Living back in my hometown brings to mind childhood adventures. Some things have changed, like the street where my grandmother lived and where I spent some formative time no longer exists. She and Gramps lived at 107 North Topeka, but the house was on the south side of the river. The front yard was divided into two sections separated by a sidewalk. The further yard had a white picket fence on three sides; the nearer one had a wire fence. Mae lived next door. I didn't call her Mae and I don't recall her last name; we children called her Miss .... whatever her last name was.
In the spring and summer, the most noticeable adornment in the tiny yard was a flower pot, a long cylinder that Grandma planted seasonal annuals. The white cylinder stood about four feet off the ground, positioned north and south. In its former life, it was a hot water heater. It must have held about 20 gallons.
I was thinking about those old hot water heaters recently. When  hot water was needed back in the day, it was heated on the cookstove or over an open fire. No hot water was available on the tap. In fact, the tap was usually an outlet from the well. Some folks had one in the kitchen, others had to go outside to pump water into a bucket that was kept on the kitchen counter. Hot water was needed for taking baths or washing clothes or dishes. Consequently, when the idea of using a hot water tank inside the house surfaced, the size was determined on the current use. Since then, we've come up with lots of other uses for hot water. That's why we now have 40-60 gallon hot water tanks. But I digress.
Grandma kept her housekey in the planter, a.k.a. hot water heater. She and I used to walk to the second hand stores on Kansas Avenue, some six or eight blocks from her house, and she would put the key in its hiding spot in case someone wanted to come in while we were out.
Her routine for the day began about 6 with coffee, oatmeal, wheat toast, and Blue Bonnet margarine. In season, cantaloupe was also on the breakfast menu. She and Gramps finished their early meal, she cleared the table and he headed off to work. He was  bricklayer. One day, when she sipped her coffee out of her brown ceramic mug, she made a face and put her hand to her mouth. She had drunk a cockroach in her coffee. I still don't use brown coffee mugs.
She fed the tropical fish in the aquarium on the outside wall. Next to the aquarium near the front room was the phone. I used to remember the number as they kept the same number for decades, but I've forgotten it now. I don't recall any numbers, not even my own. I just click on my phone. Their first two numbers were 2,3 which were the first two corresponding letters of Central, their area. My mom had a FLanders number for a while,3,5. When the city phone system went from party lines to private lines, there was an extra charge, but Grandma wanted to have the latest convenience, so they paid the extra fee.
The house was tiny by today's standards. It was a two-bedroom with a front sleeping porch. There was a television with a set of rabbit ears on top until the antennae was mounted on the roof. The television, a console with about a 20 inch screen, was covered with a patterned cloth during the weekly bible study meetings. The dining room held a rectangular table with four chairs and a buffet. The refrigerator was set back in the wall. The kitchen was so tiny that only one person at a time could fit in it. The bathroom was off the dining room and held a stool, sink, and tub with some shelves set in the wall.
The full basement stairs were also tiny; I tumbled down them one day possibly because my feet were unusually large for a small child. In later years, I had to turn sideways to get down the stairs. There were storage shelves along the south wall; the laundry area was along the north wall. She had a Maytag wash machine. Grandma had told me that she used to have to take the laundry to the river, about four city blocks north, and beat the clothes against her washboard, but that was before I was born.
There were two bedrooms on the east side of the basement. Steamer trunks, maybe four of them, were in the basement, too. Every once in a while, she would open one and retrieve a scarf or article of clothing from an earlier gift. In one of the trunks, she stored her own beadwork, her own designs that no one wore; she just kept the pieces n a trunk. She also kept fabric in those trunks as she sewed daily.
Once I needed a pair of shorts since something happened to mine. She looked at me, grabbed some fabric, and within minutes, I had a new pair of summer shorts with a button and buttonhole. She amazed me.
When the weather was extremely hot or cold, Gramps slept in one of the basement rooms. His room upstairs had no door, but a curtain hung over the arched doorway. It was always nice and cool in the basement. Grandma had a dehumidifier installed when I was about three or four years old. At the same time, a window air conditioner was placed in the window in the living room, next to her overstuffed rocking chair. with a black painted table in front of the chair and the window. There was a drawer in the table, and I was not allowed to peek inside for any reason. She had her scissors and other items that were hers and hers alone in that drawer.
If I wanted to go outside to play, she would lift the curtain and window shade over the window, look outside, and decide if I could go outside dependent upon who she saw. My aunt and uncle lived next door, and if my cousins were outside, I could go out. If she saw neighbor kids, she would say, "You stay inside; those white boys are out there." I learned to hate the white boys.
One day I went outside with my older brother and my cousins. I had just gotten new patent leather Mary Jane style shoes. We went to the end of the street where the city street services were based. They kept a huge vat of hot tar bubbling; it was about a six by six by six box cut into the yard. My two older cousins and brother wanted to know how hot it was, and asked me to walk across it. I complied and ruined my shoes. How I didn't get killed is still a mystery.
When I went back to the house, I left my shoes at the back door on the step outside. As I entered the living room, Grandma noticed my white anklets; no one took their shoes off to walk in the house. She silently got out of her chair and walked to the back door. She looked at my shoes and ordered me to go get a switch. I had to get a supple one or I'd really get it. When I got the switch, she had me tell her what happened, which I did. She switched my bare legs since I'd ruined my shoes. Then, she switched all three boys who put my in danger. All three of them looked guilty when she accused them. She was a strict disciplinarian.
Another time, there were many relatives around. Uncle Ernie and Aunt Hil and their two older boys, Aunt Phyl and Uncle Earl with their two younger boys, my mom and her three boys and one girl, Aunt Alice and Uncle LeRoy with several of their seven children. Uncle Maur and Aunt Tiny lived next door, so their five children came and went. It was a hot summer day, and the lawn sprinkler that the hose screwed into was broken. It was reduced to a spear of sorts, the long nail that went into the ground and the broken plastic tube that was attached to it. In that little bitty front yard, my brother took the spear-like thing and told us to run across the yard and he'd throw it at us and we'd dodge it. He stabbed me in the left shin. Years later, I would recall the incident with a cousin tossing the spear; my brother and I laughed till we cried at the story. I suffered through many visits to the doctor's office for treatments to heal that hole in my leg.
Sometimes, we cousins would ride our bicycles around, under the huge bridge in front of the house, to the park next to the river, and to the school a few blocks away. Unbeknownst to my grandmother, we also used to ride our bikes on the train bridge that spans the Kansas River. Since the bridge was active, we were taking our little lives into our own hands when we used it to cross the river to go to the peach orchard on the other side. One time, a train came from the north as we were crossing from the south. I was little, so I was able to stand to the side as it passed; my cousins were big and one of them went under the bridge and held on as the train passed. We were scared out of our wits, but continued on to the peach orchard after it passed and we were all safe.
Every year the circus came to town, and they parked their train cars on the tracks behind 107, as the house was affectionately called. Up the street from the house, there was a white family with two boys, one was a small person, a midget. The circus asked if they  could buy him for $100. His mom chased the circus man off with a broom. We laughed until we cried. We didn't realize the seriousness of the event until years later. We continued to play with those boys for many seasons, glad that their mom didn't sell her son.
There are many more stories associated with those days, the late 1950s and early 1960s.