1940s • Chico ~ Every summer Mom took the kids to visit her mother, Nellie Chatfield, who still lived in the two-story house on Boucher where my mother grew up. Chico was even hotter than Sonora during the summer, in the 100s every day. To cool off the family took daily picnics to Bidwell Park and swam in the icy Sycamore Pool where Betty dog-paddled in her favorite navy-blue bathing suit with the pink palm tree. The pool was built in 1929, the Big Chico Creek flowing through the cement sides of the 700-foot-long encasement. Grassy slopes lined the pool where picnics were laid out under towering white-barked sycamores and majestic valley oaks planted long before by General John Bidwell. My mother daydreamed about swimming in the Olympics as she free-styled the length of the pool. Instead, she married a man who was afraid of water and couldn’t swim a stroke. As a youngster, Mom spent her summers fishing in Big Chico Creek, whiling away the days on the rocks under the giant trees, her toes and line dangling in the water. She used open safety pins for hooks. It didn’t matter if she caught anything; she simply liked fishing.
Mom was an angler, hiking to fishing holes with her kids; her wicker creel strapped over one arm, her rod and reel in the other. She baited her children’s hooks with worms for perch and bluegill. For trout, she used pink salmon eggs which Betty always tasted and wondered what people saw in them. Betty would eat anything. My siblings loved going to Chico. Not only did the swimming and hiking entice them, but Grandma Nellie also possessed a collection of books piled in every room. She had western genre about Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, places where she and her family had lived. Books by Booth Tarkington, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and others by Owen Wister and McLeod Rainey. The Magnificent Andersons, The Virginian, West of the Pecos, and Riders of the Purple Sage were her favorites. She and her two sisters exchanged books as Christmas gifts, signing the inside pages. Larry and Carleen spent hours in the parlor, poring over the dusty volumes of The World Encyclopedia—bought from a door-to-door salesman—reading them from cover to cover; Pluto, the ninth planet, wasn’t even listed yet. Claudia devoured Grandma’s twenty years of yellow-covered National Geographic. She’d never been anywhere and loved the pictures from everywhere. Australian pygmies and Maori tribes especially fascinated her, as did Mt. Everest and the snowcapped Himalayas. Betty read every book Grandma Nellie had. Twice.
Grandma Chatfield was a sucker for the men who came door-to-door peddling wares. She looked forward to the knocks on the door from charming salesmen who could sell anything—from The World Book to kitchen knives and Fuller brushes—especially to my grandmother.
The kids’ memories of Grandma included her one-pot dishes on the wood stove in her ivy-wallpapered kitchen, or her sitting on the screened porch in her slide rocker. As Grandpa Chatfield was off working in the rice fields, they have little recollection of him. He lived in the shed in the side yard as Grandma had banned him from the house for gambling away their Montana family ranch, a misdeed from their past that she never forgave. When he died in 1942, he was barely missed.
to be continued …
© 2017. Catherine Sevenau.
All rights reserved.
Linda Troolin says
You can sure write a story woman! Again, I have been transported back to a different time and place and made to feel as though I was part of it all. A voyeur on the sidelines perhaps but still in on the action. Nellie was a tough gal. I had never heard the part about grandpa being exiled to the shed before. OMG, she could hold a grudge. Nellie would have fit right in with my family.
Catherine Sevenau says
“I am from a long line of sharp-tongued women. From list makers, rule makers and rule breakers, from umbrage and resentment. From complaining, carping and keeping score. From they don’t speak… we don’t speak…” Lineages
Deborah Bennett says
Catherine, I am so enjoying reading the segments of Through Any Given Door as you send them. This evening it made me feel as though I was in a time back before I was born when people would eagerly anticipate the next upcoming excerpt of a novel or episode of a magazine serialization of an ongoing grand adventure.
What an absolute delight to feel the excitement and anticipation of what might come next instead of the instant gratification and everything all at once of our modern times. I am thinking that our lives are supposed to have that excitement and eager anticipation of what will come next without needing to know right now what that next thing will be.
Catherine Sevenau says
Deborah thank you. I wasn’t sure if offering the book as a serial would work, or if folks would have the patience or willingness to follow along. I so appreciate the feed back. Stay tuned!
James Chatfield says
Cathy, you have quite a way of telling your stories. A person can almost vision himself being there. Back in the 30s and early 40s a lot of people lived the way you said your family grew up. Fishing, having pets, growing all things needed in the gardens. I have enjoyed all your stories and look forward to more.
Catherine Sevenau says
Thanks James. The reality of a memoir is that it is not only my stories, they are everyone’s.