Note: another essay that more or less follows the guidelines I set for my class writers with the topic being autumn. This takes quite a few liberties with the topic, but the story’s contents all happened in the fall of the year.
“Look what came in the mail!” Mother cried, as she waved the fall/winter J C Penney’s catalog in the air.
I clapped my hands and begged, “Please let me see it now.”
“No, we need to finish our morning’s work and then we’ll sit down and go through it at lunchtime, okay?”
I helped as much as I could, wanting the two hours till lunch to pass quickly so that we could see all the new possibilities for the coming year.
The arrival of the catalog was the official beginning of the “back-to-school” season for us. We poured over the pages, folding down corners where we saw something that we especially liked. We “oohed” and “aahed” over some of the luscious colors like winterberry, frozen azure, smoky sky, and said “uh=huh” to some styles that we thought were outlandish with their ruffles or asymmetrical collars or laced shoe tops.
But when we folded down page corners to mark our favorites, it wasn’t so that we could order the perfect dress or sweater. We didn’t have the money to buy most of the items in the catalog. Instead, Mother would work her wonders of sewing to create the style and color of at least one of the items we liked. Later we would also look through sale racks of clothes and shoes to see if we could find something that we could use that would look “in style” like the pictures in the catalog.
Later still, we girls would anticipate the coming of the Christmas catalog, hoping against hope that we would get just one thing that we really wanted. One year my sister got a life size toddler doll. She called him David. Interestingly, although both my other sister and I both used the name David for one of our sons, she never did use the name. I guess reality couldn’t match what she found in that toddler doll with his painted-on curls and his bright blue glassy eyes that closed when he was laid down.
Much later, when my sister was much too old to want dolls, I had my heart set on a 14-inxh ballerina doll who came in a suitcase with a tutu and an extra dress, quite stylish in its geometric print of pink and orange and its scoop collar of black velveteen. I tried to put it out of my mind, because it was much too expensive, much too extravagant to own. I could only dream. We could ask for one big toy, but not something that was too “big,” the code word for “too expensive.”
Not only did I get the doll, but my mother had created several additional costumes for her, including a wedding dress that was made from scraps from my older sister’s own wedding dress and a corduroy outfit made with leftovers from my other sister’s first “grown-up” suit. Someone, probably my older sister, created a wedding bouquet which the doll could hold. What a special Christmas that was, not only because I received something unthinkable in my mind, but also because my family had gone to some lengths to make the gift even more special.
I never remember being dissatisfied, either with my school clothes or with my Christmas gifts. We were a family of very modest means, but we children, at least the last two of us, my sister and I of the special dolls, were shielded from the poverty that was always lurking behind my mother’s special sewing and my father and mother’s efforts in the garden and my mother and older sister’s grueling, hot labor over canning vegetables and jams and butters. Meanwhile we last two children of the four were pleased with how we looked when we stood at the end of our sidewalk, waiting for the big yellow bus that would carry us to our country school in late in August each year.
Only when I was older did I feel shame over the decrepit appearance of our house with its brown imitation brick shingles and its peeling white paint. I had stood waiting for a bus right in front of the old, sad-looking house, never realizing that all the other students on the bus could see that house in its state of disrepair, giving the lie to my clothes that looked, as much as my mother could make them look, like everyone else’s.
As my siblings left with the end of high school to start their own adult lives as young marrieds, my parents’ income went further. The house was remodeled, more Christmas gifts were bought, not made, and Dad’s car models were bought new, instead of used. Still, I was mostly unaware of how much my parents had sacrificed for the lives that we lived. Only after my father’s death, many years after I had left home and had my own sons for whom to buy special, over-the-top Christmas gifts, my older sister and I found a credit book. It documented what she had known all along. Every year my mother and father had charged our Christmas gifts to J. C. Penney’s or Sears and Roebuck stores and had paid off the debt just in time to charge the next year’s Christmas celebration. The catalogs gave us the dreams; my parents made them come true.
A Myriad of Things 