Point Arena

Out of all the cities we lived in Point Arena was probably the most fun place to live. It just seemed magical that we got to live in an abandoned school house. It was the only time we lived in a multi-story house. The rooms were enormous. Since there was no central heat, we had coal oil stoves brought in to each room, which made smoke rings as they puffed out the heat.

I remember Mom occasionally finding a bowl of cake batter under Lynn's bed in his room. He loved to eat it raw and would mix it up and snack on it through the week.

Anne started her acting and directing career while we lived there. She would write plays and direct us in them. I can almost remember the plot of one of them about some girls traveling by train somewhere? We would hang some blankets from a line hung across the middle of the room and put chairs on one side for the audience. We even charged admission, like a nickel each, but the amazing thing is that friends and neighbors would actually come and clap at the end.

Of course the most common memory is of the banister, as in "sliding down the". I guess the girls always wore dresses, cause I remember Mom saying she thought she would never get the panties clean, until the banister was finally fully cleaned and polished (by our panties as we slid).

We had no fridge, but it was so cold there that we kept all the food in one room that wasn't heated, and kept quite nicely.

We also had no bathtub, because a schoolhouse wouldn't have a bathtub. So Mom heated water in big pots on a wood-burning stove and poured it into a wash tub, where we each took our turns in the livingroom. I don't remember Mom ever complaining about the back-woods-ness of our living situation.

I remember the huge hedge in our back yard where we loved to climb inside and hide. It was a like a secret hideaway. I didn't know before that a hedge is mostly hollow inside. It was so fun to climb on the branches and get up inside, until Anne and Lynn got ticks. That ended that.

The back yard was like that back yard of any school - mostly cement, but it was very uneven cement and lots of fun to play on. There was a water tower nearby that we liked to climb, but I was the most chicken for how high I would go on it. We also liked to sneak into the locked upstairs rooms via the fire escape, and peruse the contents stored there. They had typical school stuff stored there - auditorium chairs, a big clown face for bean bag toss, and stuff and stuff. In one room on one of the floors,Lynn found a coffin. From then on, I didn't go into any of the rooms. I was really scared of that coffin, and who might be in it -dead or un-dead.

Since Point Arena was a little town, the school was very small, with not enough teachers or students to have a full class for each grade, so I was put in a combination 2nd/3rd grade class. I was in 2nd grade, but I loved to listen to the teacher instruct the 3rd graders and I felt very smart and always thought I was ahead of other kids of the world for that situation. It surely made me smarter cause I listened in on the 3rd grade lessons.

Wild blackberries grew abundantly up there, and we used to go pick them with Dad, and Mom would make pies and jam. It was wonderful. We used to try to swim off the coast, but the waves are very dangerous up there, and one time, Carma was almost drown because of the undertow. We used to walk on the tide pools and look at all the life there. Sometimes we found abalone and brought it home. One time Mom tried to cook it. She pounded the thing forever, but it never go ttender. I don't think anyone ate it but Dad. He firmly believed in trying everything.