Pop Goes The World
Early in their marriage, my aunt Wanda and my uncle Skip were looking for a property in Lexington where they could set up a home and raise their growing family. The home they chose was in a quiet section of the city near Waddell Elementary School and just steps away from what would become Woods Creek Park.
The slate-colored twostory home had a wide front porch accessed by a steep set of wooden steps. It had five spacious bedrooms on the second level. On the ground floor was a full eat-in kitchen, study, living room and den. The front door opened to a sunny foyer. The gabled roof sat upon a vast attic. The full basement was home to a fearsome furnace that had been in operation since William Howard Taft was president.
Wanda and Skip named the house “The Shady Rest” after the hotel on the TV show “Petticoat Junction.”
The young marrieds didn’t waste any time making the home their own. Wanda found that the space between the kitchen and the dining room made a perfect spot for her sewing room. She envisioned the dining room being the setting for many future family gatherings, so she and Skip acquired a long rectangular table that would comfortably seat a dozen or so relatives. Skip chose the west-facing room that had copious space for his immense library of books on education and theology, as well as the family’s set of encyclopedias.
Two sturdy pines grew on either side of the steps to the porch, and for the first few years, those trees were strung with multi-colored lights at Christmastime. The foyer of the home became the place for the Christmas tree every year. There were no fireplaces so the children’s stockings were hung on the radiator in the living room. Four children grew up in that home – Sarah, Bo, Jenny and Jeremy.
That gracious home did become the frequent gathering place for the family during the holidays, particularly on Christmas Eve when Wanda hosted her annual party. Wanda was in her element in 1976 when the country celebrated its 200th birthday and she made 1770s clothes for her 1970s children so they could perform a pageant for the family on the Fourth of July.
I spent a lot of time with my cousins, particularly during the summer months. I remember playing a game in the twilight hours called “There Ain’t No Ghosts Out Tonight” in which we would eerily chant the name of the game. One of us would play the ghost. When the cousin playing the ghost jumped out of hiding and tagged someone, that person became the ghost.
Recently I was reminded of my time sleeping over at my cousins’ house when a junebug entered the cage of the metal fan on top of my computer desk and met its end after being chopped by the blades. I remembered those hot nights in the room Jenny and Sarah shared and kamikaze junebugs would fly into the window fan while we talked about what had happened that afternoon on the soap “General Hospital” and wondered who shot J.R. Ewing on “Dallas.”
When Skip and Wanda’s children began having children of their own, a new generation wore costumes for living room pageants. Easter became like a second Christmas as Wanda planned egg hunts, first placing plastic pastel eggs in the grass of the garden lot and then later in Wood Creek Park. Sarah’s son Cole was born on Halloween and his birthday was celebrated with macabre themed offerings on the long dining room table such as Witch’s Brew, a benign punch consisting of soda pop and sherbet, and severed fingers, really just mozzarella sticks dipped in marinara sauce.
I learned recently that the home Skip and Wanda purchased nearly 60 years ago has been sold. I hope that the new owner will hear the echoes of the squeals of children playing, the laughter of a family gathered in the dining room, the mechanized sound of the Singer in Wanda’s sewing room, the squeak of a pen highlighting a passage in one of Skip’s books, and know that it was once not just a house, but a well-thumbed volume in our family’s history.
