Kith & Kin

My cousin Peggy is three years older than I am. We have been close ever since we were very small children and she dressed me up in little girl clothes like I was one of her dolls. As far as I know, only one photo exists of me thusly attired, which is one more photo than I wish there were of me thusly attired. I once told my mother that when I grew up, I wanted to marry Peggy. Grandma Swartz, standing nearby, reacted in typical Grandma Swartz style. “Oh, Stevie, you can’t marry your first cousin! Your children will be deformed! They won’t be right!” Mom’s wise reply: “For heaven’s sake, Mom, he’s only five years old! He’s not really going to marry her!” Why our children would be deformed was a mystery to me, but it didn’t really matter in the long run because Peg and I never married each other anyway. Peggy and I got to discussing birthdays once when we were kids, and we came to realize that I was born on September 22, and she was born on December 22. “We were both born on the...

Fredericksburg, Ohio, 2010. It was the mid-1970s. My first cousin Peggy and I were both teens, and we were standing together at the top of The Cliff. The Cliff bordered my grandparents’ property and overlooked a portion of the village of Fredericksburg. Someone once told me it was about 140 feet high, but in my memory it seems much higher than that. It was cluttered with trees of various girths and scrubby weeds and rock outcroppings all the way down, and its base disappeared into the shallow water of Salt Creek. Mom and Dad and the grandparents had one rule about the cliff: Stay Away From It! So, being compliant children (as all children were in the 1970s), we obeyed. Until we got somewhere they couldn’t see us. We kids had a secret hideaway called “the Cliff House.” It was really just a little indentation in the rocky cliffside that you got to by holding on to a small tree as you went over the edge and stepped into the indentation. Its floor was maybe eight feet from the edge...

Mom (Jan Skaggs) looking young, slim, and attractive. Late 1950s? As I go through the photos in this album and reproduce them here, I am so thankful she kept the album and labeled many of the photos with names and dates! Keith, Dad, and me on Dad’s Schwinn, June 1965. I remember riding the bike this way. It was always a treat to go riding with Dad—and a little scary, as I balanced on that bar. And uncomfortable too! We would ride to downtown Fredericksburg, crossing railroad tracks on the way — bumpity bumpity bump, hold on tight! I assume this is the Cleveland Airport, June 1965. No one was hijacking or blowing up planes yet, so security was quite lax. It was fun (and loud!) to watch them take off and land. L to R: Steve, Keith, Dad. My first cousin Jill Skaggs, daughter of Dad’s brother Leo and his wife, Bonnie. What a cutie! Two more first cousins, Eddie and Kathy, son and daughter of Dad’s brother Eddie and his wife, Shirley. I wish I could have known my Skaggs cousins better growi...

Great-Grandma Slutz lived in a neat little house in Fredericksburg, Ohio. If you were walking north on Mill Street (tiny Fredericksburg’s main street), you would cross a bridge over Salt Creek and then cross the railroad tracks and pass by, on your left, a house with the name “Graber” written on the door (which I pretended said “Grabber” because it was the home of a monster who would grab children who walked too close to the porch), and the next home was Grandma Slutz’s. This was the route I took walking home from school each day, starting in kindergarten. Grandma’s house had several concrete steps—probably five or six—that led up to her porch. To me they seemed quite high. You could stand on her porch and look down at the sidewalk, where Grandma waged war on grass and weeds that dared to poke through the cracks in the walk. She showed me how to kill them by pouring salt water or boiling water on them. Both methods quite effectively discouraged further growth. Directly across the s...