When we moved in, the house had a lot of "issues."  The previous owner had a dog which had left its fleas on the carpet in front of the fireplace.  Naturally, the fleas decided I was the next best meal.  We had no idea what the little itchy bites were until we visited Doctor Rickert in Boonton.

The septic tank - or maybe it was actually a cesspool - was acting up and required excavation.  The furnace exploded at one point, sending fly ash all over everything.  Lighting inside was poor, and the interior was painted a brilliant salmon-pink color.  With so many trees and overgrown shrubs shading the windows, you felt like you were entering the mouth of a whale! The bathrooms, both upstairs, had fixtures and tiles in shades of brown, peach, and mint green.  The kitchen was tiled, both wall and ceiling, with yellow tiles.  My bedroom was over the garage, and occasionally I would be bitten in the middle of the night by a large spider.  Once, a tiny mouse ran across my pillow.

But some aspects of the property were very pleasant, at least to me as a child.  Outside my window was a wonderful mock-orange bush.  The lot had an overgrown back yard between us and the Kuntz's on Cobb Road.  (My father would burn trash in a barrel there.)

The back yard contained very tall tulip trees, many oaks, and a wonderful stream.  Until I got too old and "sophisticated", I would play by this stream for hours! The evening air was filled with the lovely and memorable song of the wood thrush (and of course, bluejays screamed during the day.) The slope down to Cobb Road was a sledding hill, although it was used only a few times while we lived there.  Down the slope by Cobb Road was a lovely, huge beech tree with daffodils growing beneath it - at least until mother killed them accidentally, with an out-of-control autumn leaf fire.  One of the oak trees on the slope accepted a rope swing.  You would run off to the side, holding onto a large knot at the end of the heavy rope, and swing around the tree, out over the slope.  When my friends and I got too "old" for that, mother planted the hillside in pachysandra.  The oak trees also housed many gray squirrel nests.  Mother would feed the squirrels from an upstairs window.  She had a name for each of them.

• I remember loving to read the books Miss Kerr suggested, and actually having fun diagramming sentences.
• I remember Emma Katherine Appleby Brocklebank, who often used her full name, and made us fill out sheets of paper with all the numerals from 0 to 9, and do it over until everything was legible.
• I remember a couple of trips to the Principal's office for bad behavior, mostly from tormenting the 8th grade science teacher, a quiet and gentle man.
• I remember a bunch of us also tormenting the 8th grade music teacher by signing the attendance sheet with fake names we hoped would be read out loud.
• I remember Mr. Yaudis (spelling?) who taught math my freshman year - his contract was not renewed.  He sat on top of his desk, wearing Bermuda shorts and a bowtie and telling off-color jokes.
• I remember Miss Vincent, and the artifice of having to choose a French name, and the mortification of having her look at our class photos and telling everyone that I had eyebrows like hers.
• I remember the awful 1950's food we cooked in Mrs. Coyne's home-ec class (e.g. creamed fish on toast points, jello salad.)
• I remember "Birdielegs" McManus, a wonderful biology teacher, even if she was a bit daft about the yellow bellied sapsucker.  We had a hard time believing it when she married and became Mrs. Ketterer - she was so OLD!
• I remember one day Mrs. Harris, our Latin teacher, showed up very properly attired as usual, in a navy blue suit, but minus her skirt - she had on a navy blue slip and probably didn't notice until after the class, when she went home.
• I remember Mr. Davidowski hurling an eraser at the boys who were in the back of the class and not paying attention.
• I remember putting together science fair exhibits, and hauling them to Princeton NJ.
• I remember shelving chemicals in Jay Elicker's stockroom as a volunteer, and becoming fascinated by organic chemistry in his class.
• I remember falling asleep in Mr. Pitt's physics class.
• I remember Miss Phelan saying over and over "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" and asking us what we thought about that.
• I remember Miss Blanchard trying to get all the girls to apply to Mount Holyoke.
• I remember the fun of taking drivers' ed with Coach Ciardi.
• I remember Mr.  McDowell and feeling very grown-up in his seminar-type class, analyzing the poetry of W.B. Yeats.
• I remember the dynamic Mr. Ready encouraging me to take voice lessons and giving me and another girl a very embarrassing duet to perform at the spring concert.
• I remember performing the part of "Ginger" in the drama club play, "Time Out for Ginger," and forgetting one of my lines in one of the performances, thus disappointing Mr. Harrison as well as myself.

We kinda moved in a flock, like Starlings, as most teenagers do, given the chance. 

As a younger child in Spokane, there were great opportunities for ballet, and I had studied it since age 3.  However, opportunities near Mountain Lakes were extremely limited.  A decision had to be made, was I going to devote my life to ballet, commuting to New York to study, or to academics? For me, as interested in science as I was, this was a no-brainer.  But for a time I did take acrobatic dance classes in Morristown.  We gave a recital that involved doing a hula.

I'm sure there were laws against underage drinking, but being a studious type from a teetotaling family, I wasn't directly aware of them...  but some of my classmates apparently were intimately familiar with them.

Because there were apparently no laws against discrimination in housing, there were no Blacks, hardly any Jews, no Latinos in town that I was aware of.  My parents told me that the real estate agents just would not show the available houses to people they deemed "undesirable." This subject came up when they noticed that I was dating the son of the "only" Jewish family in town.  They didn't object, just mentioned it in passing.

This boyfriend lived during the school year in Florida and went to military school there.  His mother often drove us to the movies in Boonton in her 1957 powder blue T-bird.  I loved that car!

From a teenager's perspective, the "greasers" lived in Boonton, and black women came out of Newark on the bus to houseclean.  The young people I knew wore madras plaid Bermuda shorts and "alligator shirts", and were expected to go to college.