The dark-green Railway Express truck had never stopped at our house before, and for six-year olds its arrival that spring day was excitement aplenty. But thinking back on it over 70 years later, I realize now that the heavy, paper-covered cylinder from the Olson Rug Company in Chicago dropped on our porch that afternoon marked a victory for our mother against the chain of misfortune that had left her alone during the war years to raise three young children.

Dad lay in a hospital bed at the Lakeview Sanitarium above the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, sixty-five miles away, fighting for his life against the tuberculosis that had raged undiagnosed in his slight body until he began coughing up blood. He would remain hospitalized for three years, enduring surgery that removed the upper half of his right lung and most of his right shoulder muscles. Mom, a former teacher, was left alone to run our small neighborhood store, The Blue Ribbon Grocery, and raise us children. My twin brother, Pat, and I were four-years old that warm-summer evening in 1942 that Dad left for the san, our sister, Mary, just one.

Those dark years were made even worse by the advent of World War II. We listened to the war news each night over our small radio, its brittle plastic shell, shattered by impatient blows that at best delivered momentary relief from the static, held together by white tape. German armies surged across France and the Low Countries, then Norway, the Balkans, North Africa and now Russia driving the population of most of an entire continent from their homes. From London, Edward R. Murrow described the horror of the blitz, and through his words processed though our young minds, we vicariously experienced the terror.

The entire population of Europe was on the move, made refugees by the advances of the German army and its allies. German submarines operated at will off the east and Gulf coasts. Tankers and freighters were sunk often within sight of the port from which they sailed. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese continued to roll over Southeast Asia, The Dutch East Indies, and US territory in the Philippines, Guam and Alaska. Even deep in the midwest, we participated in weekly blackout drills, closing the heavy, dark curtains over our windows and dousing all lights save the one Mom used to read to us.

It was uncertain that the U.S. itself would escape invasion, or that the US and its allies would win this war. In later years, Mom told us that at the time she wished we at least 14 years old so we could care for ourselves if the worst happened and we were forced from our home.

Having been left alone to run our small, neighborhood store, The Blue Ribbon Grocery, on the highway at the southend of town, and not having a car, Mom rented a small, white, wood-frame house on the next block from the store across the street from the Richland Co-op Creamery. We came to know it as the Little House. We moved in on a cold, November day, and those first nights, a corpulent aunt slept between Pat and I while mom slept with our little sister, Mary. When Mom was at the store, we were left in the care of a succession of hired help.

Resting on a crumbling stone foundation and a partial basement little more than a root cellar, the wood and linoleum floors of the un-insulated house were as cold as the frozen ground underneath. On cold mornings, we crawled out of our snug bedding and slipped our bare feet into our shoes. We carried our clothes into the living room and warmed them against the kerosene stove before jumping out of our pajamas and pulling on our trousers. It was the only place in the house where we could stand on the floor in our bare feet.

The stove became the center of our play, the place in later years where we would do our homework, and at bedtime where we changed into our pajamas. We could see the flames jumping cheerily through an isinglass window. When we came in from play after school, we sat in front of it and broke the ice from the cuffs of our long underwear. Three steps in a snow bank were enough to pull our trousers out of the tops of our rubber buckle boots allowing snow to pack in around our ankles. From November into April, we sported a ring of black chap there.

A coal stove heated the kitchen, and when we were big enough, Pat and I took turns lugging in scuttles of coal from the shed at the rear of the house and hauling out the ashes. Of necessity, mom bought the cheapest grade of coal, large chunks that had to be chopped up with an old axe before it would fit into the firebox. We took turns hauling in buckets of oil for the living room stove also, and woe be it to whoever let the stove run out.

The Little House did not have a hot water heater, and mom heated up pans and kettles of water for the dishes and our baths on a white-enamel kitchen range fueled by white gas. Nor did we have a refrigerator. An icebox sat on the back porch, just outside the back door. Above the icebox in the cold, humid air, Mom hung a cloth bag of popcorn. When popped, the kernels exploded into large white puffs, a treat – one of our only ones – each Sunday night after supper.

Late in the fall, in preparation for our long, Wisconsin winter, mom, helped by a neighbor, tacked a wide strip of black tarpaper around the foundation of the house. It was our job to rake leaves up against the tarpaper. Mom planted parsnips in the leaves, and later in the winter, with mittened hands, we dug down through the snow and composting leaves to harvest them.

After taking down the screens and putting up the storm windows, mom and her helper tacked panels of quilted isinglass over the doors and windows. The opaque covering admitted light but prohibited a clear view outside. It felt like we were living in a cocoon, and when in April the isinglass panels were peeled away and we could see the colors and experience the fresh, scented air of spring, we felt reborn.

But of all the things we needed or could use, a warm carpet for the living room was at the top of our mother’s list. In the war years, however, even if we had the money consumer goods were hard to come by. Everything, including wool for carpets, went to the war effort.

Unable to get wool because of wartime shortages, the Olson Rug Company offered to weave carpets from woolen rags provided by the customer. When mom learned of the offer, she began hoarding old woolens. In those years, we were blessed with a surfeit of hand-me-downs from people who knew of our plight. I imagine she also had help from her customers at the store. I do not know how long it took mom to hoard enough wool rags to make a carpet, but she did it.

The deliverymen had no sooner departed than Pat, trailed by Mary, ran up the street to the store to get Mom, but, still wearing her apron she was already on her way up the sidewalk. Impatient, Pat and I ripped and tore at the heavy paper covering and soon we laid bare the grey-fiber underside of a carpet rolled tightly around a heavy bamboo pole. Mom stood beaming.

Our neighbor, Kitty Durst, appeared, and she and our hired girl helped mom move our few threadbare pieces of living room furniture into the kitchen or out onto the porch. Barely allowing Mom time to sweep out the empty room, Pat and I helped lug the heavy roll in through the screen door. She stood back, beaming, as Pat, Mary and I dropped to our knees and un-rolled the stiff, new carpeting onto the bare floor. The oil stove was somehow lifted, the carpet slipped under it, the asbestos sheet it stood on replaced, and the stove set back down. Seconds later, we romped on the wine-colored wool rug.

With our new carpet, our living room became an inviting place. We no longer had to play on our cold, bare floor or wait for a playmate to invite us to romp on the warm, carpeted floor at their house. Friends would come to our house now. In those years, there was little new in any home, but Pat and I finally had something to brag about.

We had good news about dad, also. After years of bed rest, he had grown strong enough to undergo surgery. He would lose half a lung and the muscles in his right shoulder, but he would come home. After a long summer of recuperation, he would once again take over the running of our store.

With dad’s touch for retailing, and in the post-war prosperity, the Blue Ribbon Grocery thrived. We bought our first car. A new brother and sister joined us, John Timothy and Elizabeth Anne, and in 1949 we moved to a new, much larger house on North Central Avenue, and we no longer had to walk the mile to St. Mary’s school and back each day.

In the darkest moments of our lives, mom’s Olson rug had helped us past the turning point. Today, Mary, Pat, and I recollect the countless hours we played, read books or did our homework on that warm, burgundy rug under the watchful eye of the dancing orange flame in the isinglass window of the living room stove. But in retrospection, having ourselves had the responsibility of raising our own families, we think of our mother and the satisfaction she must have felt the day the Olson rug arrived.