A poem out of rhyme

The internet may be a wonderful place with a lot of information but it does not have the lyrics of poem/song from which the title was taken.

Memories
Like a poem out of rhyme
Misty water colored memories
of the way we were

Of course maybe the song is The Way We Were
* * *

My father's (Andrew George) parents were named Louisa and Joseph. I remember he called her Lou.

They lived on York St in Covington. The street was/is short, one way from Pike St to 9th St, not wide enough for a car to park on one side and yet to allow another car pass. They lived on the right side of the street.

The current Yahoo satellite image shows that a number of houses on their side of the street from Pike have been torn down and replaced w/a parking lot.

The house was the northern version of a "shotgun" house - three rooms front to back arranged to use the least amount of front footage. There was a basement, a least part of which had a dirt floor. The basement was not heated.

I think the furnace was coal fired but I also remember a lumber yard delivering a load of small wood pieces in the fall which had something to do with the heating system.

Facing the house from the street, the left side of the house appeared to be the property line. Ditto for the house on the right. The side yard was paved from the front wrought iron fence to beyond the back corner of the house. The front yard was about 10 ft deep in grass. I don't remember any bushes or trees.

The back yard was about half the size of the full lot. It was before I was born a garden for roses and peonies. When I was young, I remember an old compost pile in the far right corner of the yard that still had citrus peels, not yet decayed, sticking from its top.

I remeber hearing a story that grandpa bred the roses and peonies. When he was done, he would rip out what he had produced and start a new breeding project. This infuriated grandma. All she wanted was pretty flowers.

The front room of the house had a covered porch which ended with a door. The door was not used in my memory. That corner of the room had grandpa's chair, possibly a rocker.

There was also a fireplace on the outside wall of that side of the house. I don't remeber it being used, but I do remember early on seeing a creche in it at Christmas. I remeber there being a mantle.

I remember the front window being large and a single pane of glass.

The front room contained a large bed with the footboard cut off to accomodate greandpa's height (6'3"). It also had a massive wardrode. Don't you got that when the house was shut down.

Besides grandpa's chair, I remember two "couches" in the middle room. They were pittiful to sit on. They may have been convertible into beds so the four brothers (Marcellus aka Bud, Andrew, Eugene aka Gene, Joseph) could sleep there. I don't know where Irma(linda) slept.

The back room was the kitchen: stove on the back wall and sink on the right wall. The table, a beautiful round wood one with claw feet, was against the left wall. The far left corner had a door to the back yard. The near left corner the door to the bathroom. The near right corner had the main entrance, with several (4?) steps down to the ground. I don't remember an inside entrance to the basement just the outside one. If there was one it was somewhere on the left wall of the back room.

The bathroom was the length of the middle room and narrow. The tub was free standing, again with claw feet.

The only kitchen story I remember is this:

Covington had a very large German popualtion. Where there are Germans, there are posperous sausage makers. Grandpa had a "favorite" sausage. I suspect it was cheap. I don't know its name but I was told it was made at the end of the day but chopping (not grinding) left over peices of meat (not the god stuff but the leftovers like organ meat) and stuffing it in a large casing, probably an animal intestine. Don't know if it was prok or beef.

It looked terrible. You could see the different pieces of meat used to make it - they were different colors and textures. It smelled when being fried in a skillet. Grandma would fuss about the smell while frying it.

Just remmebered another story. Around the end of WWII, Irm came home with a new hat. I took one look at her modeling her new hat, wnet to the kitchen, got a pot out of the cabinets and placed it on my head. There is a picture of it somewhere.

[to be continued]