Break the Rules

Charlotte (Mamaw) and her sister Pete

I need to make a correction regarding the first post. Mamaw told me that she wasn’t naked up on the second floor, that it was actually the first floor. They only went out on the second story roof, she said, to turn the beans they were drying out. So the more appropriate title for the previous post should be ‘Out on the Porch’ rather than ‘Up on the Roof’. But the correction made me start thinking about the house itself. Mamaw said the house in Butler, Maryland was great big, so big that it housed three families. 

When most people think of Maryland, they picture Baltimore and imagine life in the city. Although Butler is not far from Baltimore, it is much more rural, probably even more so in the 40's and 50's. Still today, there are only a few businesses in Butler, including a saddlery. The rest is residential and farmland. However, Butler was home for some of the wealthiest people in the state during that time, like the Worthington family whose manor is now a golf club. The people of Butler had to travel to nearby towns like Cockeysville and Reisterstown to see any action. It's fun to watch Mamaw and Papaw talk together about their hobbies and habits while they lived there. They laughed back and forth together when were talking about it last and we pulled up a google map so they could show me the area and the nearby towns. 

One winter Mamaw and her sisters, Frances and  Pete, decided they were going to go ice skating. Pete dressed up in layers and layers of clothes, including their father’s cowboy boots. Pete went up ahead of Mamaw and fell through the ice.

Mamaw said she could see her under the ice, so she grabbed a stick and started breaking up the ice, then got down on her elbows and pulled her up. Attached to the backside of her pants, was a very large snapping turtle or cooter as they call them in these parts. Mamaw said, “Daddy’s going to kill you for ruining his boots!” The cooter held on to the seat of her pants all the way back to the house. Once inside, they asked the mother of one of the other families in the house for help. Mrs. Cardwell, Mamaw said, liked to drink and run around with men. However, she must have also been pretty efficient at handling cooters. She promptly cut a hole in the seat of Pete’s pants, chopped the turtle’s head off, and ate him for dinner.

On another occasion, Mamaw and her sisters were playing hockey outside. Mamaw hit Frances with her hockey stick and broke her arm. When they got home and told A.C. what happened, he beat them all for "playing in shit", not knowing that hockey was actually a sport.

While living in the same area, Mamaw said she frequently skipped school. She said she hooked over 40 times one year. On one occasion, Mamaw talked Pete into hooking with her and they found an old empty house. When they went inside, everything in the house had been chopped up with an ax. The furniture, the walls, everything. While they were inside, they heard footsteps on the stairs. Mamaw bolted. She said she passed whatever it was on the steps as she flew out the door. I asked her, “What was it?” She said, “A ghost!” They ran out into the woods where they found a suitcase they believed was full of money. She said it was heavy, but when they opened it up it was full of Three Musketeers candy bars.

Today it is unimaginable for a couple of preteen girls to be on the loose, hooking school for more than 40 days in a school year. I am not condoning juvenile delinquency of any sort, but in those times there was a sense of freedom and adventure that became extinct somewhere in the last several decades. These bits of rebellion, inspired by curiosity, seem to be absent in younger generations. We only want to be Explorers of the Internet, not frozen lakes and abandoned houses.

Back in the early seventies, my grandparents had moved to Hildebran, NC and the house they were living in had burned down, on Thanksgiving Day to be exact. It was a large, green two-story house built in the early 1900’s in conjunction with a nearby mill village. There were stories about the house being haunted. All of my aunts and uncles, as well as my grandparents, have their own ghost stories about that house. After it burned down, my cousins and I would sneak in there to play, even though we were really not allowed to. Looking back, Mamaw always knew where we were and what we were doing. She must have been indulging us and letting us feel like we were sneaking around breaking the rules. I was very young at the time, and the clearest memory I have is of a time I was playing in there with my cousins Stacey and Timmy. We were playing house and we designated a corner of the house ‘the bathroom’, complete with a bucket to piss in when we had to go.

Stacey and I got into an argument that apparently got pretty heated, because Timmy felt like he needed to intervene by coming up behind me and dumping that pot of piss over my head. One of the many times in my life I must have screamed, “MAMAW!!!!”

In the grand scheme of things, we have down some downright mean things to each other. But we explored together, we broke some rules together, and we fought. But we made up and in the long run we were together when it mattered. When Timmy passed unexpectedly in his early twenties, we grieved together. When the old house was finally torn down, I think we all felt it in our bones. You never know when things will change, fade, or be gone altogether. So go skate on some thin ice, go explore an abandoned house, trespass (within reason, haha), go on an adventure, put yourself in a position to get a snapping turtle stuck to your ass. Make those memories with the people you love so that you have those reminders of better times when you need them.