We only lived in Point Arena for one year, but as we discussed it, we realized that we have more fun memories from there than any place else we lived.
Dad was stationed there temporarily, and Mom and Dad managed to arrange for us to rent an old high school while we were there. As far as we can remember, it had 2 floors. Our livingroom/familyroom/kitchen/diningroom were all the room you came into when you entered the front door. The front door was actually at the back of the house. The street ran behind the house. There was a parking lot in front, or at least a fairly large cement slab.
On one side of the back yard there was a large hedge. We remember it being about six or eight feet high. It was mostly hollow inside, so Anne and Lynn used to love to go there and hang out. It was like a secret clubhouse. They would spend hours there, talking and playing. The only drawback were the ticks they frequently got from the hedge!
Inside, of course the house was more like a school building than a house. It was rather square, and kind of divided up evenly in the square. The bathroom, to the rear of the front room, on the northwest side had several stalls for the toilets and a few sinks. Obviously, there was no bathtub.
Upstairs, Lynn and Paul had the n/w corner room, and we had the s/e room. The rooms seemed huge to us because we were little, but we remember our single beds seeming very small in the big rooms. As far as we remember there was nothing else in the rooms except a potbelly stove that burned kerosene. They didn't exactly burn clean and we remember them occasionally blowing smoke rings.
As we describe all the lack of conveniences, it sounds like we really lived in the 'olden days'. Actually, it is amazing to us that Mom was willing to put up with all the lack of conveniences that would have been available in the 1950's. We had a huge woodburning stove for Mom to cook on. Lynn used to have to help chop the wood. Since there was no shower or tub, and no hot water, we bathed in a big washtub, and Mom had to heat the water on the woodburning stove. So we bathed oldest to youngest, so Carma got the dirtiest and coldest water to bathe in. Good thing she was little.
We had no refrigerator, but since it was so cold, and there was no central heat, we used the n/w corner room as the refrigerated room. Our food stayed very cold in there. It was also our storage room, as it had shelving against the wall going all the way to the ceiling. Arlene found that the Christmas presents were stored in there, at the very top, and managed to scale the shelves to peek in the box to see what she was getting. To her dismay, it was a make up doll instead of the baby doll she had asked for. What disappointment! But she was glad to know in advance so she could hide her disappointment on Christmas.
Carma-memory of poker and foreign coin - insert here
The rooms we didn't live in were locked up and used for storage. But being children, we had to see if we could get in them. We went into one room from the outside window, and it had school auditorium chairs, a large clown face that would be used as a target for bean bag toss, and in the room on the east side of the bathroom, we found a couple of coffins! That was enough to scare some of us out of those rooms for good!
Anne thought the house was haunted. We remember hearing scary noises, and thought all our lives that Lynn had been trying to scare us. It worked. But Lynn said one night he was hearing scary sounds - like a high etherial sound and Dad went outside and looked around. He found some gypsies had camped outside and were probably playing the violin. He made them leave, and that ended that sound.
There were five of us kids, ranging in age from about 12 to about 5 years old. Another testament to Mom's patience was that we remember running around the dining table endlessly. When anyone had run around so long they had to rest, they would duck under the table. Not many mothers would tolerate that kind of rambunctiosness for very long without going crazy. We loved it.
Of course the stairs were another thing we loved about the house because of the banister. We loved sliding down it, and didn't wait until the trip was necessary. We would run up over and over and slide down it. Back then little girls wore dresses, so our underpants were constantly dirty from rubbing the well-used handrail of the stairs. Mom said she thought she would never get our underpants clean! We loved sliding down the banister!
One day when Lynn was out with a friend, they found a skunk and decided to throw rocks at it. They did manage to hit it, and stunned it. They went and looked at it, and then went on their way to town. They went into a store, and the first person they came to exclaimed how bad they smelled and they were told to leave. He went home, and Mom tried everything to get rid of the smell. Finally the only thing that worked was to bury the clothes.
Point Arena is a coastal town, so we went to the coast frequently. There aren't really beaches there, however. It is mostly a rocky coastline, and we loved hiking all over the rocks. We always went with Dad and we would wait for a wave to recede, and then run to the closest rocks. We would stand there, looking at all the sea life, and then when the waves went out again, we'd run to the next set of rocks. The trick was always to end the day and go home before the tide came in so much that the waved didn't recede far enough for us to get back to shore.
The waves were very dangerous. They were large, and there was always an undertow, so swimming was not an option. Once Lynn got dragged out by a wave, and Dad thought he had lost his son for good. Fortunately he was able to save him. The same happened another time with Carma. We were very blessed to be protected while there.
One of the reasons to go to the beaches was to collect muscles and abalone. The abalone shells are absolutely beautiful, and Dad thought we should all taste the abalone. We took it home and Mom pounded and pounded for hours to try to tenderize it, but it still was like chewing shoe leather. Mom put it in a creamed sauce and Dad made sure we all tasted it.
The other great thing about going to the beach was buying fresh peas in the pod for 10 cents/pound, and picking wild blackberries. We would eat as many as we picked, but still take home enough for Mom to make several pies. It is amazing that she was able to bake them in a woodburning oven. They were wonderful and that's where Anne learned to make great pies!
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Some added color here: we weren't just climbing rocks; we were climbing along the cliff face where the waves & tide would crash against. It WAS a race to get from one ledge to the next before the next wave smashed in, and it WAS often a real race to get back across the cliff face before the tide actually got too high to get back to shore. I don't think mom ever knew how dangerously dad played with us. I do remember getting swept into the tide one day when we'd been on the beach, but mom had tied a long rope around my waist, plus, dad ran after me in his "good Sunday shoes", ruining them, to save me.
OH goodness, the world was our playground, it seems, almost every where we lived.
On or way to or from the shore, we'd buy big grocery bags full of fresh peas from road-side stands for 10 cents a pound. We'd go home and dump them out on the large living room table in a huge pile, and just sit and split the pods and eat those peas. I only remember mom actually getting to cook some peas once or twice.
Lynn used to love mixing up a cake mix, then just eating it out of the bowl.
We'd sit in his & Paul's room and play poker and/or 21. He had some foreign coins we could wager with. The 21, he said, helped our adding skills.
And we can't forget the rec room! It seemed the large3st of the upstairs rooms! It had room for a ping pong table, a dart board, and room, including a high enough ceiling, to play jump rope.
Anne used to write plays, which we 3 sisters put on, and invited neighbors to come and see it, for only two cents a piece.
Point Arena is where Paul was coasting down the hill into town on his bike, and his front wheel hit a rock, throwing him head first over the handle bars, landing on and splitting his chin. He chipped a chunk off a front tooth which I don't think he got capped until he was well into adulthood.
When Dad and Lynn took the abalones out of their shells, we thought the abalones were screaming. Turns out that Dad and Lynn screamed so we would think it was the abalone.
Dad caught a baby octopus and had it in a bucket. He was trying to do something with it, and ended up with suction-cup marks all up and down his arms. I'll have to ask Carma whatever happened to that octopus. I hope Dad returned it to the water.
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