Page 55 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 43

Maude Rohl. Frank was also a mail carrier. They had no children,
but I always remember they had a lawn swing we’d always swing in
when we visited them. They had a beautiful back yard, grape arbor
and all. I don’t believe the Rohls were related to us. If they were,
it was way back, and they could have been, because we had Irish
relations, and shirt-tail relations, around St. Louis back since about
1849 when my granduncle [John Day] first arrived from Ireland,
which was about the same time when my maternal grandparents’
parents—both sets [Lawlers and McDonoughs]—came from
Ireland themselves. Cecilia knew about the Rohls, but I lost track.
In Kampsville, the cemetery was up on the hill with a long,
winding road going to it and we always went sleigh-riding down
the cemetery road every winter, which my little brother, Harold,
said was convenient if we insisted on killing ourselves. I remember
one winter when it snowed real deep and then sleeted, and our
back yard turned to a sheet of ice. That one night while Mom and
Daddy were reading in our dining room, we snuck out and played
sleigh-ride right on top of the crust of snow. There was a creek right
behind us and when it’d freeze over, the boys would ice skate on it.
We had little 4-runner skates and we girls would skate on it too.
When it rained, winter or summer, that little creek would rise
up in a raging current almost to our back fence and we’d throw our
tin cans in and watch them float away. Daddy always warned us
away from water of any kind. He said drowning ran in our family,
but I don’t know of any relative who drowned except his mother’s
father, Jack Lynch, who was a sailor. So I guess he was trying to
scare us into being safe. Actually, Daddy himself nearly drowned
when his Model T was swept away full of mail.
On the river at Kampsville, we also had “locks” that raised
and lowered the water level for boats. The locks were very beauti-
ful with lovely landscaping around them where there were three
or four homes where the locks-keeper and some of the other em-
ployees lived. I went down there to a party at one of the homes
one Saturday. We’d all often go there for picnics and fishing. Mr.