I think I remember Part 4

We stayed in Connecticut for about one year as best I remember. It was not that good, but my mother and father were working and we were in school. In the winter it snowed and was very cold.

At school we would put a wood straw in a tree and get some snow in a cup and drizzle syrup from the tree onto it. It was sweet and sticky. I never tasted anything like it before and never again after.

One day we were packed up again and went back to Brooklyn. We got there in the middle of the night and my mother took me to my friend Roslyn Federschnyders apt. Her mother was a friend of my mothers while we lived in the same building in the projects before my father came and took us away.  I was put into her bed with her to spend the night. I am not sure where they took my brother Marvin.

After a few days we went to live in the lower east side. It was a long walk up and very sort of dark in the building. There was one room where my mother and father slept and one room where my brother and I slept. In the summer when it was very hot, I would take a pillow and blanket and sleep on the fire escape. From there I could look down and see into the big window in the building across the way. There were people living there in a store. My mother said they were gepsys . The women and girls wore very colorful clothes and their dresses were long and flowed like the gowns I read about in books. The men wore scarfs around their heads. There was always lots of music and at night they danced around.

Sometimes at night  I hid in the bathroom in the hallway that we shared with the other families on our floor. Then I could read the books I got from the library without listening to my mother and father fighting.

When it was very hot we could go to the street and someone would open the fire hydrant and all the kids in the area would run through the water and play. In the apartment the water only trickled up to our apartment and sometimes it was so brown we could not use it.

In the kitchen we had a bathtub which had a metal cover and during the day it was down over the tub to use as a counter, at night it was up on a hook and we could bathe when we got enough water to come up the pipes.

In todays world the sink would be considered a bathroom sink, but then it was considered a kitchen sink At the time I did not know the difference.

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