Prose Sketch: Who Am I? Page One, As E-Mailed To JustSandi from Eve Adam
I grew up on twenty-five acres in Maryland.
It was a small plot of land compared to what most of my classmates had, because they tended to be in farm families.
My grandfather (step-grandfather, but I didn't call him that) was a lawyer for the Interstate Commerce Commission in Washington D.C. He was a hearing examiner, which is like a judge, working on railroad law cases. I don't remember any time that he was ever unemployed, or ever working for any other company or department. It was the depression, and then World War II. Although I was aware of the war effort and how we were all growing victory gardens, I did not realize how important his hobby of growing fruits and vegetables and milking our cow, actually helped us not feel the pinch of the depression the way other people did. I was not aware of the problems so many were facing.
He used to spend a lot of time mowing the lawn around the house. By the time he finished the whole lawn, the first part would have grown enough to need mowing again. He never complained; about anything, actually. He was a saint: patient, kind, wise, etc., and not the least dictatorial. He is the one who named me "Sunshine." I was too young to remember how it started, but I was told later (by a family member who witnessed it) that one morning at the breakfast table, as his back was to the window, he said, "I have sunshine in back of me, and Sunshine in front of me." From then on, he, my mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles on my mother's side ALL called me Sunshine until they died.
At school I was known as Phyllis, and my mother occasionally lovingly called me "Phyllis Eve." (Not the whole name in anger, as with some parents.) We had a large house which had been a Southern plantation house about a hundred years before. When we obtained it, we rented a short while as it was being brought up-to-date. We had to put in indoor plumbing and do other remodelling. Of course I was only three, so I didn't have much to do with the work. I remember when the cement that held the stones of the new front porch was poured, they had me place my thumb print in the wet cement. I thought about that thumb print and looked at it off and on for years, until I was aware that the size of the impression was more like a little finger than a thumb. I was much larger when I moved out than when I moved in. When I was seventeen I left Maryland to go to college in California.
Now my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are all deceased on both my mother's and father's sides. I am the oldest of the cousins on either side. I will be seventy in August. Seventy "sounds" old to me, but I don't feel old. Age thirty was actually more traumatic as a milestone reached. I just inwardly laugh at the meaning we have had for "seventy."
I look back on the time when I used to play in the pine trees and climb the apple trees, or when I was quite young and could hide or relax in a small space inside our large lilac bush. I loved to swing on one or the other of the swings we had attached to trees in the yard.
There were no stores nearby, so I didn't pester the adults to buy things for me. We did not have television, so I learned to read well by reading the children's classics someone had given me second-hand. I got them all at once, and had my own bookshelf for them. I sometimes played with my cousins or occasionally a neighbor, but much of the time I was alone, appreciating the nature around me. It was beautiful there.
~~~EVE ADAM April 2001~~~
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Eve Adam, a.k.a. Harmonic Eve