The next day...the very next day (!) who showed up! Moe-fee; he still has his baby mew...for some reason, while his siblings acquired a full depth 'meow', his was always a tiny 'mew'. So, how odd, but then his mom was nowhere around that day. What's up with these silly black cats? He was gone the next day, and his mom was back. Spooky.
Speaking of spooky, it, being today, I was trying to remember the creepiest thing I could remember about my childhood, but the only thing I came up with, was our cellar. We lived in Olean, NY, on top of the levee of the Olean Creek. From my Dad's memoirs, I learned that his uncle Dan, a tugboat captain, had built our house in the mid-1800's. It was a fine old house, built over a basement which was crudely dug into the ground. There were no real concrete walls, perhaps a few stones lined the wall here and there, the floor was just flattened, tamped down dirt. It was dark, the air was dank and cool, there was one 40 watt light bulb hanging near the stairs. There were several rooms down there, of which I never dared go into; it was sufficient enough for me to peer into the first room where decrepit shelves were lined with old, old canned goods, from who knows what generation, and where thick, ancient cobwebs draped everything. Actually, I never wanted to venture down there at all. Just getting down into the basement was a very creepy challenge. First a huge very old door had to be lifted and secured, which was built into the cement floor of the closed-in back entryway to the house. One day, out of sheer curiosity, I decided to explore, so, peering down into the gloom, and cautiously feeling down into it with one foot, finding the icy cold hard cement step, then the next, and next, while trying to duck under where I thought spider webs might be lurking. Just then my brother showed up with a flashlight which flooded the whole stairwell where we immediately spotted several families of spiders roosting everywhere! GAH! We've never seen spiders like this in our lives! They were completely white. They looked like their bodies were made of a cellophane-like filament filled with puss! Even their eight legs! We just stared at them, horrified, frozen where we stood, until a couple of the larger ones started moving about. We were then OUT of there!
Our Dad was nonplussed about it; he said they wouldn't bother us, if we didn't bother them. We saw them occasionally over the years. My Dad would send my brother down there to put something, or bring it up. Since he was a brave teenager at that point, he didn't seem to mind.
Because it was such an undertaking for the electric meter reader, since he'd gotten older, my Dad decided to just leave the cellar door open. Still, the meter guy wasn't happy about having to get down those stairs trying to avoid those white spiders and finding his way around down there in the dark...he said he never did like that place. Well....who did?
Adjacent to our house, there on the levee, was our family owned sign shop. It was western New York's oldest sign business. Our great-great grandfather started the business by hand-lettering stagecoaches. The business grew, whereby many types of signs were built by our sign company. As such, there was always some odds and ends that had to do with commercial art stashed here and there in and around the old sign shop. Many of the 3-dimensional art objects ended up in the house, as well. One of these was a mannequin. My dad brought her in during his lunch break and named her "Rhoda" one hot and summer day.
My grandmother scolded that we had enough stuff in the house already and to take his 'date' elsewhere, but we three teenagers, my young aunt Bev (same age as I am), my brother and I, all thought that Rhoda was the coolest thing we'd seen in awhile, so persuaded Grandma to let us keep her.
"Well, just keep her out of sight when company comes," ordered Grandma, lightly dusting off something with her lace-edged hankie.
Rhoda might have been out of sight of company, but we dragged her everywhere. Although she had no hair, Bev being a beauty school student, fashioned her with a scull cap, much like "flappers" in my Dad's younger days used to wear. So, Rhoda looked just fine, we thought, for public display. We packed her into our friend's car and cruised around town, one time she showed up at my brother's band practice, anywhere my grandmother would not be caught dead, we took Rhoda. It was "The Summer of Rhoda".
Well, Fall set in and so did the rigors of school, so Rhoda kind of got left to go her own way. Grandma got disgusted with her being in the way all the time, she said. We put her in our bedrooms, but she kept getting in the way there, too.
Sadly, we never realized that we hadn't seen her around for awhile. We were busy with school and after school activities.
One quiet afternoon at the end of October, we heard a tremendous SHRIEK from somewhere in the house and a thundering coming up the cellar stairs, followed by the back door slamming HARD, as wailing was heard all across the back lawn and into the distance.
A true mystery. It was solved somewhat later, as the meter man refused to come read the meter for six whole months, when he retired. It seems that his nerves were already frazzled as he slowly crept down those dark stairs into the cellar. He shined his dim flashlight around to find the archaic cobwebbed meter, then suddenly had a strange feeling on the back of his neck that someone was watching him. "Impossible," he thought, turning his flashlight to find himself face-to-face with Rhoda's cold dead eyes staring into his, as she stood, hidden in the corner just inside the door where Dad had put her for safekeeping.
The meter company had to send somebody out to fetch the poor old guy's flashlight and writing pad, in whatever direction he had tossed them in his haste to escape our "dungeon".
Good Ol' Rhoda, she still had one good adventure left in 'er. She was, of course, then banished from our house, but we always hoped that wherever she was, she was still havin' the time of her...well...Life?
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