Tennis and bats
Sheila was self-reliant.
I'm sure we all have stories about how she took on the world. One of my favorites took place right after Doug and Sheila bought the cabin in Highgate Springs, VT.
The house was pretty beat up when they bought it, and they didn't have a lot of money. So Doug hired a local carpenter to fix up the first floor. I think he figured the second floor, that just had four bedrooms, could wait.
As was typical, Sheila and Doug put a mattress in the back of our family station wagon, loaded in the 5 kids in the back, and we headed north from NJ for the summer. (There was always a battle for the two spots next to one of the side windows.) Doug would commute up to VT on weekends but the rest of us were there for the duration of the summer. It was a glorious place for kids to grow up.
There was a lot of excitement that summer as we moved into the the refurbished cabin. The first floor looked great with new knotty pine on the walls. The wrap-around porch had been repainted and had a great view of the surrounding neighborhood. We were all excited to have our own space after renting houses for years. Doug's parents (our grandparents) lived across the road, and there was a path behind their house that cut through the woods down to the water.
Doug headed back to NJ after a couple of days, and Sheila dug into making the cabin our new home. She bought some furniture and hung pictures on the new walls. It looked great.
But the second floor was pretty rugged and it bothered her.
The second floor was open studs with wadded up newspaper stuck in holes in the rough, unpainted wood walls. One day Sheila decided to clean it all up. Job-one was to remove the old newspaper. I recall her saying she was confused why someone would stuff old newspapers in the walls. She thought they were just too lazy to throw them out.
She was wrong.
That night after the five of us were asleep, bats started flying around the second floor. Turns out that the newspaper had been strategically placed where the previous owner had discovered that bats snuck in. She had inadvertently destroyed the hours of detective work, and our house was now a bat playground. The bats were everywhere.
Now Sheila was an excellent tennis player in her day. So with Doug gone, and a house full of sleeping kids, she knew that she had to solve this herself. She pulled the covers over all the kids heads, gabbed her tennis racket and put her flawless forehand into any bat that flew into her path. I think she took out a couple of dozen bats that night.
And then she went back to replacing the newspaper in the right spots as best she could recall.
Needless to say, Doug was quickly ordered to get the carpenter back in the house and to finish the job on the second floor.
Ernie
