Choice Morsels

Today's post is another notably amusing memory from my childhood visits to Grandma Robbins house. Our house in Indiana, where my sisters and I grew up, had windows and curtains and that was it. We'd never seen a pull-down window shade in person, but just  on cartoons where the characters were always pulling them down, then letting them snap up to roll crazily at the the top. (Amazingly, I couldn't find a single window shade gif of Looney-Toons or Tom & Jerry, pulling down window shades, though it was pretty common on those shows.  So I drew one.) But our Grandma Robbins had real window shades on her windows---the old fashioned vinyl draw-down kind with a pull-string. I recall that string had a ring on the end  that was encircled with pretty ecru colored crochet and that the shade had a floral print. I was probably trendy decorating for the early to mid-20th century.  But because my sisters and I had only ever seen window shades on cartoons, w...

Next in my series of memories about Grandma Robbins house is "Grandma's Staircase." Grandma's house in Mantorville, Minnesota was built sometime around the turn of the 20th century. It was a spacious two-story house with stairs: eighteen narrow, good quality hardwood steps that ran straight up to the second floor, with "straight" being a key word. Their upward angle was very steep, steeper then an average staircase. No carpet or covering. Just plain maple or oak wood steps worn  smooth from like 50 years of use. (It was the 60's and early 70's when we were visiting.) It wasn't like the average staircase with rails so you can see the floor below. Nope, this staircase was installed between walls. No hand-rails. I'm not even sure it was a whole 30 inches wide--maybe just 28 and the individual steps were below average width as well, so it was very easy to take them two at at time. If you needed support, you just used the wall.  N...