Winter Is My Middle Name

Chapter 3

It was now near the end of January and my mother thought we should be getting the "January thaw" soon. She said there were always a few days when the weather would turn warm and the snow would start melting. This is not what I wanted to hear. I may have to leave for Canada soon.

When my father built the cement block foundation that we lived in, he had heard that you could get a house from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Then he found out they discontinued them. Now he was looking into all of his options. He wanted to get the house started soon because last fall when the tail end of a hurricane came through, our flat roof started leaking.

I remember the day very clearly; it was a Monday evening in October and I had gone to get my hair cut at John's Barber Shop. John had a day job and only cut hair in the evenings. I had told him I wanted to let my sideburns grow longer and not to cut them short.

"You're not going to be looking like one of those Rock and Rollers like Elvis, or one of those Beatniks! I'll trim them to the middle of your ear, the same as everyone else," he lectured me as he cut my hair.

I didn't want to resemble Elvis, but I did like the Beatnik look. But I ended up with my usual flattop haircut. John had a thin board that looked like a large wooden comb with a bubble level on it to make sure my haircut was straight and level. I looked like I was in the army at basic training.

My mother had told me to come straight home after getting my haircut because there was a storm coming. As I left the shop I noticed the sky was a pea green. I had never seen it that color before. The wind was blowing violently, the trees were bending over and the few remaining leaves were blowing off them. The wind was picking up the leaves and dirt, and they were swirling up into small cyclones. I started running and it started to rain, then it came down in buckets. I was soaked by the time I got in the door.

As I ran inside I could see my father running through the rooms with buckets and bowls yelling, "Blimey, there's another leak. Fiddlesticks! Here's another." There were buckets, pans, cans and bowls everywhere with water dripping into them. My mother and father spent the whole week emptying all those containers. I could not remember it raining for such a long period of time. I couldn't go outside until Friday evening when it finally stopped raining. That was the longest time I had ever spent indoors. I hate rain, there is no worse feeling than getting drenched in the rain.

That was when my father said we could not spend another year in that foundation. There was an ad in the newspaper from a local contractor that said they would build the shell of the house and the homeowner could finish the inside. He had called them and they were coming to talk about it.

I was in my bedroom playing with my Robin Hood Castle set when there was a knock at the door and a guy in a suit was let into the house. I heard them talking about different things, but my father kept saying, "Now, I am just looking into this and I am not going to make a decision yet. There are a few more people I want to talk to first. So I don't want you to start on this yet."

The guy in the suit replied, "If you hear anything on the roof, it will just be the birds." And then he left.

The next morning we were all awakened by loud noises and scraping sounds on the roof. My father yelled, "Fiddlesticks! That's not birds!" and ran outside to find a few men unloading wood onto our foundation roof to start putting up the shell of the house! He ran back inside and called the guy in the suit and told him, "Get your birds off my roof, now!"

That spring after the weather broke and most of the snow had melted, we took a drive to New Alexandria where they had model homes on display. My father kept talking about Lincoln Homes. I knew Lincoln grew up in a log cabin, so I thought these must be log homes. That would be great. I would really like living in a log house.