where the heck is that high-pressure hose nozzle that I use to clean out the garbage cart?
This is my yard at the old house on Superior Street. It is sunset in this photooo. That house is the neighbor’s to the north. Lemme think who lived there. There was a stream of folks. Harshbargers were there for a while and for some reason, I thought that the phrase “Harshbarger’s nose” was absolutely roll on the floor laughing hilarious. I have no idea why. I don’t remember what a Harshbarger looked like. And there were the Propsveldts (y’all, I do NOT know how to spell any of these names) later on, who had kids just a bit younger than me. I’m sure I teased them. There was a toilet in the basement of that house that sometimes flushed itself and once the mom of the house (I don’t remember that family’s name) was home alone at night with her five kids or whatever it was and she took a baseball bat downstairs. I am in the Courtois family now and I have learned that a toilet is not normally something to panic about. Back behind that house you can see the Malette’s house whose daughter Connie was one of our long-suffering baby-sitters. I do not think The Engineer and I were very well behaved kids with most baby-sitters, even the ones we liked, and Connie was one of those. I guess she did it for the money. That big smokestack in the background belongs to Lincoln School. I red-queened over there every morning until I decided (alas) that I was too cool for red-queening.
You can’t see our little white house in the photooo. And the garden is just to the left of that person in the summer pajamas and probably a diaper. A nice, wet cloth one, no doubt. I remember wearing summer pajamas similar to those when I was a little older, five maybe. I’m sure I had survived the throes of toilet training by then but one hot spring night, I kept asking for Fizzies (who remembers those) over and over and over again. More Fizzies! The Commander finally said, “You are going to wet your bed if you drink any more Fizzies.” “Oh, no, I’m not.” Roight. I can still remember getting up in the morning in rather damp pajamas.
The title? Well. Welcome to the world of Garbage Woman on a day when our handy dandy A2 Garbage Cart stinks absolutely to high heaven. I swear, when my work friend Cynthia visits friends in the neighborhood this weekend, she will be able to find my own personal Landfill by the smell. I need to clean that thing out. I can’t find a decent high-pressure nozzle anywhere around here. I know there is one somewhere. Since I don’t know where, I’m gonna buy myself a new one tomorrow morning. That is all.
May 14th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
What a wonderful photo of you and Fran! What dos she have in her left hand, a handle to a red wagon?
May 14th, 2010 at 6:08 pm
I can’t figure that out. Might be.
May 14th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
I love the photo!! We have cat smell in our garage; how does one get rid of THAT? I’m just glad it’s not in the house.
May 14th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
I do remember Fizzies!
We also had a toilet in the basement of our house on Crest.
It was notable because it was just a toilet at the side of one of the basement halves.
There were no walls around it at all, although you could open the door between the two basement halves and shield it from the stairs.
May 15th, 2010 at 5:25 pm
i don’t remember fizzies. but we were never allowed soft drinks. there were too many of us. (ten kids.) so my mother would buy flats of cheapo offbrand pop and whoever did the dinner dishes (home-cooked meal for a family of 12; no small task) was rewarded with a can of warm flat soda. ah those were the days.
May 16th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Fizzies were fun! (A flavored tablet that you put in water and it turned the water into a fizzy kool aid type of drink. Sort of like Alka seltzer but Kool Aid flavored.) My wonderful brothers would put them in their mouths and they would have colored foam pouring out of their mouth and down their chins. Gary did that and maybe Don too. So gross looking! I don’t think they swallowed one, but I’m sure that it must have happened to someone.