My mother, father and I always slept in the front parlor over Aunt May's parlor. There was a fireplace on one side but I never remember having a fire in it. There were two beds in it - a double bed where my mother and father slept and a single bed for me. The room was papered with wallpaper that had wild pink roses with lots of thorns on the stems. I used to lie in bed looking at the roses. If we needed to get up in the night we had to use the chamber pot. I really developed the ability to hold it well so I went to the bathroom at night and again the next morning when we went down stairs for breakfast.

     The bathroom was kind of an inside outhouse. It was in a shed off the hall that went from Grandma's into Aunt May's. It was a two holer for the adults and on the side were two little holes for the kids to use. I can remember feeling very grown up when In could use the big one. Since there was no heat it was really cold in the winter. No lingering in the toilet with a good book in those days.

     Since Boxborough schools started a week before Worcester when Jr. had Mrs. Adams for a teacher, she let me go to school for that week with her. Mrs. Adams lived in the house just above the farm. I would go up to her house and ride to school with her. Jr. got to ride on the school bus. Also he didn't really want to acknowledge he even knew me. One year I wore one of my last year's school dresses because Mother wanted to save the new ones for starting in my own school. One of the girls came up to me and fingered the material and then said, "You're not supposed to wear your best dress to school." When I told her it was just last year's school dress she couldn't get over it.

     One summer there was an argument going all that year among the Smith boys, Waldron and Prescott, Bud, Doc, Jr., Lucy, who lived in Mrs. Robbins winter house every summer, and which every hired man we had that year heard about what the difference was between a calf and a heifer. There was a great deal of good-natured arguing with every one trying to prove his point. The Boxboro Library didn't have much to go on so Waldron Smith went into Boston to the Public Library there to prove his stand. They never did settle anything and at the end of summer they each still had their own idea about which was which.

     One year I had to have my tonsils out. We went in to Harvard Center and Dr. Royal took them out in his nurse's kitchen. They used her kitchen table as the operating table. Uncle Harry's oldest daughter, Mary, had her tonsils out too. I was only seven or eight but Mary was older and had a harder time that I did. We had ether and we were both pretty sick that day. I remember the days after the operation we stayed at the farm and the boys made ice cream every day for me because I wasn't supposed to eat anything rough. I also lost six pounds in weight and they all kidded me that my tonsils weighed three pounds apiece.

 

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