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My Street

By Ruth Cohen

All the streets I have lived on have momentous memories for me. However, I must write about the street I lived on in my early childhood. 

The street my family lived on was small and was called Fencikova Ulice. On one side, there were six houses; the other side had only two. One house was diagonally across from ours, and the other directly across. One of my very good friends lived in the house directly across the road. She and I had long conversations from our living room and their kitchen window, which faced each other. They had a lovely backyard, but the best thing was their huge front yard on the street level. It was our playground. When we came home at five o’clock in the afternoon, and it was still light out, our friends from the neighborhood went over, and soccer was on. It was so much fun. 

In our backyard, we had a two-story icehouse, the length of our house. Ice was trucked in from the Latorica River in the spring and packed into the icehouse. They packed the huge blocks of ice into the icehouse with sawdust in between the blocks, so that they wouldn’t stick together. We used the ice in our home, and we burned the sawdust in a special oven for heating one room. From late spring to early autumn, as the ice was used up, we played hide-and-go-seek in the icehouse. All our neighborhood friends were there. Those are the happiest times I remember!!   My other wonderful memory is being in the same room where my grandmother sat in her wheelchair. My mother sat at the table reading, and we children hurriedly did our homework. Most of our homework had been done in school, so our time working on it at home could be short. After dinner we could play or do whatever needed to be done.

Such wonderful memories of the past, I wish I had more.

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