I realized tonight that if I start right now, I will have time to write a series of 12 Days of Christmas blogs before December 25. So here we go, DAY ONE--December 13, my first blog about a Christmas memory or tradition.
For the first day of Christmas, I want to tell you about Vern and Ann. (The story may be a bit long and convoluted before I get to the Christmas part, but if you hang in there, I will get there. :)
I grew up on a dead-end street surrounded by neighbors who all went to the same church. All except for Ann and Vern. They were an elderly, childless couple who lived across the street and down one house to the west. They did not go to our church. In fact, they smoked, which was a habit that wasn't OK in our church. I realize now that it was a gift to me to have Ann and Vern, a couple of smokers, for neighbors across the street. Because whatever I may have interpreted from the church DOs and DO NOTs during my sheltered childhood, I grew up knowing that even though smoking may be bad for your health, it did not make you a bad person. Ann and Vern smoked, and they were always kind to me.
Vern was tall and thin with darkish graying hair. He spoke softly and seldom. Ann was shorter and plump with blond hair. She spoke slowly and deliberately, with deep breaths and a low voice that shook a bit. She spoke to me with loving words, like "dear" and "honey." I don't recall what Vern and Ann did for a living. They were probably retired before I was born, and so I grew up with them living across the street, in a house with a huge--I mean HUGE--evergreen tree that took up most of the lawn. Vern and Ann had no kids, so it was a house we didn't go into to play, but there were a few special times when we were invited inside.
One of those occasions was a baking day. Ann would invite a few of the neighborhood girls over and teach us to bake. I don't recall if this happened multiple times, but I clearly remember one time. That day she taught us to make a chocolate cake she called Crazy Cake. You put mixed dry ingredients into a square baking pan, and then you used a large spoon to make 3 depressions in the cake mixture, and then you filled those depressions with vinegar. Vinegar in a cake? Yes, vinegar. That's why it was Crazy. I don't remember what happened next. I think we probably mixed it all up in the pan, baked it, and got to eat some and take some home.
Other times that I stepped inside Vern and Ann's house were when I helped my oldest brother G water their plants. Vern and Ann had a house chuck full of plants. When they left town, they gave my brother a key to their house--the key was on a big pink clear plastic key ring that I imagined was a teardrop that fell from a fancy crystal chandelier--and my brother would take their newspaper and mail into the house and then take care of their plants for them. He let me go with him sometimes, and I remember how it felt a bit sneaky to let ourselves into their house when they weren't home. My favorite part of watering their house plants was when I got to spray a mist of water over the ferns. We didn't have any ferns at our house, so I thought the spray bottle was a truly entertaining way to water a plant.
The best day that we got to step inside Vern and Ann's house was on Christmas Day. We would wake up Christmas morning, open our presents, eat cold cereal out of small boxes, and then get dressed and go show our presents to our neighbor friends. Ann and Vern were some of those friends. On Christmas Day they invited all of the children in our neighborhood to come to their house to show them our present from Santa, and then we would each receive a gift from them, wrapped up and with our name on it. I don't remember how many children lived in our neighborhood during these years. There were eventually 10 kids in our family who may have hauled their little dolls and dump trucks across the street to show Ann and Vern. Our cousins who lived next door had 8 kids, and there were at least half a dozen other families in the neighborhood that had 4, 5, 6, or 7 kids each. So this was not a small thing for Ann and Vern to buy presents and wrap them for the neighborhood. The gift I distinctly remember receiving from Vern and Ann was a wooden paint-by-number craft set of a collie dog. I kept it in my box of treasures for many years because it was a gift from Vern and Ann. After 35 plus years, I may actually still have that wooden collie set in a box in my basement. I'll let you know if I find it someday.
As I have written of these loving neighbors, the memories have come at me through a fog, like I am waking up from a dream and trying in vain to put words to the fleeting images swirling in my sleepy head. I have a feeling I got some of this wrong.
Share Your Story
If you are reading this and have memories of Ann and Vern, please share your story. Did you ever bake with Ann? Please also correct my mis-remembered memories. Did the pink plastic key ring let us into their home, or into the home of Lonzo and Sylvia who lived directly across the street? Did you ever journey up or down the street with your Christmas presents to visit Vern and Ann, or was it just our family that visited them and received gifts from them because we lived across the street and watered their plants? (I'm pretty sure it was all the neighbor children, not just us.)
And do you remember what happened next? I know that Ann and Vern both passed away, but I don't remember when that was, or who passed away first, and whether one of them sadly lived alone in that house for a while without the other. ... I just know that I got married and moved away, and when I returned home 6 years later to live in my parents basement with my two little boys, a little boy my oldest son's age was living with his family in Ann and Vern's house across the street. And the huge HUGE evergreen tree was gone. And so were Ann and Vern.
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