lickhaven

Summer was always the Time of Year for me growing up.

I never joined anything. I wasn’t in any sports. Looking at an application for summer camp made me sweat and tremble. The thought of all and every bit of that panicked me. But summer itself was sacred, precisely because I was away from everyone. I puttered and walked around and ate blackberries and looked at stuff and… no idea what else.

No memory of anything but the joy of sunshine and not being in school. Summer should extend at least 11 months a year. I still feel that way.

But for one whole summer in my teen years, I sat hunched over a table in the stone-walled basement of our rented house off 37th Street in Powelton Village. I’d decided to paint all the little metal animals and people and landscape bits that I’d inherited from my brothers and that my mother had given me as Christmas presents over the years.

While I was growing up, beside my bed lay a box, probably a foot square, six to eight inches deep (cardboard? wood?) chock full of English-cast farm animals, milkmaids, itty bitty cats, firemen, interlocking fencing, shrubs, lampposts, tiny tractors, zoo species, train conductors, butchers, playful children and townspeople of all sorts. They knocked against each other in that box, all higglety-pigglety, some with broken limbs, all nicked and missing shatters of paint.

At Christmastime I’d spread two cloths, one green, the other off-white, around the Christmas tree, which usually stood on our “library table,” the long, narrow, solid  mahogany table my parents had purchased along with the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The encyclopedia fit exactly into the deep shelf that ran along one side. The duplicate shelf on the other side was free for you to extend your literary imagination.

On those cloths I would create town streets and stores, using wooden blocks, and wide farmscapes divided by the interlocking fences and whatever else was handy. Then I would meticulously arrange farm animals, townspeople, yard workers, zoo creatures, machinery and the tiny girl who sat in her tiny leaden boat on a mirror lake. It was a lot of effort, taking a nitpicky concentration I can’t quite fathom today. 

That teen summer I vowed to repaint and repair all the older pieces, maybe in their hundreds. The house we rented then had once been a pair of slim two-story twins that someone had run together – with two front doors, two simple concrete porchlets. The house next door was the same. They stood by themselves on a courtyard in the center of the block, up a brick walkway entered through a trellised opening. I have no idea how they came to be. There was nothing else like them in the neighborhood. 

One side of the basement, where the stairs came down,  held the furnace, a round coal-fed monster with oversized ductwork that I stoked daily in the winter from a pair of coalbins (I also pissed in it, which raises an unholy stink). On the other side, through an open doorway in a solid, stolid stone dividing wall, spread an equal but unencumbered space – no furnace, stairs or coalbins. A space. Its empty rectangularity drew me. For an equally empty kid, what a hideaway! 

So I bought a selection of half-pint cans of variously colored paint, carried down the animals and milkmaids and began work.

How do you mix minute quantities of paint tones? Our milk was home-delivered from Wawa (that unlikely name now graces a proliferation of Pennsylvania mini-marts and service stations). Each milk bottle came with a golden aluminum cap. Carefully levered, inverted, they provided tiny bowls.

I knew nothing of color mixing (still don’t). But all those English cows and horses must look right when repainted, so within these tiny milk caps, I set out to create Cow Color and Horse Color.

I don’t know the breed of my metal cows, but most were a uniform off-white. No righteous American cow would put up with that, so I decided to try to duplicate the shade of the few sister brown cows. After numerous failures I came up with a tint that could add acceptable cow-splotches to the off-white metal sides. Now those were cows.

Horse Color diverged only slightly from Cow Color through added red. Fine horses, noble horses.

From there I went on to green – the shrubs, the faux-grass at the base of the street signs, the hollow tree and swing for the little boy in shorts, a roofed bench (a bus stop?), a few dresses here and there. Then I moved to red.

I held off on flesh tones because a) I had no idea how to achieve them, and b) doing faces would mean I’d also have to re-color eyes and mouths. I’ve always had an unsteady hand. The slightly de-featured faces would have to stay as they were.

I never got beyond those first colors. I still have the metal animals, now layered in batting so they will never again jostle each other and do interactive damage. Lots of chipped faces there on the few occasions I pull them out for inspection. My attempts to repair limbs with glue, solder, tiny lengths of coat hanger and aluminum foil were mostly dismal failures. 

But those cows… Ah, they look mighty fine.