Page 34 - Always Virginia

22 Virginia Day Fritscher

called Stringtown) on which my Mom would lift us up (no steps to
porch), really a side porch and give us fresh, hot-baked roly-polies
made out of pie-crust rolled up and sprinkled with cinnamon and
sugar. Bake til golden brown. That’s the whole recipe. I also had a
rabbit (a white pet—my very own) which I really do not remember,
but my parents always told me about it as it would only come to
me when called, but some mean older boys up the street killed it by
throwing it by its legs in the air and letting it fall to the ground dead.
My next recollection was when I was three years old and we
moved into our new home which my parents purchased—a big
8-room concrete block home—fenced-in yard—upstairs porch and
front porch. It was the second house on the right from the main
street. None of the streets had names. I remember trying to open
the gate the day we purchased it and we all went up to look at it.
I don’t remember the actual moving-in day but we spent many a
happy day there until we moved when I was eleven to Jacksonville.
I had three brothers, John, Jimmie, and Harold, and one
sister, Norine. My two older brothers, John and Jimmie, used to
come into our room at night and run their hands up and down the
wallpaper and make my sister and me think it was a bat, as once
a bat did get in and we were a little apprehensive about being in
that room, because my maternal grandmother [Honorah Anastasia
McDonough-Lawler] died in that room when I was five years old.
I always remember Grandma Lawler always had big round mints
in her room with the Triple “XXX” on them and would give them
to us. She took to her room when she was sixty years old, and
never came down except to rock for three years until she died at
age sixty-three.
Living in such a small town, I liked the woods which were
only about two or three blocks away on what was called the Illinois
River bluffs, and we always went there in the spring and picked
wild flowers or just to hike. My brothers, John and Jimmie, went
mushrooming, ginseng hunting (used to sell it to the local doctor),
walnut gathering, and trapping possums. One morning when they