Eighty Memories for Eighty Years: # 1 The House on Fourth Street

... no little girl looked more like her dad than I did ...

I have early memories about living in a white picket-fenced house at 1419 6th A St North West.

From there the milkman would deliver to a number of his customers, up and down the street.

The house isn’t as important as the memory of watching a horse pull the milk wagon come down the street and stop at our house.

... Arta, circa 1945 ...

The horse had on blinders which my mother may have called blinkers, horse tack to prevent the animal from seeing what was behind him.

I used to study the mouth of the horse, its teeth and especially the sticky secretions that hung down from its nostrils.

The whinny of the horse frightened me, but that element of fear must be what drove me to sit on the steps day after day and watch until the milkman came to deliver the milk.

My Grandmother Blanche Scoville lived at the bottom of the hill on Memorial Drive. My mother would walk us from 12th Avenue to the brow of the hill, and then we would follow a dirt path that zig-zagged down to the Bow River and then over to grandmothers. After a good rain rivulets of water would widen small trenches that cut through that walking path. My mother would hold my hand as we would jump over them, when the hills was drier and we were on our way to grandmothers. That fear of leaping over seeming chasms hasn’t gone away.

... behind our 4 A St home ...
Note the fabulous ruffle down the front of my mother's dress
And can my father's tie really have been that short!

Living in this house is the first place where I practised my religion, in this case what I had been taught to believe about praying to God – explicitly, that he would answer my prayers.

One day, the test came when I asked my mother for 5 cents to go to 16th Avenue and buy an ice cream cone at Jenkins, the corner store.

My mother said no. Not to let that be taken as the final answer, I remember kneeling down and asking my Heavenly Father to send me an ice cream cone. I was mystified when the day went by and no ice cream cone appeared.

Two no’s.

The second one really hurt.

Arta