Life Beside the Genesee River: my boyhood home in Rochester, New York

There is a gray, shuttered cottage, just past a muddy bend in the River. That was my boyhood home.

It was a tiny house... a shotgun cottage. My room was a screened-in porch with windows on three sides. As a young boy, when I opened the front door, I could see all the way thru ...and out the windows of my bedroom... to the river.

Our house began life as a simple, one room building. The members of a canoe club built one large room and roofed it in. The riverbank was closeby, just thirty feet away. It was a place to meet or get in out of the rain.

Nowadays, the canoers meet five miles downstream, in the big park where the Barge Canal joins the river. There's no clubhouse; just the bustle of emptying SUV's in the parking lot and the muffled greetings as twosomes head to the river with a canoe on their heads.

The next owner, Perrot, built onto the main clubhouse room. He added the kitchen, dinette and bath toward the street. To the side of these rooms, he built a small, one car garage with wooden double doors that swung wide into a short, gravel driveway.

From the main room going toward the river, he built a bedroom for himself. It was narrow and divided in half by a hallway of sorts. To the main room he added steep, narrow, wooden steps up to the attic. And beyond his bedroom, he made my room; a sun porch with windows all around. There was a back door that lead to the concrete steps and down to our small, grassy backyard. It was always kept in deep shade by the two great, tall, cottonwoods growing beside the riverbank.

When my Dad started to remodel the place in the 1960's none of the windows matched. We found a lot of used lumber in the walls. There were boards of different sizes; painted in different colors. He tore out what he could. The rest remain hidden, to this day, inside the walls.

When Dad and I lived there, he was always getting up out of bed at 11:30 each night. The raccoons were up for the night, fresh from their daybeds beside the river's edge. The first point of attack was always the trash cans. It became this nightly ritual. Dad would slide back his little bedroom window with a big scowl on his face; ready to let fly with something.

When I was little, maybe eight or nine, Dad had a sling shot. He'd shoot the raccoons with these metal bee-bees. But they always bounced off. Dad would be just fuming. He hated to watch the raccoons just waddle away like pudgy little fur balls looking back over their shoulder at him with glow-in-the-dark eyes. But it was the same thing, every night. Pop! Pop! Then on they marched, single file; back to their nest under one of our giant cottonwood trees. They'd be safe again; enjoying life on the riverbank.

Later, Dad bought a pellet gun that looked like a cop's gun. He'd pump and pump. But it was the same thing. The pellets just bounced off. Like on Superman.

When Dad retired, I bought the house. First thing I did was mow the lawn.

Not really.

First thing I really did... was fix the trash cans. I ran a two by four thru each of the trash can handles. Life was good. The raccoons never bothered MY trash cans.

Dad had a real shotgun. But he never used it at home. That was for when he and my uncles went deer hunting. I went sometimes, but the five of us never shot one deer.

I shot a tree once. My cousin Mike gave me his 16 gauge shotgun and said to shoot this tree. It knocked me over and hurt my shoulder. The gun, I mean. The tree just stood there. And took it like a man.

After hunting, those guys always went to the bar and drank beer and talked loud. I tried beer.

I didn't like talking loud either.

I never liked mowing the lawn...front or back. As a boy with other, more worldly aims; it seemed to take forever. The front ditch was hard to mow; especially without scalping the steep sides. Dad didn't want them scalped. And I hated that sound, brrrrummmph! And maybe sometimes a rock would fly out too. Then he'd stick his head out the door and yell, "HEY! DON'T scalp the lawn!"

You couldn't win.

Anyway. When I bought the house I went out and mowed the side yard. I made two passes on the outside and left this figure-eight shape unmowed in the center. Then I parked the mower and cut out the figure eight with a spade.

It made a nice rock garden.

From then on, I could mow the side yard in just two passes. I never liked mowing the lawn. But I could get used to doing it in just two passes.