Monday, December 08, 2008

Playing at Mammy's House

Over at Travelin Oma's Marty wrote a great post about playing at her grandmother's house.

Since I had said a while back that I was going to write some more about the things I remember of my grandmother, I took Marty's idea for this post.

I spent a lot of time at Mammy's house.

During the summer there would be long stretches of time there.

Since there was no swimming pool in easy walking distance, our summer cool off place was a tin wash tub

I remember sitting in the tub and running a hose

Running through the hose was a big deal too -- as were the discussions with my grandparents about when it was warm enough to do so -- it had to be more that 75 degrees for us to be able to run through the hose


And there were marbles

Because my grandfather was a postman back in the days when they actually WALKED a route, he would find marbles in the street

Somewhere at my mother's house there is a deep cookie tin full of the marbles he found and brought home in his pockets

I remember blowing up the air mattress, putting one end of it up on the couch and running marbles down the grooves in it to race them to the bottom

One summer when Mammy had been teaching me to knit we used up a bunch of little scrap pieces of yarn to knit little 1 to 2 inch squares with tails at one end that my sister and I dubbed "mice" which we then took outside to play with over a blanket stretched across a wood frame. We bounced them all around like they could do double flips on a trampoline.


and then there were the paperdolls

Betsy McCall paperdolls to be exact -- (which I only recently discovered were introduced in 1951 -- the year I was born!)

Mammy let me have that highly coveted page as soon as the McCall's magazine arrived in the mail.

I had a box that greeting cards had come in that was the place that the carefully cut out dolls were stored.

Right now I'm wondering whatever happened to those, wishing I had kept them, wondering if my mother will find them as she is now going through all of the ephemera from Mammy's house that she hadn't gotten to.

And so it was that play time at Mammy's was also learning life skills --- I learned to sew and knit and cut --- and all of those skills are still the backbone of the arts I do today.

So what did you play with at your grandma's house?

2 comments:

Travelin'Oma said...

I remember the Betsy McCall paperdolls, too. I must be getting old. I love reading other's memories, and thinking about my own.

Bear Naked said...

Oh my goodness.
Those paper dolls bring back so many memories.
Thanks.

Bear((( )))