Monday Memories--The Stereopticon

There are so many memories in this photo I almost don't know where to begin. The room is the north living room of what had been my grandmother's house, but which was the house of my daughter's grandmother in 1973, my mother. It is my recollection that my great-grandfather purchased this property when another farmer lost it to debt, maybe in one of the late 19th century panics. He and his son Ira farmed a lot of land in the Franklin Grove-Ashton area of Lee County, Illinois. Ira died from an infected cut finger in 1908 at the Ashton farm. Around that time my grandparents who were living in Wichita, KS, lost their little baby, Oliver, at birth. Grandfather David offered them this farm if they would come back and help--he being about 80. At least that's what I have in my head. Around the same time he made significant gifts to the Brethren Church in Wichita where my grandparents worshiped.

It was an unspectacular, 8 room, boxy farm house. Grandma had it remodeled adding a huge gracious dining room, a second staircase to a lovely bedroom with a canopied balcony, a big airy kitchen with "modern" features like a built in corn cob storage for the blue and black cookstove, manual dishwasher, table with flour bins, a walk-in pantry/storage room, an upstairs servant's bedroom, plus two bathrooms, a dumbwaiter, a generator and a sink at the back door for washing up before entering the house.

By the late 1960s the house had fallen on very hard times and was almost unliveable, and when my grandparents died, my mother went to work to transform it to the house it actually had never been, and it became a family and religious retreat center. One item you can see through the windows are the grape arbors my mother rebuilt and coaxed grapes into growing again. Thus my little family traveled from Ohio and took a week's vacation there for about 10 years.

My daughter is five years old in this July 1973 photo and totally engrossed in the stereopticon my mother and her siblings had used, and which my siblings and cousins had enjoyed on the slow Sunday afternoons we had visited in the 1940s and 1950s. She's lying on the couch that my Grandma bought in the 1950s to update the look--the arms were so wide you didn't even need TV trays (there also was no TV)--with her head on the pillows her grandma made.

The little girl in the photo would still jump into my arms and sit on my hip with her long brown legs almost touching the ground. She has a band-aid on her foot from running barefoot all day, and her golden brown hair had not yet seen a scissors. She's wearing a little green and yellow nightgown I remember well, so I think it was twilight--my kids didn't run around in the morning in night clothes. From the looks of the dirt on her feet, we had probably skipped bathtime, and I'm guessing that under all that thick curly hair was a sweaty, sweet smelling, damp neck--the windows behind her are open to bring in a little air.

Ah, the Monday memories. As I was finishing this, my daughter rushed in the door to use the computer. "Oh mom, do you have a band-aid?"