We are sitting at home around the fire on a Sunday evening and my father is reading poetry to my mother, my sister, and me.

The snow had begun in the gloaming,

And busily all the night,

Had been heaping field and highway

With a silence deep and white.

           It is early November in Minneapolis and the first real snow of winter is falling silently and enclosing the city in its soft mantle. All day the strong winds of fall have whipped and lashed the last reluctant leaves from the trees and swept and swirled them every which way. Now, a calm has fallen on the world and on us. Should you open the front door, you would almost hear the silence but, inside, the fire snaps and crackles and our senses absorb the pictures the poetry conjures for us. This scene is so reminiscent of my early family life that, when I remember those days, I see this setting.

           When I think of my childhood and recall these vignettes which make up the memory quilt of my life, I see always before me a book. Sometimes that book contains poetry, sometimes chapters or passages from favorite stories, and sometimes characters come into view–characters that are etched so deeply into my soul that I feel they are a part of my very fiber.

           It is a measure of relief that these memories are satisfying because I was, I fear, a difficult child to raise. School and homework I loved, but I was (and have continued to be throughout much of my life) what I will term socially immature, one who felt unhappy, bored, and ill at ease at open houses, teas, and luncheons. Dinner parties were fine. One could get a grasp on a thread of conversation, but spare me to this day from the small talk of social sophisticates.

           Growing up in our neighborhood on the edge of the city just up the hill from Lake Harriet and surrounded by vacant lots and birds and trees and wild flowers–pussy willows, violets, wild roses–we were surrounded by the raw materials of nature from which childhood dreams are made. These lots were our baseball diamonds in summer and our football fields until snow whited out our markers. They became our winter “jump” areas, where the edge of a lot sloped down to the sidewalk. One could take a running leap up, out, and over a steep bank and land in soft drifts where the snow had piled up to twice one’s height. It was here in the oak or willow-treed fields or under the red maple in our yard that we cried over Beth March, suffered and itched when the Five Little Peppershad measles, and devoured, to Mother’s disgust, the adventures of The Bobbsey Twins,especially the book about Baby May.

           We were an Irish family surrounded by Norwegian and Swedish peoples. To this day, I long for the good coffee and baked goods our neighbors turned out, and my ear is ever on the alert for a Scandinavian name or accent.

           At Robert Fulton Elementary School, we had good teachers, many of them quite unforgettable. Mrs. “Spit-in-the-Wastebasket” Morton taught 4th Grade and she earned her name, but mostly I remember our 3rd Grade teacher, tall, angular, stately Miss Edith L. Hookey, fringed shawl trailing behind her as she sailed down the hall in rapid pursuit of a mischievous or reluctant scholar. She it was who drilled and drummed grammar into our heads and stood over us like a tall, beak-nosed eagle as we dipped our pens into ink wells, held them poised and ready, then slowly and carefully formed the circles and angles of the Palmer Method of penmanship. And she it was who introduced us to the world of Tom Sawyer. At home we were still reading, with gales of laughter, about the antics of Meg and Peg and Kilmanskeg in Frances Hodgson Burnette’s Rackety-Packety House.

           It wasn’t difficult to identify with David Copperfield when he was an outcast at school, for my high school years stand in sharp contrast to the happy times in grade school. In 9th Grade, I was enrolled in a small private school wherein I enjoyed not one happy day. If you take a fish out of water, a plant from its roots, a bird from its nest, or water from a thirsty coyote, you have me, miserable and sitting forlornly at my desk with my hands clasped against my stomach, immaculately turned out in the school uniform, a black jumper and white shirt, and hating every second of my terms at that school. I was an outsider among social butterflies with whom I would never share a common value, separate from the mainstream of society.

           My years at Carleton College passed happily, although there was a huge black and threatening cloud covering the earth: World War II was waiting in the wings of history’s stage. On December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the world as I had known it changed forever.

           Unlike all Gaul, my life is divided into four parts. Looking back at Part Two, even after so many years have passed, I still feel that cold chill of fear streak up my spine every time I hear a heavy truck rev its motor or a motorcycle accelerate for the climb up a hill. Those sounds recall times in my life when I felt the haunt of terror. I was in England during World War II and I still hear in memory the rum-rum-rum of German planes as they flew over us at night in East Anglia to engage British night fighters in dog fights; still hear the drone of the buzz bombs as they lumbered closer and closer to our club in Kingston-on-Thames, near London.

           And then there was joy that more than balanced the horrors of wartime. There was, for example, a bright day in August when I walked down that long aisle in Norwich Cathedral and was married to Jack Reynolds.

           Jack and I had met at Camp Atterbury where, as a Red Cross girl, I had been assigned to the 231st Station Hospital and where Jack was the personnel officer for the unit. Our hospital group had traveled to England and was stationed at Morley Hall in East Anglia, that thumb of England that protrudes into the North Sea. Our hospital cared for the sick and wounded of the 8th Air Corps and we were seldom idle. Each morning the planes from bomber squadrons would circle into formation over a little lake on the hospital grounds and set off for their missions. Sick soldiers we cared for by day, but by late afternoons and early evenings it was the wounded who claimed our attention.

           After our wedding, I was reassigned to a club in Kingston-on-Thames that was close to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) where General Dwight D. Eisenhower was stationed and where buzz bombs flew at us night and day.

           These terrifying months were made bearable by occasional visits to Jack and my hospital friends in East Anglia. And there were good times. Once on a dark afternoon when clouds were heavy and threatening rain, Jack and I took a train to Yarmouth, a second-hand copy of David Copperfield in hand. We managed to find an old inn close by the North Sea and there by a fire we read to one another a chapter I had loved for years, “The Tempest,” wherein Davey travels to Yarmouth and watches on shore while heavy waves crash over, grasp, and drown his dearest friends, Ham Peggotty and James Steerforth.

           It was after the war that Jack and I settled down in Minneapolis and started to raise our family, which would grow to number five children.

           How can I dismiss so lightly the 33 years of raising children, which is about the amount of time it took us, but I lend my voice to the mothers’ chorus, extant since man first appeared on Earth, in singing for joy, weeping for sorrow, exulting in success, agonizing over injustices or malice, scrimping, saving, camping, cooking, cheering, consoling, and finally sitting down for a good rest, but not a long one.

           Because experiences never come neatly in packages and march single file down one’s path in perfect order, I must mention ten years of teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to foreign students–ten years of the rich experience of learning about other cultures. I had volunteered to aid a teacher in adult education. Before the semester ended, the teacher had fallen ill and I was asked to take the class. “Because you speak English,” the program director had said. I walked into the classroom, knees shaking, but still with more confidence than ability, I found. I knew my grammar. Miss Hookey had seen to that, but ESL is a separate entity. One must view English from a different perspective entirely, and I labored to acquire the skill.

           It is difficult to assess the recent years of one’s life, easier to let the experiences mingle together and produce a hearty stew, a heady wine, or even a rich mulch. The mulch would be more my lifestyle because I ended my active life as a Naturalist for the City of Palo Alto, leading walks, giving programs, and helping to teach and interpret nature for children and adults in a little wooden hut that stands on stilts in the Palo Alto Baylands.

           I close this account with a return trip to London, to Norwich, and to Yarmouth, this time with our youngest daughter, Caroline. The boy she had loved since high school days had been killed in a mid-air collision and we arranged this trip to help to lift her spirits. We had toured London, checked the marriage records of the church in Norwich to her satisfaction, and now we were headed for sleepy, coastal Yarmouth and a hotel the travel agent had assured us was situated right on the shore of the North Sea. We were not prepared for what we saw–a new and different Yarmouth, with a carnival atmosphere. Gone were the boats and the old piers, and hidden from our view was the beach. From our hotel window we saw only roller coasters, merry-go-rounds, and concessions. Still, we were able to call on some imagination. Mentally we erased from our sight these symbols of merriment and replaced them in our minds’ eyes with the overturned boat that had served as a home for David Copperfield’s friends, the Peggottys. Again for us the tempest raged and the waves of the North Sea lashed the beach and we stood with Davey as he watched Ham Peggotty’s futile attempt to rescue James Steerforth. “I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.”

           The so-called twilight years played no part in our scenario. “Dawn patrol” would better describe us, for often Jack and I would rise in the dark and with binoculars and scope, pit-helmeted and sun-screened, watch and listen along some nature trail as the birds gave chorus to a new day. We tracked the Gray Hawk in Arizona; the shy, elusive Mangrove Cuckoo in the back reaches of the Florida Keys; and in our own yard, bird book in hand, we checked for the field marks of migrating warblers.

           More years have passed and the family has grown slowly. We have three grandsons and one great grand-daughter. Our daughter Carrie is happily married to Bruce. They live with their little dog, Jordie, in San Jose, California. Chris, an attorney, lives with his wife, Maggie, in Port Republic, Maryland. Their son, Rowan, is into his last year of law school. He hopes to practice out here in San Francisco. Katie, a writer, lives with her husband, Alan (and four cats). Their home is halfway up a mountain in Tucson, Arizona, and daily, they are treated to a view of those glorious Arizona sunsets. Andy and his wife, Rose, live in Orange, California, also on the side of a mountain. They have a great view of Catalina from their patio. Andy’s son, David, has a little daughter, Lori, our very first great-grandchild. Paula is a teacher in Tulare, California. Her son, Beau, has followed in his mother’s footsteps and teaches school in San Diego.

           I will leave it to our children to share with one another their own stories of growing up in a large family.

           In reviewing the past, I note that the years have taken their toll, but when I hear in early morning the call of a robin or the sad “Oh, dear me” of a Golden-crowned Sparrow, I perk up. Then, I realize with relief that even now, in 2006, there’s a dance in the old dame yet.