First memories of summer lemonade and cookies

Preface: This is from my childhood memoir from 1950 to 1964 when my parents, Bill and Anne Haug, owned a bar on Bigfork’s Electric Avenue. 

We moved into our new, nearly completed house in the fall of 1950, shortly after my second birthday. The only memory that I have of that move is an indistinct image of my unsure steps, tottering along a plank walking-path braced above the newly finished oak floors, and wondering if I fell off the plank, would I be stuck to the floor forever. My first real memory of our new house comes in the hot August of 1951, when my Dad was building the unattached garage. I was almost 3.

I had gotten a doll buggy for Christmas. I used it like a grocery cart, filling it with cookies, dried apricots, and other miscellaneous items, including an occasional stuffed animal and a blanket or two. I got an idea. My Mom had made some lemonade, tart-sweet with real lemons, just that morning. I went into the kitchen and got Mom’s beautiful china pitcher, the one with delicate roses on an ivory background, and gilt edge along the top. I filled it with lemonade, and put it into the doll buggy along with two glasses and some cookies and a tray. I wheeled the buggy out to the driveway and parked it in front of the garage door. I put the tray over the cart part of the buggy, a sort of table on wheels, and placed the pitcher, glasses, and cookies on the tray.

My dad was up on the roof, pounding new asphalt roofing in the hot sun. “Daddy, Daddy, I got lemonade. Come get some.” The hammering stopped. “What?” he called.  “Come down Daddy. I got lemonade.” He climbed down. He was in his sleeveless cotton undershirt, dirty-yellow with sweat. His greasy felt fedora tilted over his right eye. “What have we here?” he asked. I beamed with pride as he poured us each a glass. He gulped it down and asked for another, and ate a cookie. He left the empty glass on the buggy table, touched my shoulder and said thank you, then climbed back up on the roof. I left the buggy there for him and went off to play, full of happiness and the inner warmth of love.  

We often had people over for Thanksgiving dinner, usually unmarried men who frequented our bar. I always liked these dinners because I felt so grown-up, sitting at the dining table with the adults. Mom was setting the table and she wanted her china pitcher. She looked everywhere in the cupboards. When she couldn’t find it, she turned to me with a look of impatience in her eyes. “Have you seen my china pitcher?”  

With all innocence, I said “No,” not remembering the summer lemonade.  

“Are you sure?” she asked, impatiently, “Go look in your room.” I went to my room. Not there. I even went to the basement, where I often played when I couldn’t play outside. Not there either. She said, “OK, but if I find you’ve had it all along, you’re gonna get a good spanking.” I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t have it.

I don’t remember what we used instead of that pitcher, but sometime after Christmas, I was playing in the basement under the stairs. There was the doll buggy. Memory flooded back. I shrunk to the cement floor, hot with shame. When I got up the courage, I started pulling out moldy cookies, dirty blankets, sticky glasses. There was the china pitcher. At least it wasn’t broken. What to do? I didn’t want a spanking. So I took it up to the kitchen and put it way in the back corner of the lower cabinets, and never said a word.

To be continued.