Staying at Granny and Grandpa’s house meant everything . It was here that we all wanted to be at any time of the day or night , and any day of the week. Granny and Grandpa began their family in a dugout . A dugout house was a hole dug into a hillside or mound of dirt . Once the hole was made a roof was built over the top and then more dirt piled around the house, thus making it underground except for the roof and the entrance.
Sometime after Granny and Grandpa began their family in a dugout, the meager dwelling we all loved and begged to stay in was raised. In the day neighbors would gather from miles around to help and bring whatever they had that could be used. On this day neighbors carried flat sandstone rock up from the nearby creek and set them as cornerstones for the foundation of a four room house. Others cut pine logs for corner post and floor joist and scaled the bark. A hand-operated saw sliced the oak trees cut the previous winter into thin slabs of lumber. The slabs were nailed to the pine corner posts and raised as four complete walls. A roof was scaled and floor laid. The last addition was a chimney and windows. The windows did not have glass panes, but instead wood shutters that closed for cold and rainy weather. The chimney was built beside the house out of the same creek rock that had been carried up for the foundation. Chimney construction was an art and was planned to serve as a heat source and vent smoke from the wood heater and the kitchen wood cookstove. There was no plumbing or electrical wiring needed.
Fifty years later Granny and Grandpa still lived in this meager dwelling raising their children and their grandchildren. The single walls had long since developed cracks between the oak slab lumber and been patched with mud, and later cardboard. In the winter snow would blow through the cracks and we would wake up covered with a layer of snow . It was an adventure to us because Granny would bury us under an enormous mound of heavy blankets , and we slept six kids to a full size bed. We only slept in beds during the winter, in the summer we slept on the floor or outside on a blanket.
Once during those winter nights we were taking turns coming to the top of the covers and peeking through the cracks in the wall . We would surface, take our turn looking through the crack in the wall, then burrow back down under the covers and the next kid would surface. We didn’t have to argue about taking to long to peek because your nose would get so cold it would hurt . On this particular night Granny was fussing about us knocking the covers off the bed and warning us to get still and go to sleep. We thought we would continue and just be a little quieter. My turn came and I had just put my eye up to the wall when another eye on the outside wall met up with mine! Totally scared out of my mind , I couldn’t say a word. Grabbing the covers I crawled all the way to the bottom not to surface for the rest of the night. Every night thereafter, I remembered the eye outside and refused to sleep next to the wall.