On Moontown Road
My mom made all our clothes, down to the knit curly-cue ribbons in our hair. I always chose purple, my older sister Debbie yellow, and the baby of the family, Netta, pink. Once dressed, we gathered on the front step of our brick ranch house for the annual Easter photo-op. Right after this was taken we headed to church and a couple of Easter egg hunts.
My aunt Marie and grandmother hid hard boiled eggs in the yard with quarters, dimes, and nickels scotch-taped to them. There was always one egg that was the big winner with a whole dollar attached. We searched hard for that egg. We had older boy cousins who were hard to beat, but we were lower to the ground and used that to our advantage. Plus we Gaskin girls were known for our eagle eyesight. Our dad liked to “mushroom hunt” in the woods behind our house, and he taught us how to spot sorrels and sponge heads. We also loved searching for arrowheads in the fields in the springtime when my uncle plowed, getting ready to put in the crops. Unearthed soil contains a lot of mysteries. We eagerly pulled on our rubber boots, and trekked through the overturned earth to see what was in store for us.
Growing up on Moontown Road was an outdoor, introverted child’s dream. I had a bike with a six foot flag on the back (to spot me easily), a backpack filled with all the essentials like spy glasses, a good book, a diary notebook and a pencil. We lived seven miles from town and my mother’s family owned all the acreage around us, as far as I could bike that is. My grandparents lived next door, but this was the country, so they were a quarter mile away. My great-grandmother Cuba lived next to them, and two sets of aunts and uncles with cousins lived right around the corner. There was a very steep hill between our house and the cousins’ houses that seemed enormous to me as a child. At the bottom of the hill was a stone arched bridge where a creek flowed gently. I spent hours sitting on that bridge, writing in my secret diary with the little gold clasp complete with a tiny metal key.
I wrote in my diary about the birds and the creek, and how much my little sister got on my nerves because she always wanted attention when I just wanted to read or write. She had this very annoying habit of coming up to me when I was reading Nancy Drew, usually at the good part of the story, and say:
“If you don’t pay attention to me, you will regret it!”
She always lifted her voice on the last four words as if signaling that time was up. If I didn’t put my book down, she would grab it out of my hands and run out of the house, into the front yard, threatening to throw my book on Moontown Road.
I would of course chase after her, which made her squeal with delight because she was getting the attention she wanted. I would eventually catch her because she was four years younger than me, and get my book back. But she won the game because she got the attention she demanded. This “game” was played many times over our childhood and is still a good story around our family table today. When my baby sister grew up and had her own child, her daughter would ask me to tell her the story about when her mom used to steal my books and make me chase her. She loved that story about what a rascal her mom had been, and I loved telling it to prove what a pain in the neck my baby sister had been to me growing up!
I love my sisters and I was so lucky to have them as my sisters. We are very different people, yet we share the same key ingredients: love for family and home cooked meals, a simple life filled with things you make, quiet walks in the woods, and many memories of a childhood filled with wonder such as fireflies in the summer, camping trips with the extended family, annual trip to Round Lake in Wisconsin where we learned to fish and our grandmother taught us how to row a boat. We played outdoors all year long, no matter the weather, and usually because of the weather.
We had moon boots and snow mobile suits for winter sledding and snow snowmobiling (yes, we used it as a verb, we are from Indiana). In summer we swam in our above ground pool. We played baseball in the evening, taking turns in each of our backyards. All the cousins and aunts, uncles, and grandparents would come out to play or watch. Our grandfather smoked a pipe and would run the bases with his pipe in his mouth, puffing away like a train as he rounded each base. We thought that was super funny.
We made homemade ice cream in a hand cranked barrel that took what seemed liked hours to make. It was the best ice cream I ever had. We also lived on frozen ice pops that came in about 10 colors (yeah to Red Dye #6 my favorite!), in long clear plastic tubes. We sometimes made our own ice pops out of Kool-Aid using the frozen ice pop Tupperware containers our mom bought from the Tupperware party with her friends.
As Easter draws near, I am reminded of so many childhood memories of family and place. My baby sister is also up to her wily tricks again, playing an adult version of “you will pay attention to me or regret it!” She has challenged the Gaskin girls to an Easter bunny cake bake-off. The rules are simple- each household gets to make a bunny cake and decorate it. Then we will get on a Skype call and showcase our prized cakes. It is not clear who is judging and how the winner will be chosen. I am assuming it will not be any of the Gaskin girls as that would plainly be a conflict of interest. But once again, the baby of the family is getting all of us to pay her attention! Man, she is good at this game.
