Henry faithfully followed my parents, my two brothers and two sisters and me everywhere for five or six years. He ensured we had a dry place to sleep and toted our luggage around through many adventures.
Henry joined the family and gained his name shortly after my parents had sold the valley farm in New York, put books, excess furniture and mementos into storage. The furniture went, Henry – a blue canvas, pop-up tent trailer – arrived and we moved to southern Arizona.
Crossing the continent via camp sites, Mom, Dad and we girls slept in Henry. The boys slept in the station wagon, Molly, as my mother affectionately called her.
We stayed in Arizona long enough to finish the school year and get homesick enough to return to New York where my dad began looking for another farm to buy.
For the summer, he served as the hired help on the “bump-your-head” dairy farm – my name for it. The low ceiling in the milking parlor and my dad’s 6-feet plus height guaranteed a noggin knocking experience every time he milked the cows.
While my parents weighed the options of buying a farm and staying in New York or heading west again, they set up minimalist house keeping: a kitchen and parental bedroom inside the small farm house and two tents in the front yard. My sisters and I slept in Henry with his beds made of two platforms which one pulled-out, propped underneath with poles and covered on top with thin foam mattresses. Between the house and Henry, my brothers set up a nameless pup tent and spread out their sleeping bags.
Inside the house, the downstairs echoed; upstairs, a mass of flies swarmed to keep us out of the empty bedroom. Inside Henry, I read books and enjoyed the cross ventilation of summer breezes blowing through the screened windows. On rainy nights we slept high and dry to the sound of raindrops hitting Henry’s canvas. To this day the sound of rain falling on tent canvas triggers waves of nostalgia.
Before school began, my parents bought a farm with plenty of head room in the barn and a two-story farm house with a completed basement. Gathering up household furniture, stored books and knick-knacks, we quickly set up housekeeping.
The girls received the two rooms and three closets at the head of the stairs. My brothers had a finished room to share to the left, but my oldest brother wanted his own space. He moved into the unfinished storage space with a vaulted roof. In the winter he watched snow drift down on his blankets and studied the amount of frost on the protruding tips of shingle nails to determine his clothing for the day. He may have been cold, but he had a room of his own and he did not move.
Within two years, my dad had developed a lung ailment related to the hay the cows ate. Once again my parents reduced everything to clothes, Molly, Henry and whatever else we could pack into them and a car top carrier.
Again, we moved to southern Arizona where my parents rented a small mobile home while they looked for a house to buy. I wanted the small, second bedroom in the trailer, but I was too tall for the built-in bed, so my littlest sister slept there. My next younger sister and I camped out on the sofa sleeper next to the kitchenette. That summer my brothers inherited Henry for their desert bedroom.
My big brother found a job, the rest of us spent a lot of time at the swimming pool while our parents found jobs, finished whatever paper work remained in New York and finally bought a cool, adobe house with a small, detached apartment-sized house behind it.
Suddenly, we had not one, but two houses, as well as Henry to shelter us and any guests.
After I married, my parents used Henry one more summer for bedroom space as they sorted out once again whether to live in Arizona or New York. Up in the mountains of northern Arizona, my sister said they played a lot of Monopoly beneath his blue canvas before my parents left one daughter to finish college in Arizona and took their youngest son and daughter to finish high school in New York State – where Henry settled into a well-deserved retirement.
(A contented house dweller, Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the El Dorado News-Times. She can be reached by e-mail at joanh@everybody.org)