Bluefield, Bramwell, Boston

 My brother's birth halted my parents divorce.

We rented my grandmother's house and headed to Bluefield, West Virginia where my father had just bought an Underwood Typewriter franchise.

My mother took one look at the school system, declared she would not be party to adding an ignoramus to the citizen pool and found a private school for the second half of first grade.

Thanks to my grandmother's drilling, I knew the 12 tables backwards and forwards, my spelling was the best it would ever be again, thanks to my grandmother playing anagrams. I was thrilled with the reading matter about other countries, learned about silk worms and Roman cultures all before Easter of first grade. It was far superior to the "See Dick run, run Dick run." 

The school was three hours day and was supplemented with a ruler for wrong answers.

Despite a beautiful house and country club membership, my parents marriage did not improve. My mother was always that damned yankee and she didn't want to be anything else.

My mother came home one day and announced the house would be sold and we were moving back to Reading, Massachusetts. Seems a man had come up to her and said, "I know who you are. You're Jimmy Boudreau's girl friend and that's Jimmy's car." My mother replied. "I'm Jimmy Boudreau's wife and this is my car."

In Massachusetts we had lived with my grandmother and had only rented the house. My mother evicted the tenants the following month, sold the West Virginia House and rented a house in Bramwell until we could drive north.

I didn't realize it at the time but what she rented was an old plantation. There was a brick courtyard with a statue/horse reins black jockey (certainly not acceptable today), a huge house with columns, a lawn sloping down to to the Bluestone River.

We were in the former slave quarters, a vine-covered brick building. The only furniture were beds, tables and wooden chairs. "It's temporary," my grandmother said. "Less than a month."

It turned out to be less than a week. The fire department showed up to put out yet another fire in the main house. As the chief told my mother the owners often set fire to the place when drinking. Although the daughter of the house who was three years older than I was tried to keep me out on that lawn, my mother sussed out what was happening.

I have no idea how my father managed to get our Massachusetts tenants to move so fast.

The next morning we were on the road. My baby brother and I were installed in the back seat. As we were loading the car, my mother noticed my face was swollen as a basketball. The leaves on the wall of the slave quarters were poison ivy.

 

I think the trip took three days. I remember stopping in New Jersey at a motel/restaurant. There was television with Gene Autry. At that point the TV signals were not able to broadcast into the South so it was almost three years since I had seen TV.

We breezed through Boston to Reading. I thought I'd like to look at the city, but I was not going to get a chance to do that until I was an adult.

Our house was like I remembered it. My father had seen to it the furniture was not only back, but back where it had been. 

Two weeks later I started third grade. I had tested for fifth grade, but since I was the smallest in third grade, my mother felt size-wise and socially I should stay with my proper grade.

I was so bored. I no longer could write in script and had to print covering two lines. Reading matter was far less interesting.

After Valentine's Day I had measles, mumps and then a low grade temperature for six weeks. The school work I had completed down south. I did not want to go back.

Solution?

Rub poison ivy on my face? I had blisters that were up to an inch long and a quarter inch high.

Stupid move. My punishment was karma. Instruction on the lotion had not been given. Instead to diluting it 10x my mother applied it full length. 

Agony.

When my mother asked for a renewal of the prescription, the doctor realized what happened he was at the house within 15 mins. He gave us all the lotions recommended by a leading Boston dermatologist. It was two years before the marks totally disappeared. I've never tanned properly.

I never confessed to my mother that I had given myself poison ivy. I suspect if there is a life after death and she and I meet again I still wouldn't.