The Reason To Go West...

Adjusting from having a single mom, a brother, and a maiden aunt who had always been like a second parent, to having a stepfather and several step siblings was difficult. Even so, I noticed it was much harder for my step-siblings to adjust to the new situation. Remember, they had just been through the terrible tragedy of losing their mother. She had suffered immeasurably from cancer, and had died when her last child was only four.

It was especially hard for Bonnie, who at fourteen had been very close to her mother. Bonnie had been very successful in school, but when she was needed to help with the little boys when her mother’s condition deteriorated, she had quit school and took on that task with grace and energy. In those days in Arkansas families paid all the expenses for their children to attend school. Anyone could “quit school” for any reason without consequences from the state. People also had to buy their own school supplies and books, even in elementary school. Such things were not furnished by the state as they were and are in California.

Bonnie’s fifteenth birthday was in April after her Daddy married my Mama in January. The little boys had looked to her as a mother substitute for many months before the wedding. After the wedding she was required to move to a new town, leaving all her teenage and other friends and relatives behind in Little Rock, continue to be a nanny to the little ones, keep house and cook. In the evening when her new stepmother came home from work, Bonnie still had to help with dinner, wash dishes, and get the kids ready for bed, tell them a story, and finally get to sleep.

Also, Mama was relentless in requiring a high standard of housekeeping. Aunt Berl had been the same way, keeping everything in perfect order, floors swept and mopped, dishes washed in a dishpan, rinsed, dried by hand with a dish towel, and put away in the cabinets. I helped with the night work, but I was only ten, and in the fourth grade.

Laundry, done once weekly, was a huge task, especially for a family of seven. We used a wringer washer and two No. 2 washtubs set up on chairs. That wringer washer was rolled in from the back porch and the hose set up to drain it into the kitchen sink. After filling the washer with hot water (by hand with buckets), and the two tubs with cold water (same thing, by hand with buckets), the wringer could be turned to squeeze the water out of the clothes as they were “wrung” from the soapy water in the washing machine to the first rinse tub and then the second rinse tub. Finally, laundry was hung out with clothespins on the “clothesline” out in the back yard. The clothesline was a heavy wire or rope attached between big trees and supported in the middle with a tall pole, called a clothesline pole. The clothespins were those carved wooden ones, not the spring loaded type.

Bonnie turned fifteen in April. There was a lot of tension between Mama and Bonnie. Both of them were struggling with heavy loads of responsibility, and had not found their comfort zone in this new family dynamic. Mama didn’t see Bonnie’s situation as all that bad. After all, when Mama had been fifteen, she had been required to hoe or pick cotton, depending on the season, and could only go to school when the crops were not in need of her hand. In her day, everyone who could work on the farm was a “hand.” So in Mama’s mind, house work being the lighter handed task, Bonnie wasn’t having it so bad.

Eventually the situation deteriorated to the point that Bonnie left home. Mama’s and Daddy’s relatives began to discuss the situation… and this one and that one said this and that… And finally, Daddy and Mama decided to go to California and make a brand new start with their new blended family. Bonnie stayed in Arkansas with relatives and married within a year or two.

But the move to California is another story…