Emptying the Attic

My grandmother used to put all her Saturday Evening Posts in the cedar chest she kept in their bedroom in Canadian, up in the Texas Panhandle.

When my brother and I would get shipped up there for part of the summer (the best part, actually), I would empty that cedar chest and stack those Posts up by month and week order all over that red-and-cream braided rag rug on the wood floor under the old swamp cooler in the window. That cooler was older than I was then. It's probably gone by now; everything else I remember from then is.

Anyway, once those magazines were aligned by the nine or ten months they'd been collecting, I'd thumb through them one at a time. First I'd read every single cartoon in an issue; when that task was accomplished, I'd read the first couple of paragraphs of each serial story that was started in a month. If it grabbed me by the eyeballs and yanked me in between the covers, I'd follow through to make sure I had all the story parts in a line. Then I'd check the next story. And the next. And the next.

I have no way to calculate how many hours I spent belly-down on Grandmother's braided rug with that swamp cooler keeping my head and elementary-school brain from overheating, but it was extensive. 

One summer I walked over the the Public Library, which was on the second floor of the Women's Christian Temperance Union Building, picked up Volume Aa of the Encyclopedia (I always -always- spell that by singing along with Jimminy Cricket) and made it as far as the volume with the M-words in it before we had to get back on the train to Amarillo. Never did finish that project. 

Grandmother and Granddad had me carry the months of Posts I had read out to the trash barrel in the rutted dirt alley as I finished the stories.

I -know- that's where I found Hemingway. I don't remember who-all else I found there.

Those were good summers, spent with good people.

190417 Rockwell cover coming