Chapter 22 - The Ending...

1950 - 1957

     My first day of school school was nearly sixty years ago; and my sixth grade “graduation” was 52 years ago. The vivid reality of each day spent as a Greenfield Village student has faded, but I am surprised with the feelings and memories that remain. I live in Dearborn and visit Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum frequently. Every visit brings back my childhood:

     Today I walk by “The Sounds of America Gallery” (formerly named the Stephen Foster House, where Stephen Foster never lived, but that’s another story)…and I remember the grave for “Old Dog Tray” that used to lie on the lawn. I still hold my breath when “inside” the covered bridge (for a while, anyway) …and recall that, as our school bus lumbered across the bridge’s clacking boards, our entire busload of kids held our breaths to avoid bad luck. Today I step inside one of the historical homes that used to be my school and a wave of nostalgia passes through my being. I notice the moldings and the tiny knobs on tiny doors which hide light switches; I see locked doors that lead to rooms and stairways not open to the public; and I remember the hours that these spaces, these walls, these floors were part of me.

     At the Henry Ford Museum, I see the original white tiled floor of the bathroom and spot the once-elegant toilet-flusher on the floor, a worn brass ball that we used to step on, and I think what a great idea that was and assume they lie abandoned because the maintenance was too expensive to continue. And this little-changed bathroom brings back memories of the annual Christmas pageants held in the Museum’s theater, and the excitement of waiting for our theatrical act in the staging area—which happened to be in the Henry Ford Museum, near one set of bathrooms.

     I don’t wish to return to those days, and I have plenty of bad memories of my years at Greenfield Village. I intentionally chose which memories to write down, hoping to bring pleasure to my reader and to myself in the re-telling of these tales. Spurred to record this part of my youth by my friends in the Writers Group, I know that not everything is fact, that memories are funny things, and I hope that both the reader and I will forgive me for the mistakes. As my mother once wrote in her memoirs, “After all, it was a long time ago.”

[Written by Betsy Cushman in 2010]