Once Upon a Christmas 1954 Part 2

. We worked it out on paper and realized if we saved our ten cents a week allowance, it would take years to pay for them, so we decided we needed to get a job. So began our first enterprise ‘Hal and Elaine’s snow Removal.’ Each day after school we would go door to door offering to shovel the snow from sidewalks and driveways for a fee of twenty- five cents. Each day we would return home with our frozen hands clutching a quarter and our minds clutching the visions of those bicycles as we prayed for snow once again. Mom had taken a job working from home. Each night she would soak piles of leather pieces to soften and stretch over balls of twine to stitch together the next day making a baseball. She was paid five cents for each one that met their standards. Mom stitched hour after hour, day after day until her fingers bled. Dad would come home from Camp Borden after many hours of hard labor and army maneuvers to have supper and make us giggle and laugh with his outrageous stories of the day’s events. After supper he would leave again returning much later with red and blue paint stains on his hands and a tired smile on his face. The days flew by in a blur as we shoveled up and down the streets dreaming of those bicycles that grew more solid with every quarter we put in our piggy banks. I would go to sleep each night and ride through towns and cities and over hills and through valleys until I heard the sound of buoy bells ringing in the harbor. I would pedal faster and faster, knowing I was almost there. I could see my old home just down the road. As the bells got louder, I would slowly awake to the truth as the alarm clock wound down on the night stand. Once again I would head off for school and stand daydreaming, peering at that gleaming bicycle in the window of the bicycle shop. Suddenly – Christmas was almost upon us and we needed to buy mom and dad a present, so we pulled the plug on the piggy bank and tool our loot, a total of four dollars each to Woolworth’s continued in part 3.....