Month: April 2015

A to Z Family Stories: F for Fred and Friend

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They just showed up one day and started hanging around our back porch for the shelter, I guess.  Fred and Skippy, two dogs probably out having fun, but of course we thought they were homeless, starving, needing love. So we named the big, fuzzy brown one Fred and the short legged black and tan one Skippy, and adopted them as our new farm dogs.  My brothers were always happy to have a dog or two around to play with and this curious looking pair was friendly and seemed to have adopted the boys too.  Then Fred had puppies.

Obviously, the naming came before anyone cared what gender they were, and looking at them it was much easier to imagine the big one being the boy and the little one being the girl. But, no. We don’t talk about Fred very much past this point and I think it’s because he she ran out on us – too much family responsibility I’m guessing.  My brothers decided to raise two of the puppies, again picking noble doggie names for them – Steve and Andy.

Everyone’s memory is kind of fuzzy about what became of Steve and Andy as well.  One of the problems with farm dogs was that they often craved the excitement of chasing cars. That was a problem with this rambunctious pair and likely the cause of their demise. Which brings me back to Skippy, the one we remember most fondly.

It became apparent that Skippy had at one point been someone’s house dog.  He was very comfortable coming in and generally well behaved.  Even mom liked him.  He was always willing to eat leftovers that no one else wanted and that was his main diet.  No one ever thought of buying food specifically for the dog, not on the farm.  There were always other “things” for them to eat.  And here comes the part of the story that we always laugh at when talking about Skippy.

When we milked cows, the milk was poured into a funnel like strainer with a heavy paper filter at the bottom, and into large metal cans.  Washing up the equipment, we always took the filter out and tossed it – into Skippy’s mouth.  He loved the wet, milky circles and pretty much swallowed them whole.  Evidence of this would come in the spring as the snow melted and exposed the little white piles all over the lawn.  They were composed of milk filter material and tin foil, swallowed with his leftovers.

Skippy was an adventurer though.  He considered us his home but the world was his playground and he would be seen at neighboring farms and sometimes out in the woods. He often came back with wounds and bite marks, looking as if he had been fighting with other dogs.  For a small dog, he had an amazing amount of hormonal motivation leading him to wanderlust.  He may have just disappeared, like he came.  No one remembers exactly.  We’ll just say that maybe he and Fred found each other again and lived happily ever after…

A to Z Family Stories: E for Every Easter

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There we were.
There we were.

There we would be – however many of us there were at the time.  All lined up, or as close to that as possible, in the moment before the boys got into some dirt, the moment before we were herded into the car – hopefully not late for church.  It was the Easter photo op.

Weeks before the event the planning would begin.  Mom always made a new dress for me and I still have memories of many of them, partly from seeing the pictures so many times but also I remember how I felt in them, what I thought of the fabric, who I was trying to look like.  Little girls always got a hat. Who started the Easter bonnet thing is still a mystery to me but it was a habit that died hard.  Easter was also one of the two times when one might expect to get new shoes to go with the new dress.  And because the snow might be melting by Easter I sometimes got to wear the new shoes without boots over them.  There were so many things about the holiday that spoke of spring freedom.

The real miracle of Easter was getting all my brothers cleaned up and dressed in their church clothes before something tragic happened to one of them. For simplicity’s sake they always had matching outfits in various sizes. Often one component or another would go missing – a sock, a belt, a shoe – adding to the craziness of the morning.  I can remember family routines of getting things ready on Saturday nights (commonly referred to as bath night). Shoe polishing must have been one of my favorite things to do as I have a mental picture of small shoes lined up, last week’s newspaper underneath them to protect the floor.  But it was mom who did most of the work. I think she was the one who took most of the pictures, just to prove she had done the job.

Our church family and the routine of the church calendar added much to my growing up years.  It was a pretty safe place to be, and there weren’t expectations of perfection that left me disillusioned, jaded or burned out.  We were just people and we seemed to know there was something about God that called for our attention.  Sometimes we gave it fully and lots of times we didn’t. I don’t think God was surprised.

D for Detour

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  I did not announce “family stories” as a theme for the whole challenge because I knew there would be days when I would depart from it.  Today is one of those days.

Longboat Key – so called because it is shaped like a, well, like a longboat and is about ten miles long with a small drawbridge on the north end and another bigger bridge on the south end going over to Sarasota, the mainland.  I was working today on the very north end.  I finished my job and headed home.  There was a long line of stopped cars as I came to the drawbridge and I assumed a boat was passing through and the bridge was up.  A short wait and we moved forward, and then we stopped again.  This time the wait was unusually long.

An ambulance came up behind me.  The road going over the bridge is only two lanes and the ambulance had no opposing traffic coming from the other direction so it went past.  Then a fire truck also went past, siren going, lights flashing. Two police vehicles followed.  A couple cars in the line ahead of me turned around on the bridge and headed back south.  For me, getting home would be well over an hour if I had to go all the way down to Sarasota to hit the mainland.  Surely whatever it was could get cleared up in less time than that.  I would wait.

I looked at facebook on my phone, I took some pictures of the boats lined up on the sandbar.  About 45 minutes later some pedestrians came across the bridge and were stopping to talk to people waiting in their cars.  “The bridge is closed. They are turning traffic back on both sides. Turn around.” they told me.  I got out and walked a short way, not even to the middle of the bridge and saw what was left of a small bright green moped crumpled in the middle of the lane. Ahead of it was a black sedan with the back window completely smashed out.  A young man was sitting down outside the sedan with his head in his hands.  The policeman guarding the scene, came over and confirmed that the bridge would be closed for some time – best to turn around. There was going to be accident reconstruction which probably meant a fatality had occurred.

I headed south,

thinking about the two hours I was spending making the half hour trip home,

thinking about missing lunch and being hungry,

thinking about the man sitting beside his car,

about the hole in his window and the smashed moped.

Someone’s life took a very unexpected turn on that bridge a few hours ago.  Someone would not be celebrating Easter in the morning, or perhaps ever again.  And yet for me, it was only a detour.  I was shaken.

A to Z Family Stories: C for Cat Tamers

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This is a collection of family stories that are told repeatedly anytime the Smith clan congregates during a vacation or a holiday.  I’m sure some of them are told more from my perspective than others but I welcome added insight from those involved. These stories are part of who we are and I want them recorded. Not all of them are pretty, but that is ok. 

Young ones growing up on a farm had an important job. It was taming the kittens.

Cats are an essential element on a farm. Barns and other farm buildings are like hotels for mice if there are no cats around to keep them in check. Most of our cats were not the pampered, brushed and combed, vaccinated and neutered kind that are fed fancy food. Barn cats were and are excellent hunters who feed on small rodents almost exclusively and travel around the farm at will. And even if some cats were neutered or spayed, there was no guaranateeing that the neighbors cats were, therefore … kittens abounded.

You found them in the hayloft. You knew to look because a cat who had been looking kind of hefty for a while was suddenly skinny. We loved going into the loft to look for kittens because it was the ultimate scavenger hunt. You could follow mama cat if you were wiley enough to not let her know, otherwise you just had to start searching the crevices between the bales and hope you got lucky. The prize was finding that sleeping pile of gorgeous kitten fur, four or five of them most of the time. They were often a variety of colors and patterns, tiger stripe, calico, orange tiger, black and white, or maybe even solid black. It was best to find them when they were very young and let them see you often as they grew, but sometimes the mother would be skeptical of motives and move the family to a new hiding place. So the hunt would resume.

Older kittens were more difficult to deal with. They would instinctively hide and bite and scratch, but if they weren’t tamed they would grow up wild and too many wild ones would result in a cat population growing way out of bounds. Our job as children was to find, tame and help the kittens be people friendly so they could possibly go to a new home.

One time, my brother Stubby (we don’t call him that anymore) had been working on an older kitten and was making some headway when he heard of a family in need of a cat. He very much wanted them to take this kitten and was able, with difficulty, to get it into a box. With glowing reports of how pretty this kitty was he took them to the barn to see their new pet. Unfortunately, every time the box was touched it exploded into a shaking, jumping, growling, banshee shrieking package that was not very inviting. Amazingly, they took it.

As a young mom, I was able to live once again on the farm where I grew up. My own children learned the art of cat taming just like I had. They carried kittens in their arms, dressed them up in doll clothes, put them to sleep in dresser drawers (which was the first place we looked when one was missing) and in general subjected them to all sorts of handling. They were gentle and bomb proof by the time they were grown. Caring for them provided many lessons and so much fun for my own two cat tamers.

Esther and White Necklace (they always had descriptive names)
Esther and White Necklace (they always had descriptive names)
Julia and Rebel, asleep for the moment.
Julia and Rebel, asleep for the moment.

A to Z Family Stories: B for the Basement

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Cool. Dark. Smelling of wet earth and cobwebs.

It was the basement, or more commonly, “the cellar”. It was the place mom went to fetch a jar of green beans, or dad went to see if a fuse had blown, or something had gone wrong with the pump for the well. It was the place in my dreams, and sometimes for real, where we went when funnel clouds were feared and things started flying around in the wind outside. I had watched “The Wizard of Oz” religiously for years and knew the cellar was the place to be.

It was a dangerous place for children, or so we were told (until we were old enough to work at cleaning it). It was the cellar steps that scared our parents the most. The only access to the basement was outside – a cement staircase, worn and a bit jagged, descending down into the ground under our house. Retaining walls on either side were probably meant to hold a door that would keep little children from falling into the abyss, but I don’t remember when our doors disappeared or if they were ever there. I remember playing on the steps. It was a cool retreat in the summer. It was my pretend home where I “cooked” mud pies decorated with dandelions and put my dolls to sleep.

At the bottom of the staircase, was a heavy, ill-fitting door with an unusual latch. I remember worrying about opening it, and then worrying again about being able to get it closed. A door left open might be a nocturnal invitation to a skunk, or something bigger. Who knew? And of course, a small child, mistakenly left behind in the cellar might not be discovered for some time

The floor inside was dirt, uneven with cement scraps and piles of “stuff” that kids couldn’t identify. In one corner was old wooden shelving that held dusty jars of produce, canned and stored from previous years gardens. The other corner housed a pump on a cement block. It dripped water and the dampness and faint smell of mold permeated the room. We knew our water came from somewhere under the pump and whether or not it was working was always of great concern to our parents.

Stories of the cellar would not be complete without mentioning it’s most numerous occupants – the family Arachnidae opiliones, Harvestman, or as we called them “daddy long legs”. Somehow we didn’t fear them as we would a spider. Their long spindley legs made them look too clumsy to be vicious. They were interesting and I watched them often. Others were not content to watch and I’m sure some torture occurred during moments of childhood boredom.

I’m just sayin’, I remember the cellar. It was part of our world, our house. Not many of them left.

Our “daddy long legs” looked like this friendly guy

A to Z Family Stories: A for the Apple Tree

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This is a collection of family stories that are told repeatedly anytime the Smith clan congregates during a vacation or a holiday.  I’m sure some of them are told more from my perspective than others but I welcome added insight from those involved. These stories are part of who we are and I want them recorded. Not all of them are pretty, but that is ok. 

 

 

 

It was a friendly tree for small people, having branches down low and plenty of climbing space. When the leaves were on you could hide in it, and that happened from time to time. We had to cross a small distance of back yard, squeeze between the barbed wire and the lower part of a fence, run up hill through a narrow field and at the edge of a woodlot of hardwoods was the smaller, evenly proportioned crab apple. All of us learned to get there quickly. It was far enough away to be secretive yet close enough that everything on our small farm was within sight and hearing.

There would be a time each spring when we would suddenly notice the tree getting white with blossoms. It was an obligatory ritual to get a bouquet of branches for the house and we would always go up to the tree with excitement and then remember the bees. Lots of bees, and there would always be some on the branches that we wanted to pick. But the smell of apple blossoms was strong and wonderful, filling the air. We would be brave, grab our prize branches and run back to the house, imaginary insects chasing us down the hill.

The time would come when the ground beneath the tree would be white because the petals had fallen off, like snow floating on the breeze. Instead of being white the tree would get faintly green, then darker as the leaves grew bigger. The little green apples would appear where the blossoms had been. It was safe for climbing then. The bark was often marked with woodpecker holes – I don’t know why I remember that so clearly. You could read a book in that tree. Or play all kinds of pretend situations. I had dolls, but more often it was kittens that got dressed up as babies and put to sleep in a box under the tree while I went to forage for food in the woods. The tall grass of the field would be the walls of our house and the tree was the second story.

The apples didn’t need long to ripen. I think sometime in July we would see them start to redden. They were too sour for anything except apple butter that had sugar to sweeten it up. But it was these little apples that made their way into the story that my family tells when we are together thinking about our childhood. My four younger brothers were a tribe of wild ones and I was occasionally put “in charge” or so I thought, when our parents were away briefly. One time we had an inept babysitter who was doing very little to shepherd the flock and a disagreement arose. It quickly escalated and the rebellious leader of the wild ones, who knew better than to throw rocks, decided crab apples would be suitable. The hard little bullets were easy to throw. I ran to the house and locked them out which made them even more angry.

I got bigger. The tree seemed smaller. I don’t remember when it started dying and losing branches. Years later I visited the farm and the tree wasn’t there any more. I was sad, but it seems that is the way with all things that live, and then they don’t. Except in our memories, for a while.