The sounds of summer

The screen door on the Little House was never locked during our summers at the Bauman House. I still hear, at least in my dreams, the constant opening squeal of the door, and the gentle bang signifying its closing. The door was never locked until the last moments of our stay, when Mom, and her father, Pop, secured the actual front door, a massive thing that kept out intruders and locked the strange small place for the coming winter months.

Our kuchalein was open only during the summer months, and Labor Day ended the season, sending us all back from Parksville in the Catskills to our haunts, our homes, in Brooklyn or Newark or the Bronx. This was after the water was turned off and the first-floor windows were covered with specially prepared wooden shutters to keep out whomever. Looking back all those many many years now, I can’t figure out who would ever want to break in, since there was nothing at all of any value within the house.

No matter, the shutters went on anyway. It was part of the routine. And the only undesirables who did somehow manage to gain entry were the mice that Mom would eliminate competently when she arrived the following June. It was Dad who actually feared them, but Mom was completely nonplussed about what was just another part of the reopening.

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It was certainly a fairly primitive house, a real fire trap to be honest. We were lucky that nothing ever happened, because the fire department, which was all volunteers and anyway five miles away in Liberty, never could have arrived in time to save the building or its inhabitants. Almost all the adults smoked in those days, and Friday nights with the candles all aglow, was a really treacherous time. Never mind. It wasn’t a fire that laid waste to the place in the end! It was the old story that what you worried about most should not actually have been your focus. The real worry was Joey. He, too, will be for another day.

Was there anything as delicious as sitting on the front porch on a cool July or August evening, hearing the crickets perform an opera? It was clearly not an opera but their harmonizing was delightful nonetheless, a sound and a song I will never forget. The song was repeated nightly, always the same melody, a sound so soothing, especially when the stars were brilliant and the moon was aglow.

But yes, there were also the sounds of the cooking in the shared kitchens, somehow always peaceful, as if it was normal for three or four balabustahs to share a narrow space, whipping up endless tasty kosher meals. There were no dishwashers and only college-dorm-sized refrigerators, which were still a big improvement over their recent predecessors, the constantly dripping iceboxes. Each of the mamas had at least a couple of burners on the stove and a little niche in which to keep her supplies, as well as a small Formica table and some chairs. Somehow, unimaginably, it all worked.

But the sound that resonates the most, the sound that transported me from summer to the rest of the year, was the sound of ivory tiles clicking onto a folding card table, a vintage table with a top made of wood, a table placed on the porch and surrounded by four women, always women, playing the ubiquitous game, far from its roots in China, but adored by Jewish women throughout the Catskills, and throughout the five boroughs, down the New Jersey Shore, and throughout those great states of New York and New Jersey. It was known as mahjong.

In Parksville, they would play every single day, except Shabbat of course, when they avoided the gaming table, welcomed their husbands who had arrived on Friday, and prepared somewhat more elaborate meals. In their regular year-round homes they also played mahjong but never with the daily regularity of the porch games. It was undoubtedly from those summers on the Catskillian porches that the game moved out of Sullivan and Ulster counties, conquering mothers who may have had other interests, but none as worthy as the mahjong game. Certainly, the games were the high point of their summers. They loved to play, and play they did! It was ubiquitous and constant.

The moms barely had time to read a book or write a postcard. Small amounts of money were won or lost, but in the end it seemed to even out. If you won on Tuesday, chances were that you would lose on Wednesday. Mahjong wasn’t played with cards but with a small suitcase full of equipment, racks for holding ivory tiles, the tiles themselves, with characters in Chinese, and a card, a mahjong card, which gave that year’s formations.

Even my own mother, never one of the major players since she was the manager of the whole place and had other responsibilities, was an occasional player, usually filling in for someone else.

So I grew up with the sounds of 1 bam or 2 crack. I never learned how to play. But I had my own addiction. It was called bridge.

And so it was. Summer nights in the Borscht Belt. Never arguments about politics. After all, everyone was a Democrat.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of eight. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com