Third Paper

Around the time that I turned seven, the two sides of my family merged. My father had grown up an only child and was the center of his parents attention until we arrived, us three kids were a bonus to marrying our mother. All of a sudden they became grandparents, and it was very different from the family that I had been surrounded by up to this point.

My father’s parents were very neat. The rancher style home that they owned while we were growing up was always decorated according to the season, not just storage for treasures like we were used to. Whenever we arrived at the house there always seemed to be something baking and had activities planned for us kids. The rancher style home that they used to own had a country kitchen homeyness to it, the antique furniture that they owned had been passed down in the family, and was well kept. They had black and white pictures in frames from when they were young and lived in Montana. Up until that point I never knew anyone who had cable television. I was used to waiting for Saturday morning cartoons, but they had a channel that played cartoons all day, it was awesome. My grandparents cooked meals from scratch and lived in a subdivision that we could ride our bikes around. Before I met them, I had never heard of spring cleaning, when you go through your possessions and purge.

My mother's family was quite a stark contrast. One of my first clear memories was following my grandmother around the farm to tend to the few pheasants she still kept. There was a collection of outbuildings that my grandfather had built when he was still alive: the a-frame, the tool shed and flat roofed delapated garage that housed my grandmother's treasures. I don't believe I ever saw my Grandma Mickey baking, save a tv dinner or two for us kids. She was no Betty Crocker, but she did own all of the cookbooks. Always a collector, my grandmother was always saving, tucking things away. Born in 1923, she and her four sisters were raised during the depression and saw many wars. It may have been some type of coping mechanism or just a habit that stuck after raising five children. If she was out shopping with any of us and saw something on clearance, she would purchase it, often in multiples. Once home they were store away, nearly always forgotten about.

The three of us oldest grandkids didn't go to daycare until I was in school. Instead we spent our days with my mother's overwhelmingly female family. My mother would drop us off at grandma's before the sun was up most mornings and we would watch the morning news while grandma made us instant oatmeal. She would stand in the back corner of the kitchen ironing, half-listening to the scanner and telling us stories about growing up, peppered with slight anger toward one of her sisters or a classmate, something that happened more than fifty years previously.

It was my grandmother who taught us about buttercups, willows and the other plants that blossomed around the property, about gathering aluminum cans that had been tossed into the ditches of the country road she lived on and recycling them for money. Grandma's house was a haven for things that had potential to be fixed, but rarely did they. There were stacks of fruit boxes that lined the hallway leading to the back bedroom, and that stack housed three Easy Bake ovens. This was torture to my five year old self, to see these boxes everyday, knowing that not one of them was in working order and I wasn't able to play with them. There was an unknown number of Barbies, collectors items we were told, kept in their boxes and never enjoyed. Thousands of books, stashes of art supplies, and tons of dress patterns filled these boxes. There are somethings that will always remind me of my grandma's house; Aquafresh toothpaste, Head and Shoulders (and the way it makes your scalp tingle), Irish Spring and the smell of Folgers instant coffee.

Aunt Rita would show up most mornings, before The Price is Right, to take my brother and I on an adventure. Usually it was work, disguised as fun; going on a hike around the property to scout out a fence that needed repair, figuring out what was wrong with the well, or loading up fallen branches or recycling. Rita drove the big blue pickup when I was young, teaching me to shift out of necessity, because my car seat got in the way and I was the only one who could reach second gear. She taught us how to fix things around the house, about making faces at strangers at stoplights, and how to suck helium out of balloons and sing Happy Birthday on people's answering machines.

When she wasn't working at the hospital, my mom's oldest sister would take me for the day. My Aunt Rocky lived out in the country when I was young, and along with grandma, had us convinced that the television only worked during certain times of the day; coincidentally during the news, MASH or Masterpiece Theater. She collected mystery novels and I would help her bake peanut butter cookies before settling down for the night and working on the ever present crochet blanket project. My uncles, my mother's older brothers weren't around quite as much but did take us fishing occasionally, stomping through the woods to get there, and pointing out which leaves were okay to wipe with. Most of my aunts and uncles didn't have children until we were a bit older, so us three were like practice children.

My parents are the grandparents now to my niece and nephews, and time has mellowed them considerably. The house is a mixture of the two sides; it's very neat, although I think my father only vacuums once a day now. There is lots vintage sports equipment along with pictures of the family, both from when we were growing up and some older photographs of our grandparents and great-grandparents. They purchased right before my sixteenth birthday, and they have nice things now, and white carpets. Both of them are collectors to an extent, but they have a garage sale nearly every year to keep the garage from getting out of control.

I can only hope that I've made the right decision, to move away from home and everything I knew. I hope that the time that spend with my niece and nephews will be enough and they will have funny memories of riding around in shopping carts or running errands with me and my youngest sister the way I remember my aunts as a child. Baking cupcakes with sprinkles or coloring pictures, I try to allow them to do fun things that their parents don't have the time or patience to do. I buy them the "cool presents" for christmas and knit them toys and hats throughout the year.

First Paper

“Wake up my little sunshine. Are you ready to go to the ocean?” my mother cooed. “I don’t wanna go to the ocean. There’s octopuses there,” was my sister’s response. Not yet four, she didn’t understand the significance of this trip. Though none of us knew yet, it was to be the last true family vacation; before teenage angst would take a strong hold on all family gatherings, before any of us children would start working, before the grandchildren would enter the world and we would all be too busy to all get together as a whole, save major holidays.

As we piled into “The Loser Cruiser”, an aquamarine Chevy Lumina slightly reminiscent of the Jetson-mobile, my family of six was already slightly uncomfortable. It was early July, and from my spot in the backseat, tucked in between the padded Eddie Bauer cooler and a stack of sleeping bags in the back row, the cool air never reached me. I was fifteen that summer and it would be a long six hour drive, where in I would block out my siblings very existence by playing the same mid-nineties rock tapes on loop via my walkman and nearly finish reading a Patricia Cornwell novel.

Most of the drive down is a blur to me, if it weren’t for the videotape and photos of the trip, I don’t know if we would remember the best parts. Like when we crossed the fresh rumble strips along I- 82 in order for all of us kids to trudge through a wheat field to pose next to the lonely tree that made up the Connell National Forest (which, as far as I know, no longer exists). The soundtrack : Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A., The Beach Boys – Greatest Hits, and Boston- Boston. We would tease our parents about this mercilessly, and beg them to put on something else, anything else. But this was many years ago, when there was no such thing as 5 disc changers, or iPods. I think my parents only packed ten cds, but these were the only ones that made it to film.

We made it to Seaside at sunset with little issue. This is a lot to ask when you have two teenagers, one child on the brink of adolescence, and a toddler in your keep. My younger sister’s pubescent horns were just starting to show, mostly she just whined a lot, but that was to be expected. We stopped by the manager’s cottage a few blocks away and picked up the keys for the tiny house that would be our residence for the next nine days. Our rented abode was a block and a half from the promenade that runs along the beach in Seaside. And though the sun would only make an appearance the day we left, none the less, it was our sanctuary.

As we carried our bags into the house, I remember being very annoyed; I had to share a room with my eleven year old sister again. I “offered” to sleep downstairs on the other couch, where my brother would take up residence, to avoid the snoring and general irritation that she caused. But my parents wouldn’t hear of it, it was only nine days… but it would be a long nine days.

That night, as always, Klarchen kept me up for longer than I care to remember, asking me questions. She always liked to pull this when we were camping, since we hadn’t shared a room in a few years and I was her captive audience. She was just lucky that I never went to find the duct tape when she started asking why the sun rose in the east, or some other equally open ended question just as I was nearly asleep.

We dressed quickly in the morning, despite sharing one tiny bathroom on the main floor that had inadequate ventilation for its size. All of us were excited to be so close to the ocean and the treasures it could possibly hold. Our parents took us down to the shore and around town that day, acclimating us to the town, in the coming week we would be sent out on our own. Being the oldest I was put in charge and given an allotted $30 a day to be divided equally between the three of us; my brother and I with instructions not to ditch our sister. As we wandered from shop to shop, the promenade radiating warmth beneath our flip flops, gathering gag gifts, candy and and toys we could quietly smack each other with when no one was looking. Sand Dollar Square was a maze of sidewalk stands boasting cheezy tee shirts and trinkets. The smell fresh popcorn and carmelized sugar, serpentines of shiny homemade salt water taffy filling our day.

I believe it was at the Seaside Aquarium that I found a tide tracker. Later that night we gathered empty Tupperware containers from under the kitchen sink and the few kiddie buckets that were on the sun porch of the house and headed down to the water with our father at 10:30. Just as the calendar had instructed, we arrived just as the tide was at its lowest point, and we had the best chance of stumbling upon some swag of the shore. The Doc Marten knockoff sandals that I wore soaked up the seawater like a sponge as we eased into the shallow water’s edge. They became so heavy and cumbersome, tunneling into the sand and subsequendtly being drawn away by the waves. I grew tired of chasing them down in the moonlight, and slipped them off and tucked them in the pail with my treasures.

All in all, we found a dozen whole, live sand dollars, though many more broken pieces, lots of mussel and conch - like shells and a fish that had been trapped in a tide pool (he looked like a palm size purple-ish shark, but he wasn’t). We lugged it all back to the bungalow that night, with the understanding that we were to release the fish the next day. Before meeting up with our parents the next day before lunch, us kids did one better and stopped by the aquarium to help identify our found fish, which they decided to add to their collection.

The next evening, after returning from our adventures in town, my younger brother started to feel a bit queasy. My father joined us shortly after with a big bucket from KFC, one whiff of that chicken and we didn’t see much of my brother for the next twelve hours. By morning my brother had earned the nickname “Sir Pukes-A-Lot”, which still lives on in our family legend. Luckily, none of the rest of us developed any symptoms of his mysterious stomach flu, probably due to the fact that my mother quarentined us girls upstairs, away from the sickly one… and the only television.

Despite the fact that I moved here to be closer to this spot that I enjoyed so much as a child, I have yet to make it back to Seaside. I almost want to wait for summer, when the arcades will open and be swarming with sticky-fingered, unsupervised children like we were, when I can find a worthy opponent to reclaim my title as skeetball champion. I still have many of the knicknacks that I picked up on this trip, including the black Oregon Coast coffee mug that I found in a grab bag at the Seaside Aquarium and has followed me to every house I’ve lived in since, and the Dennis the Menace lunchbox which holds my hand sewing supplies and buttons.