naturally from the rain and the springs in the earth. There were few “toys” to be had and we used the lake and its wonders to create summers that remain deeply etched in our memories. We followed the streams in the woods, creating paths not only on the ground but in our minds, some of which became stories that we told each other, while others gave us a lifelong reverence for the beauty of the natural habitat.

How wonderful to explore the twists and turns of the watercourses that were, then, uncontaminated by human intervention and full of the romance of young minds. Was it better then? Our lives were not without challenges, and so better may not be the word, but wouldn’t it be a blessing to be able to return to those tranquil moments of rain on the roof in my grandmother’s attic and let the rain wash some parts of the modern world away?

Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.