Written by Johanna Cecelia Herlein (excerpts from a letter in 1983)
I was thinking about that school in Oak Glen. I remember that I had been at the school, but not too much about it. I must have been visiting. I remember being in the basement on a rainy day and Lammert and that boy across the street standing on their heads in a corner to see who could last the longest. I don't remember the boy's name, but they had a parrot who called, "Lammert, Lammert".
My mind went from there to the flower garden in front of the house to going down the street one way to get milk in a shiny pail, past a tavern etc. Every time I hear about the "face on the bar room floor" I think of that tavern. Down the street and around the corner lived that deaf woman who had a big horn she listened through. The other way down the street we had to pass that old store, and keep looking at the ground, because there was an old witch living there and if we looked up all sorts of things would happen to us. That's the way you took to get to school.
I remember going to Aunt Lizzie's house and having coffee in her sunny kitchen. There was a sun porch off the kitchen. On the way home (we rode in a buggy) we were coming down a rutty road and the buggy nearly tipped over. The horse's name was Frank and I remember holding my hand out with sugar in it and the horse nibbled and squiggled his nose to get the sugar. I can still feel it.
I was five when we came back to Muskegon to Furniture Ave. (now Forest). I was born here so we couldn't have lived in Oak Glen too long. Then I got to thinking about Furniture Ave. The railing around the dining room we parked our gum. The time Mom sent me (and Annie 7) to Temple's Store to get 5 lbs. of sugar. I got almost home and dropped the bag of sugar and it busted! One time I was in Temple's Store and a woman sat the baby on a pile of sacks and the baby wet! It was a pile of sugar sacks and the woman sat the baby on the sugar sacks and she wet!
Then I remember going to Huizenga's one day to play with Marion and the next day I was sick. So the next day I went to play with her again and I walked into the house and some strange woman was there and it looked all different. The woman said Huizenga's had moved. I cried and cried. Later I learned they had moved into the hotel across the alley. I remember the field we had to cross going to school and church.
On hot days in the summer we'd all be dressed up in our white starchy dresses and straw hats with ribbons hanging down the back and going through the field there were so many grasshoppers and they'd spit their tobaacco juice on our white dresses!