My Life in the Little Brown House, part 25: Vacant Lots

To the west of the little brown house were some vacant lots that generally grew to tall grass during the summer months. Eventually whoever owned them didn’t keep the taxes paid and my father (I think after the move back to the little brown house from the farm) bought the lots adjoining the pasture and house lot on the west on tax sale. Indeed he bought the lots extending further south to the street that ran east and west along the north side of the city park. One reason he had for this purchase was to control the quack grass that infested the lots and which kept invading the west side of his property (actually it may still have been in my mother’s name only — a change made in the depths of the Depression as a precautionary move).

These lots tended to be wet and soggy — generally they were at a somewhat lower elevation that even the lot on which the little brown house stood, which had some problems in that respect. During wet rainy periods there was always the problem in the little brown house of water backing up from the basement drain and my parents had a little plug that would be place on the entrance to the drain to keep this from occurring. The lots to the west of the house were drained by some tile, but the inlet may have been plugged, or the tile may have become imperative for any one of a number of reasons. On one occasion (so I am told) after my parents moved back to Gowrie, my uncle Carl took it upon himself to look into the situation and was poking around out in the lots trying to locate where the tile was (I guess by prodding a stick down through the wet, easily penetrated earth). My father, always in sort of an uneasy truce with my uncle (particularly after the time on the farm when he worked for my uncle until he was employed by the county treasurer’s office) was incensed at this intervention, beneficial as it might have been, and there was an altercation of sorts, with my uncle retreating form the scene.

The difference between the two men resembled the difference in psychological character between the Strands and the Petersons. The Strand side was less intense and demanding, the Peterson side with its ties to the Seashore character was in a way almost mentally unstable — certainly almost neurotic at times. Both sides shared a common ethnic heritage, for example as to religion, but the Seashore side exhibited a fanaticism in religion that I feel was lacking on the Strand side. I have always been grateful that my genes contained the Strand characteristics to counteract the heritage from my Seashore ancestors.

I recall playing as a child out in the vacant lots to the west of the house. As the ground was low and swampy there grew in some spots tall reed-like plants with a rather sturdy main stem. The remains of these plants when dead and dry served as a raw material for various “cop and robber” games and I remember indulging in these with some of the boys of my age who lived in the general neighborhood. In later years after the return from the farm, my parents no longer kept a cow (or I think chickens for that matter) and the pasture and vacant lots were plowed up and my father grew field corn on them. Vincent was farming by then and I suppose he provided the plowing, field preparation and planting but my father did the cultivation and the weeding. I wonder if he didn’t pick it by hand also. Somewhere in the collection of photographs I have is a picture of him standing at the edge of the cornfield, just north of the little brown house, with the corn towering over his rather stooped, thin figure. I don’t know how long he kept up this activity; at some time in the early to mid 1950s his Parkinson’s disease had progressed to the point where he could no longer do gardening work. From that time on he was more or less housebound.

























Clarence in front of cornfield north of the little brown house