Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [37]
The house was now officially bigger than the barn. We treated it as a combination amusement park and gymnasium. Mom had a no-running-inside rule, but beyond that she pretty much turned us loose. We tore apart the couch and used the cushions to build forts, and we used a cardboard refrigerator box to construct a submarine in the living room. Donning the flippers and snorkel masks Grandma Perry brought back from her vacation in Aruba, we’d belly-crawl out through the imaginary pressurized porthole and frog-kick across the linoleum, scanning the murky depths with the miniature flashlights that same grandma put in our Christmas stockings (Grandma Perry ignored the No Christmas rule and Mom and Dad let us). Mom kept the house stocked with art supplies, and often mixed up finger paint, which we swabbed across giant chunks of waxed paper torn from one of the rolls Dad got at surplus when he worked at the Port Edwards mill. I sat for hours at the play table looking at the bird feeder outside the picture window, drawing blue jays and evening grosbeaks, with Mom’s copy of Birds of North America as my guide. We had a Visible Man (his halves held together with rubber bands) and we studied his visible liver, but like most kids, we were mostly interested in stripping out his skeleton, as it reminded us of Halloween. We used our Tupperware Build-O-Fun kit to cobble up Dr. Seuss–like vehicles, and passed snowbound winter mornings inhaling the scent of wood smoke from our Temp-O-Matic Woodburner set. When the wood-burning got tedious, we would “accidentally” jab the red-hot Wonder Pen into the Styrofoam packing and sniff the poisonous yellow smoke. We dumped out our Lincoln Logs, strewed our Tinkertoy Master Builder set from kitchen to porch, and used Mom’s saucepans for army helmets. On winter nights when it got dark early Mom let us turn out all the lights in the house and play hide-and-seek. I remember the giggly-scaredy feeling of trying to hold super-still when you were just about to be found, and the clatter of pots and pans as one of my siblings bailed out of the cupboard and made a beat-feet break for the in-free post.
When you grow up following a religion called the Truth, surrounded by the friends, and guided by the workers, some austerity is a given. At the top of the list, our church forbade the possession of televisions, which were condemned as the leaky end of Satan’s sewer pipe. Prodigal though I am, I largely retain the sentiment, although honesty compels me to admit this has not stopped me from participating in the medium at both ends of said pipe, and compared with high-speed Internet, the boob tube has all the turpitude of worn-out View-Masters. Despite leaving the church in my twenties, I went for years without a television. When I got married there was backsliding, as my wife’s dowry included a combination VCR/TV unit with rabbit ears that pull in four fuzzy channels. I justify its presence by citing PBS, but given half an hour, the snowy Seinfeld rerun triumphs every time. We go through fits of self-revulsion during which we banish the set to the closet and pull it out only to let Amy watch The Magic School Bus or a Lightnin’ Hopkins documentary on DVD (“Mom!” she said when Anneliese walked in the room, “Lightnin’ is dead!”), but then Anneliese has another couple of sleepless pregnant nights or I am feeling sorry for myself over some deadline or other, and whammo, it’s Scrubs at midnight. By the time you read this the new digital format will be in play and our set will be worthless. We have sworn a solemn vow not to purchase a converter box and can use your prayers in