Once liberated from Children’s Hospital, the great joy was tottering, then walking around our rural area in my new way -- in leg irons and wooden pirate crutches! My lofty bedroom with the soaring hillside and treetop view gave way to a new bedroom downstairs looking directly at a six foot stone wall across a small back yard. Once or twice a day my mother and grandmother put me through an unpleasant series of exercises on the kitchen table. These things were unimportant compared to the joy of being outdoors again. Since there was little traffic back then, we would plod along a highway to visit my great aunt, with her lovely red cows and impressive draft horses. My great uncle, Gilbert West, ran a sawmill, among other things, and teams of horses hauled timber to be made into wooden crates. Auntie fed my little brother, Donny, and me cream puffs and fresh milk then shooed us off to the barn to play with the plentiful cats there while she, my mother and grandmother enjoyed a round of gabbing.
Auntie’s big yellow barn was where I fell in love with giant horses. Donny scampered up into the lofts, swung on the bar across the two-story-high back door, and dodged kicks from great hooves. Forced into a more conservative approach, I positioned myself in front of the cows’ window, from whence I could watch the workmen bringing in sweating teams of gentle giants, water them, remove collars, hames and harness, and walk horses ten times their own weight easily into stalls. Nobody was fat in those days, certainly never the horses. I loved to hear them crunching from the nosebags of oats they received after a day’s labor, then the rhythmic chewing on sweet hay from Auntie’s pastures. I often positioned myself in front of the cow bier, which afforded the best view of the entire barn. One cow in particular, not being into my adoration of all things equine, liked to rouse me from my observations by licking my neck and shoulder with her enormous rough tongue, reaching silently through the open space above her feed trough to surprise me on the other side of the low wall.
Bucolic though it was, this was the stuff of pleasant dreams to me during the long months of incarceration in hospitals.
To Donny, however, all this was old. His chief enjoyment, at age four, was doing a lot of things he thought I still ought to be able to -- leaping from high up on the ladder onto the floor, swinging out the back door, running in and out of a horse stall before the occupant had time to notice and kick. Then he’d come and jump around in front of me, begging me to get up and do those things with him again.
************************
************************
Donny was a towheaded toddler. My mother reported that he was a colicy baby, though he never kept his big sister awake at night. My first memory of him is when my mother and father arrived home after his birth, standing in the front door for a moment or two. On that mid-April day, Mother had on a loose bluish purple coat, her face glowing above the wiggly, swaddled bundle in her arms. Evidently this must be a small specimen of humanity and my mother seemed to think a lot of it, so I said the sensible thing:
“Can we keep him?”
She was 43 when my surprise sibling was born and from the very beginning she said he was hard for her. The refrain was often repeated.
I adored the bright little face and blue eyes turned up to mine when Donny was old enough to ramble around the woods, meadows, along Pudding Brook and over to visit Grammie in her pine cabin behind Uncle George’s big house. When we got to her place, she always had a hug for me and, “How’s my best friend?” for him. She spent a lot of time baby sitting the two of us, and was well aware that with a scapegrace like me for an older sister, Donny needed lots of encouragement to be happy in his more conservative way.
There came a summer evening shortly before I got the polio. We three retreated to an upstairs bedroom to watch the tall, graceful American elms at the edge of the neighbor’s yard swaying gently, then shaking violently with winds whipping in from a thunderstorm. Donny whimpered so Grammie sat him on her lap and started reading a Thornton Burgess story. She was tiny, under a hundred pounds and under five feet, so holding a three year old and a big book caused most of her to disappear from my view. Wondering what the animals in that man’s books really did during bad weather, I went to the window, opened it wide and leaned out. “Emmie, don’t! You’ll be hit by lightning!” cried Grammie. Laughing, I put my hands out to feel the wind. Whoosh, boom! A roar of thunder and deafening crack, a white hot flash that blinded me and a great elm I had been watching a hundred feet away flew to pieces, shattering into the air. Donny screamed in the arms of our white-faced grandmother.
Lightning, a way of wondering what happened to my little brother that summer evening. He was always a bit timid, but after that he became almost a rabbit. Unfortunately, I have no more memories of him until the days when we both came down with polio, soon after this. Our family waited on Cape Cod for my aunt and uncle to pick us up for an ocean journey on their big cabin cruiser when my mother decided that the three of us should go swimming in a little pond near our motel. Sultry, humid, dog days. Her public health nursing experience did not remind her that polio germs could lurk in the depths of tempting fresh water.
Some days later the three of us came down with chills and fever, and and took to our separate beds. Grammie, another public health nurse, stayed in our house for days, washing us with cool water, trying to get us to swallow chicken broth and figuring out what was wrong with us. Despite being in her mid-70s Grandma PeeWee was tireless, appearing often beside the sofa where I lay, pressing cool cloths to my face, giving me sips of water. At night there she was, resting in a rocking chair near one or the other of us. This went on for days. Since a lot of other people in the area were sick with similar symptoms, it is a wonder that it took the doctor so long to agree with her that this was the terrible scourge of the times, polio. Meantime, my mother and brother continued uniformly miserable, while I, one afternoon, regained the energy to slip out of the house.
What I remember about my short expedition is walking down the porch stairs, holding my arms out and feeling the flowing air. Apparently I went off to climb trees, beneath one of which I was later discovered with fever around 105, nearly unconscious. The doctor, exhausted by so many patients in this next-to-last major polio epidemic in the United States, did not come to see me that night.
Early the next morning my Aunt Harriett appeared next to the sofa where I lay. Since she was never the cuddly type, sick though I was, I do remember how that tall, black eyed lady with her curly mop of dark hair picked me up in strong arms and held me lovingly... All the way through the long, long ride to a hospital in Boston.
While were were making slow, pre-highway journey, back at home, Grammie tried for hours to coax Donny out from under a big chair in the living room. He had crept there from his bed upstairs, terrified to see me being carried off, red faced and limp.
