The Best of Times

My father came home from the war

but we still didn’t have any money

so we moved out of town

into my dead grandpa’s cottage on the river.

Set among the great oaks

the only house on the whole River Road.

No electricity, no telephone

no running water, no indoor toilet.

In the winter it took the county

three days to come and plow.

Our own private school holidays.

We pioneers of the Great White North

like Daniel Boone or Paul Bunyan himself.

My job every evening

was to light the candles

and the two kerosene lanterns

on the living room mantle. 

Our water came from the pump out front.

I carried the buckets to my mother

to fill the dog’s bowl, to brush our teeth.

Before bedtime I walked my little brother to the outhouse

keeping an eye out for creatures of the night. 

We took our baths in the river

even my mother and father

though I learned many years later

that our river was dirty. 

My happiest times in those years on River Road

were walking with my dad to the city dump

a half mile up the road

pulling my red wagon behind us

to carry home the treasures we found. 

I searched for bottle caps

to add to my collection

while my dad looked for household furnishings.

A bedside table with a broken leg

a discarded flower vase

an ashtray from somebody’s Florida vacation

rusty old tools.

We lacked this and that but

we loved our life on the river.

The swimming, our green rowboat

with its one horsepower motor,

birches and pines, expeditions to Pig Island.

After two years the Meads and the Orths built houses nearby

and the county installed electric lines on River Road.

Our world would never be quite the same.