I've attached a picture of Junie in the fridge, Neffie holding a cup and I am the one in the ponytail with my back to the camera. There are a lot of memories stirred by this pictures. I'll tell you about this home in which we spent most of our growing up years. The address was 120 East Herndon, Shreveport, LA. The house was a long, white, frame home that stood maybe a foot high in places on brick footings in several places under the home so that the air could get completely under the house. You don't find many basements in Louisiana because of the water table being sooooo high. The house could have been divided in half from front to back to determine living areas. This half in the picture started in the front with a brick front porch that was completely covered. There were cement steps going to the front door. I remember my mom keeping a fresh coat of paint on those steps. You entered a big living room from the front door. It has a fireplace in it that was a gas one with pretend logs. Mom taught us girls to stand in front of it and hike our skirts up in the back to keep our legs warm. I have a cute picture of Andie doing after mom taught her the concept. From the living room you went through a set of french doors into the dining room. The upright piano was in here that each of us learned to play the piano on. Junie etched Rocky Chalmiers name in it also. There was an old round table for dining and a long hutch on one wall for storage. When Papa drove long-haul truck, we kept a map of the United States on one wall of this room. We had string and pins with big heads on them. We put a pin in the city he was in and wrapped string around it to connect it to the city he had come from. This helped us to feel closer to him as he traveled over the United States. The you went thru a swinging door into a breakfast room. This room had windows on one side and the little table was there. The other side had 2 corner cabinets. In the bottom of one of those was my Girl Scout manual and I can remember using it to learn to set a table properly. The counter top on the other corner cabinet had a pink depression glass cookie jar. Mimi won this at a fair as a child. She always kept it full of fudge or divinity or something sweet. Hence the sweet tooth we all have. Next came the kitchen with the fridge you see pictured. There was also a stove that had a griddle in the center and 2 gas burners on either side of the griddle. There was not dishwasher, that's what the girls were for. The shelves in this kitchen went almost to the ceilings which were very high. When we would misbehave (which was not often...), our favorite toys would go on top of these shelves. Then you would go to the little screened in back porch. This was were the washer was and eventually the fridge you see pictured went there after a newer one was purchased. The other side of the house started in the front with a big screened in front porch. It has a swing on it that now hangs from my deck on my patio. Mimi also made sure the floor and swing were painted regularly. This porch was great to play school in during the hot summer days. There was a door from the porch into the front bedroom which was my parents bedroom. Then you went into a little hallway with an alcove on one side for the telephone. This alcove had a shelf in the bottom to place the phone book. The other side of the hallway opened into the only bathroom. This bathroom had a built-in dirty clothes hamper in it's closet. The bottom half of the closet had a wooden counter with a door that you could lift up and drop your dirty clothes in. The front of the hamper was a gate-like door that you opened to take the dirty clothes out when it was time to do laundry. This was a great hiding place when playing hide-and-seek. From the little hallway you went into the last 2 bedrooms in the house. The first of these bedrooms had a closet in which hung a razor strap. This was made of leather and used to sharpen straight razors years ago. It was also the source of threatened discipline if we misbehaved (which I have already stated we didn't do...). I never remember that razor strap being taken from that closet. When we were cleaning our my parents home to move them to Kentucky, I asked Neffie if she wanted it. She assured me she did not. I brought it home and it now hangs on the hall tree in my basement bathroom. The back bedroom had a huge window fan to draw the air through the house in the summer. My parents let us paint it a great blue color and the blades we painted gold. The house had gas heaters. One in the living room in the fireplace, one in the back bedroom and one in the bathroom. There were probably others but those are the ones that stick out in my mind. The one in the back bedroom had a little shelf on it. We used to cut apples in half in the winter, core them, add sugar, butter and cinnamon in the hollow middle and put them in dishes on the shelf in the front of this little heater. It made great baked apples that way. When the old fridge in the picture was moved to the back porch, my mother stored some chicken in it. We went on a trip and when we came home there had been a power-outage on the back porch and the fridge was not working. Those chickens had little worms crawling all over them and they smelled sooooooo bad. I don't know how my poor mom cleaned that out but she did. When the fridge was in the kitchen, it always had a quart jar of tuna fish and a quart jar of pimento cheese in it for a quick snack after school or for lunch in the summer. Another thing Mimi would keep in there was any juice left over from anything that had juice in it. When she had collected enough, she would come home with a bit of dry ice and drop it in the mixture. It would bubble and the color would usually be dark from mixing so many things. We called this 'stump water' and it was always good.
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