My mom passed away one year ago and I’ve been slowly making my way through the photographs she left behind. This has been wonderful, although mixed with the certain knowledge that the owl of minerva does indeed take flight at dusk, that we only acquire wisdom at the moment it’s too late to do anything about it. One of the great blessings of this process is that my mother not only labeled but also annotated many of the pictures, often noting what I good little girl I was. (Editor’s Note: I still am!) I was taken aback, however, by a series of pictures of her and her rascally friends unexpectedly up on top of a house sometime in the mid-1940s. Here she is, obviously full of mischief:
This seized my attention for a particular reason. When I was a (good) little girl, the house my family lived in was put together in such a way as to make it easy for an energetic lass to scale the side and get up on the roof. Every time she caught me my mother yelled, vigorously, insisting that my recklessness would lead directly to pain for me and inconvenience for her when she would inevitably be forced to drive me to the hospital. (This warning was not completely without merit, by the way.)
So you can see why I would be surprised to catch her up there herself.
Must be something in the gene pool.
Keep climbing, y’all.
Roof of Jones?
My mother told a tale of getting a phone call from our across-the-street neighbor, who asked “Did you know the baby is on the roof?”
They had left the extension ladder up, leaning against scaffolding for some kind of work on a dormer, and apparently I was up on the scaffolding.
I never heard a specific age associated with the story, but it was always “baby”, which I’ve always assumed was quite young.
Keep climbing…
Roof of Brown. And we’re kindred spirits, Grungy.
Must have been pre-Mike, if you were the “baby.”
Indeed.
No telling if it was during Ike’s first or second term.
Apparently, the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree…….or house!
lol yes, it seems to be true.
Do you suppose your mother was speaking from personal experience?
At this point nothing would surprise me!
That was a beautiful post! Full of love. Made my day today.
When my wife was a toddler, her mother saw her diaper-clad bottom disappearing over the top of the fence of their new house the first day they moved in. She was a climber and explorer from an early age. And your mom was adorable!