Wedded Bliss

When I was eighteen, World War 2 was going full blast and my mother decided to leave her

responsibilities to me and off she gleefully went to another state to work in a munitions plant.

She took her widowed sister-in-law with her and left me with my two younger sisters and my father to cook for.

So I figured as long as I was a cook, a housekeeper, a child-sitter, a laundress, a shopper and all the rest, I may as well get married. So without much thought, I did.

I married a young man that had been discharged from the US Navy because of his sleep-walking episodes. He had throw a navy guard over his shoulder and knocked him cold. He was unaware of what he had done of course. I, again, didn't give much thought to what he would do to me during one of his sleep-walking episodes, but I found out later.

Without any advance notice my mother came back home soon after we had tied the knot, and of

course, I had been planning that we were going to live in my parents' house. I was glad to be

free of my mother's duties, but now we needed a place of our own to start our journey of wedded bliss.

I found two rooms on the third floor of an old house very close to main street. Furnished! It

consisted of a bedroom and a kitchen. At least the landlady called it a kitchen. There were no

cupboards, no sink, no stove and no refrigerator. Well, that was not exactly true...... there was a

sink out in the hall that was shared with the other tenants, there was a shared bathroom, too.

To cook anything, there was a two-burner hot plate with a portable box called an oven that you

put on the hot plate if you wanted to bake a pie. A former clothes closet was fitted with shelves to store food and things like that. The ice box was a cubby hole under the eaves. It was winter in Northern Minnesota, so the food was kept nice and cold.

I cooked a lot of macaroni and cheese because meat was rationed. Butter was rationed. Coffee was rationed. Gee, I think even chocolate was rationed!

I used to walk a few blocks to the grocery store to buy our food supplies. There was a nice young man behind the butcher's counter that used to slip in a little extra meat for me as I would discover when I got home and unwrapped the meat package. That was so nice of him!

After a couple of months of this we packed up and went back to live with the folks.