Not many kids have a mom like mine. I mean how many mothers do you know who have made a tent for their kids? It was the summer I turned twelve. Freddie had been gone two years. Mom thought it best we all learn to swim and so we had a pool in the backyard. The summer days were dull back then. No video games, TV was black and white and there were only three stations to choose from, and we had chores. We usually got the chores done early so we could spend the afternoon swimming. We lived outside of town and our pool was an above-ground pool about five-feet deep and we had a great diving board. The pool was behind a privacy fence, so we’d stand on the diving board and wave and yell at anyone passing by and disappear behind the fence.

That was the summer Patti and I wanted to have a sleep-over with our best friends. My best girlfriend was Margaret from church, but we nicknamed her Werby. All of us had nicknames but hers was the best and it stuck. She had a sister Nancy who was the same age as Patti. But since our friends lived in the next town, we had to plan what would we would do from one Sunday to the next Sunday. With a large, flat backyard, lots of trees and seven acres of woods, we had the perfect spot to entertain our girlfriends and have a camp out.

We made a complete itinerary of things to do each day. As we were compiling our list, Chip and Patrick came into our bedroom and like most brothers began pestering us about what we were doing. Finally, a ruccus ensued and the noise brought Mom upstairs to intervene. Chip left the room saying it wasn’t fair if the girls were going to have their friends over for a camp-out in the backyard, they should be allowed to have their friends over too. Chip’s best friend was Cary. His mom was Mom’s best friend June and they lived on a working dairy farm. Mom didn’t think Cary could be spared but she’d find out. As we shared our day-by-day itinerary, she realized this was something we had put real thought into and as we talked, she appreciated it might be fun.

“But what tent will you sleep in? Remember the hail storm we had camping last year? The bigger tent was ruined and all we have left is the pup tent.”

“Well, you could make one,” I knew Mom loved to sew. “Didn’t Auntie send you all that green denim?”

That denim was a huge bolt of dark green material and would be perfect for a tent, Mom said out loud but more to herself than us, “None of you kids will wear green denim jeans.” Well yes, it may have been the sixties, but green denim jeans were for Captain Kangaroo’s sidekick, not little girls in elementary school.
Her aunt was always sending us things in bulk and that green denim was the latest in a line of large deliveries that would intermittently appear at our doorstep. Once when we were visiting Auntie in Boston, Patti remarked that she liked the rice pudding Auntie served us. Wouldn’t you know about a week later, a delivery truck pulled up and out came cartons, no actually cases, of rice pudding! None of us really liked rice pudding. Even Patti didn’t really like it, she was being polite. Those cases of rice pudding were distributed at so many school events that I’m sure the town fathers thought we all lived on rice pudding. Once Auntie observed that we must use a lot of toilet paper in a family of nine. We always had kids at our house so Auntie probably thought there were more of us than we were.Which was sort of true because Patti’s friend Sandi was always at our house. But wouldn’t you know it, not much later a truck came rolling up the street with so much toilet paper that we had to store it all in the attic.

“Yes, that green denim would be perfect, but I’ve never made a tent!” Mom laughed.

“Bet you could!” all of us knew when Mom set her mind to doing something, it got done. Mom made all our clothes, so we figured a tent was easy enough.
Mom picked up a pencil from the desk and began to draw a tent in the form of a house.

“I would need to make a pattern. I have some netting and that would be good for the windows. I’ll need a strong zipper for the door. And what about the roof and the floor,” she was talking out loud while drawing and thinking about the fabric she had.

“That’s a lot of kids to feed for a whole week. We’ll have to charge admission - say about a dollar a day. And if I’m going to be sewing a tent, you kids will need to help out with the chores.”

That was fair and as the oldest (and I might add the bossiest), I set about to divide up the household chores amongst us all. Even the boys got excited anticipating something besides chores and swimming all day long.
“I will have to call all their moms to invite them and explain about the admission fee,” Mom was certain the other moms would appreciate a couple of days free of kids.

The next morning we were out of bed early and I had breakfast ready for the boys.They all headed outside to weed the garden and feed the animals while we took care of the inside chores. We had a garden of fresh vegetables all summer and Mom would can tomatoes for spaghetti sauce in the wintertime. Our farm was not a real farm. We actually called it the Funny Farm because we had an assortment of chickens and ducks, rabbits, geese, goats, and a pig we were fattening up for slaughter. We had names for all our animals. The pig became a family pet named Sylvester. We would stand outside the back door and yell, “Suey! Pig! Pig! Pig!” and Sylvester would come scurrying down to the back porch. His favorite place to sleep was stretched out on the side of the pool wall where it was cool and muddy from the oversplash. We all cried the day Sylvester went to the slaughterhouse. It took me a very long time to eat bacon after that. To this day I get sick whenever I eat pork.

So Mom called up all of our friends’ mothers. She made a pattern and layed it out on the kitchen floor. She cut out the various sections of the tent and began to sew. Werby and I talked on the phone every day and we could barely wait to go home after church the next Sunday. It was Tuesday so the tent had to be made within the week. Patti’s friend Sandi practically lived at our house. Sandi’s home life was not anything to be proud of and even today has told my mom that time spent at our house was her saving grace. She’s gone on to being really big in Mary Kay and is on her fifth pink Cadillac so she attributes her some of her success to her life at our home. When she heard Mom was making a tent, she decided she had to see that for herself! And of couse, she would pitch in and help out as Sandi was just like another one of us kids.

Now instead of a girls’ sleep-over, it was turning into a week’s camp-out that consisted of Patti and Sandi and Nancy and Werby plus my little sister Christine and another neighbor girl but I forgot her name. Oh, it was Cheryl and her home life wasn’t anything to write home about either.

The tent would need to hold seven of us girls and all our stuff so it had to be fairly large, but there was plenty of denim thanks to Auntie. As Mom pushed the denim through the needle of the large Bernina sewing machine, Sandi would hold the fabric at the other end so it wouldn’t put so much weight on the machine. The sewing machine was on the front porch and Sandi would stand in the living room and walk the material onto the porch and pick up the other end to keep it from falling on the floor. It wasn’t long before the big green tent began to take shape. It had a floor made of left-over grey denim. And it was so heavy that it took three people to carry it outside. She made a casing along the pitch of the roof and strung rope through the casing. At each corner where the sides met the roof were four rings. Ropes went through the rings tossed over tree branches and pulled like pulleys to lift the tent up. When the tent stood upright, all the kids cheered! It had a zipper opening for the window with netting so the mosquitoes would not get in at night. The tent had a large zippered front door. It was large enough to stand up inside and at twelve I was already at my full height of 5’2” and there was room to spare above my head. And Mom had made it from scratch!

Nancy and Werby had a brother Paul and he wanted to stay over too when he heard about the big green tent. And Mom convinced June to let her two boys come over. June said they could stay over two nights, so the boys pitched their pup tent for Chip and Patrick, Cary and his brother Craig who was my age, and Paul, also my age in their little pup tent. Mom spent most of the night sitting by her bedroom window making sure no hanky panky would happen during the nighttime with so many twelve-year olds in the back yard.

We had a blast that week! We may not have had a full week camping out. I seem to recall rain and sleeping indoors. But it was close to a week. All I know is we made good memories for lots of kids that week. We had fun; we laughed and sang Beatles songs, teased each other and splashed in the pool for hours. We ate up everything in sight as we were hungry! Being in the pool most of the day worked up our appetites. We teased Craig, whose twelve-year old voice was changing. We would call out from the girls’ tent to the boys’ tent in a deep gruffy voice, “Hey, Gregg!” Then we would roll over in fits of laughter. We went for moonlight swimming sessions trying to be extra quiet. We’d tip toe through the dewey grass and slither into the water, but we would scare one another in the pool and fall into fits of suppressed laughter.

Finally it was either the rain or the weariness of a patient mother that ended the greatest week in summertime history. Everyone had to eventually leave and go back to the usual summer boredom. But that week is stored up in our memory banks forever. Although we have lost touch with many of those good people, our childhood recollections are rich with a mother who knew how to sew and actually created from scratch a very big green tent. Sandi still talks about it today, “Who has a mother who makes their kids a tent!”

And Sandi knows that sewn up in the stitches of that tent was Mom's love for her children, a lot of laughter in our back yard, and a childhood rich with happy memories.