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The reflections on “Toxic Childhoods,” the ExchangeEveryDay story for April 6, 2007, are a glimpse of a New England “kidhood” and what it was like for a young child living at the end of the Great Depression and throughout World War II, two events that carried economic and political hardships for the nation.

Sue Palmer describes today’s world for adults as “an age of comfort, convenience, and promise,” but not a great place for children. I lived my first 10 years in Clinton, Maine, a town with a population in the high three figures and with limited comforts, few conveniences, and promises carried from earlier decades of the 20^th century. I reflect on one factor from Palmer’s list that affect a child’s development: The amount of time spent with adults who talk to them and the way they talk.

My parents and I (no pets) lived in a frame house with running water (the house across the street and others nearby had a hand-pump in the kitchen and outside toilets in the barn connected to the house), a coal stove in the living room, and a wood stove in the kitchen. Fortunately, heat rose to the bedrooms on the second floor. Remember, Maine winter temperatures go well below zero for days at a time, with a lot of snow, and snow weeks rather than snow days. We used folded newspapers to fill in spaces in windows and doors to keep the heat in. Carrying wood from the shed outside the kitchen, bringing hods of coal from the cellar, stuffing newspapers in cracks to keep out the wind provided opportunities to sing songs, repeat nursery rhymes, and carry on conversations.

We did laundry once a week in an electric wringer washing machine using rainwater from a cistern in the cellar (unfinished) heated on the kitchen stove. Wet clothes were hung on clotheslines in the backyard with clothespins without springs. In winter, the clothes froze hard as plywood. Everything had to be ironed �" first, the dry clothes were sprinkled with water, then wrapped in an old towel and stored just outside the kitchen door. The attached room was not heated, but it did not freeze either. When the clothes were evenly damp, my mother ironed them smooth with irons heated on the wood stove. One iron reheated while the other was used until it cooled off.

Throughout this and other household tasks, my mother and I talked. Sometimes, snippets of those conversations come back to me. Mostly, I remember the feeling of helping sort dirty clothes into white, light, and dark piles, of handing clothespins to my mother (until I got tall enough to hang the clothes myself, but by then we lived in Homestead, Florida, where the blazing sun kept the clothes either dazzling white or faded out). I learned to recycle in great depth, but that is another story.

To this day, I remember the smell of soap powder (Ivory Snow), clean clothes fresh from the outdoors, and the occasional smell of scorched fabric. I take clothes from the gas dryer, rarely iron anything, and return them to their drawers and closets. Similar actions, but, so different. Not a lot of conversation goes on around an automatic washer and dryer running early in the morning or late at night.

To view the the responses to the ExchangeEveryDay of April 6 that Edna refers to above, go to “Toxic Childhoods”

Contributed by Edna Ranck

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