The Little Town Time Forgot

The family, people and events in his novel are totally fictional,
any resemblance to any person alive or dead is strictly coincidental.
The events are based on stories I remember hearing as a child,
some I witnessed, some I obsorbed through osmosis,
from the little towns of
Concho, St. Johns, Springerville,
Eagar, Woodruff, Holbrook, Jo City,
and all the little small towns along the
Little Colorado River Valley and the towns of the
High North Eastern Plateaus of Arizona.

************

Can the traumas and memories of childhood

suppressed over a lifetime of denial,

be turned over to Jesus Christ

for a post war child to

be healed and feel whole again,

turning a child's heart to the fathers.


*************




THE HEART OF A CHILD



For the first ten years of my life, my town was my only world.

It was bounded on the west entrance by a bridge that crossed the

Little Colorado River.

Two miles to the south was the New Dam,

to the east stood two miniature volcanic buttes and a lake,

and one mile north the big volcano butte shaped like a chocolate chip.

The sun and moon rose over the small buttes

and set beyond the bridge and the huge blue dome of the sky surrounded us,

protecting us from the outside world.

The first time I heard the world was round I knew it was true.

We lived inside of it, and the round dome of the sky

made a bowl shaped protective shell around us.

The sun, moon and stars hung from the underside of the dome.

I never knew my father, only that he died on a beach at Normandy

in the war to end all wars.

The only picture I have ever seen of him is with my mom

in front of the Arizona Temple in Mesa.

My mother was eighteen and he was twenty three.

He was too young to enlist when news of the war came,

and tried to help his family,

but he was drafted soon after he turned 22,

and two weeks before he reported to boot camp, they were married;

I was borne nine months later.

My mother received a telegraph before I was born

describing how he died valiantly in the field of battle protecting his comrades.

Along with a package with his medal and a folded flag,

but he was buried in a memorial cemetery somewhere in Europe.

We lived in grandmother's house where my mother and her brothers grew up

there through World War I and during the Great Depression.

When none of the men could get work outside of My Town,

families made do with what they had.

They raised their crops, planted and irrigated their farms.

They milked cows and gathered eggs just as their fathers

and grandfathers had done ever since Brigham Young

sent colonists to settle along the Little Colorado River

throughout Northern Arizona.

Because they were self sufficient most of the families

survived the depression years and the both world wars.

Many of the men in town traded work with each other

to build their homes from the malapai rock at the base of the volcano.

They added new rooms and a porch to the little house.

Grandfather and Grandmother were both born just before the new century began.

They married at the beginning of World War I.

He served in the army at the end of the War I,

and we had a picture of him in his uniform.

He struggled to build up the family farm,

combining his and Grandma's family farms into one.

Grandfather went into debt to build up the farm

and improve the equipment in the mid twenties.

The banker told him with a new tractor

he would be able to double his crop and pay off the debt on the new land

and buildings in no time,

and convinced him his family needed the advantages of an improved home.


Then the Great Depression came, and he couldn't pay off the loan.

Some of the land was repossessed by the bank.

The federal government made jobs for the men

like building national forest trails,

and parks like the Petrified Forest National Park to help them get work.

All the grown ups thought this would help Our Town to grow as well,

and, he along with his older sons and many of the other fathers

took jobs building highways across the state.

The days of poverty and despair were ending and everyone was predicting that

Our Town and the county seat would not only grow but flourish.

Our house was one of several black stone houses set back away

from the main highway that ran beyond the new dam,

south along the Silver Creek through Hay Hollow and on up south to the next town.

In the other direction the road curved around and beyond the black mountain

following the path of the Little Colorado river to the county seat.

My town might have been the center of the world

were it not for the highway built bypassing it,

leaving it isolated in the middle of the high desert plateaus

of the Southwestern desert.


After World War II ended, Grandfather took a job with the state highway,

working through the winter hoping to pay off the debt to avoid losing any more land,

hoping to keep the house and enough farm land for his family needs.

With the job came life insurance which covered the men

in case of accidental death on the job.

But the expenses of working used up much of the income,

and kept him away from farm needs during the week.

They were working on a piece of highway that would cut the travel time

to Phoenix by building a bridge across the Salt River Canyon

and a tunnel through the mountain between Globe and Superior.

Even though my Uncles were near twenty

Grandfather didn't think they could run the farm well enough by themselves.

When he was home on weekends he tried to line up the work for the week,

but I guess the boys didn't live up to his expectations,

and things began to fall apart.

He was upset and angry with his sons,

then the banker came out one weekend and talked to Grandfather

about repossessing more land.

It was obvious there wouldn't be enough cash crop

to pay off even the interest on the loan.

He fought with the older boys then became silent.

The way Grandma told the story over and over again to Mom,

"the night before, he just sat out on the little butte watching the sun set.

I thought he was praying for a way to get out of debt and save the house.

When he came home he was smiling and happy.

He apologized to his older sons, cuddled the little boys in his lap

and spoke so softly to you.

He hugged me close and told me everything was going to be all right.

The next day men came to the house.

They told me while he was working at the site

he was hit by one of the dump trucks that came along

with a load of fill dirt."

Mom would tell Grandmother that she remembered,

even though she had only been about my age.

She hugged Grandma letting her cry again over the loss.

Grandmother would never say he was killed, or died,

she always said, "When Father --uh -- went away."

I don't remember any of it, except hearing bits and pieces of the story

from time to time. The word suicide was never spoken,

but somehow, even at eight I picked up enough pieces of the story

to know it had not been an accident.

Grandfather had died to collect the life insurance to

pay off the house and farm so Grandma would never have

to worry about paying the debts.

Two of my uncles were small when Grandfather, uh, went away,

so they were just seven and ten years older than I.

Mom was nine. I wasn't even been born for eight more years.

When My mother was a teenager and her older brothers

continued to work out of town, working on the highways

or at the paper mill to support their own families and help Grandma.

Even though the state life insurance settlement had paid off all the debt

on the house and farm, Grandmother, a widow, needed the income they brought

in to pay the taxes on the farm and house and to provide necessities

for her family. They saw that farming could not bring in the income they needed.

I wondered if Grandmother would have rather had Grandfather at her side

than the paid off debt.


Often they came home with friends from their job. My father was one of them.

He had dinner with my uncles and grandmother, and told them he had enlisted

for the war. Within a few weeks, he and mother were married,

and then he was gone. Neil was my father.

Mother never even got to move out of that house.

I was born and raised there.

Three of my uncles waited until they were drafted to join up,

and returned after war, married, and increased their families in houses

they built from used lumber and volcanic rock on pieces of grandmother's farm land.

So, even though I was an only child, I was surrounded by cousins,

of various degrees as well as neighbors.

Later we became known as the baby boomers,

me and my younger friends who were born at the end of the war

to the returning soldiers.

In My Town we were just a bunch of cousins and friends growing up together.

We went to school in the school house in the middle of town.

Until after the war we also met there on Sundays for church.

We all helped build the little church in the middle of town.

Our fathers hauled lumber and cut and nailed until the roof was completed.

Then Brother Allen designed and built the beautiful sandstone design

on the front wall.

The old town bell was set in a cement slab with a

circle of flowers around it and the building was dedicated to the Lord,

as was he cemetary.

At least four generations of our grandparents were buried

in the cemetary. The grave yard was just out of sight east of town,

but south of the little buttes. The markers are in rows,

with the names of families, infants, parents and grandparents.

Most of the names were on my family tree, so most of the people in

My Town were my cousins or aunts and uncles.

Those who weren't, we called Uncle or Aunt out of respect.

Grandma showed me where she would be buried next to grandfather when she died.

She said then they would be together forever.

On my eighth birthday I was baptized in the Little Colorado River,

under the bridge, by my sixteen year old uncle,

and confirmed by an older uncle immediately afterwards.

It was late April but I was still freezing and shivering

as the men stood in a circle and placed their hands on my head.

There were so many of them that they only put one hand on my head and the other,

they rested on the shoulder of the man next to them.

I couldn't even think about the words of the blessing, I was so cold,

but the words temple marriage and honor my parents,

raising children hung heavily in the air.

I kept scrunching further and further down in the chair

because all the hands were so heavy on my head.

Now I was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,

and knew I had to be perfect.

And I really tried.

When we washed the white pants and shirt that I wore in the river

they wouldn't come white again without we washed them twice with bleach.

Grandmother told me that mud was like sin, and the bleach was like repentance,

and if we sinned we could get white and pure again because of what Jesus did for us.

Grandmother always had plenty of chores for me.

She always had a big garden so we could dry and bottle plenty of vegetables

in the fall. We had rows and rows of cabbage that would be stored in the

root cellar in clean river sand, along with the carrots.

There was a whole section of tomatoes and chile plants.

We planted small seed potatoes cut in cubes to grow more potatoes and

small onions sets to grow big onions.

We had a whole field of sweet corn, and another of melons,

and my uncles liked to grow a little colorful Indian corn just to sell to tourists.

A smaller area of the garden was filled with okra, squash and green beans.

By summer the peas stopped growing, and we had eaten most of them fresh

so we didn't often bottle any.


We had row and rows of string beans.

We picked and snapped string beans every evening after dinner.

Then when we had enough bottled and had eaten all we could stand,

we let the rest grow to mature and dry.

In the fall we picked the whole plants and threw them onto a big tarp in the yard.

A bunch of us kids would stomp around on them.

We'd get to shoving and wrestling in the pile of bean plants,

but for that one day it was ok because the more we played,

the more dry beans came out of the dried pods.

Then we shook the canvas so the beans settled to the bottom

and raked the stems leaves and pods off the top and stored the beans in buckets.

Then during general conference the first Saturday and Sunday in October

we gathered around the radio in the kitchen to listen and

clean the rocks and stems from the beans so they would be clean

and ready to wash and cook.


Grandma just about always had a pot of beans soaking, cooking or setting out.

Another thing that seemed to grow in the garden and fields was petrified wood.

It seemed like every time we hoed a row there was

a hunk of petrified wood in the way.

Some were the size of my fist, and others as big as my leg.

The garden was surrounded with hunks of petrified wood.

We just chucked it over into the pile to get it out of he way.

From the fields my grandfather and great grand father

had brought pieces the size of fire wood.

Whole logs were scattered further out and brought in from time to time.

Sometimes we sold more petrified wood than we did garden vegetables in the summer.

There were rows to hoe in the garden all summer,

but when Grandma was satisfied that my chores were done,

the cow milked properly, and the eggs gathered,

I had free time to spend with my cousins and neighbors.

I don't know who was really related, but we all thought we were cousins.

I can't even remember their names. There were a bunch of us kids around my age,

about every family in town had a kid within a year or two of when I was born,

some families had two or three. There were two sets of twins.

After women started working in factories and taking men's jobs during the war,

we all learned to do all the chores, so all the boys and girls milked,

cooked, washed dishes and fixed fence. Even those who were younger than I.

When we were little we had to stay in my grandma's yard

or what ever house we were at after dark,

there just weren't a lot of bigger kids to tag around with,

but by the time we were eight we could really go places,

as long as we stayed within the boundaries of the great sky dome,

we were free to travel. We were the big kids.

As soon as the nights stopped freezing, near the last of the school year

we started planning Friday night sleep outs.

Our first one we all slept in Grandma's back yard, like we had summers before.

"I can't see any good will come of sleepovers.

Why, in my day..." Grandma warned Mom.

"Oh, Mom," my mother answered.

"They're just little kids, let them be children and have some fun.

We don't all have to be grown up before our time. Dr. Spock says..."

The yard had a high wooden fence and a gate that latched.

We could go into the house through the mudporch and into the kitchen,

and the old out-house was at the far back corner,

far enough away not to smell, but close enough to use.

We had a running water in the kitchen.

Grandfather had put a pipe through the kitchen window

and into a sink in the kitchen.

There was a pipe underneath for the water to drain out.

By the time I left town we had indoor plumbing in the bathroom and a sceptic tank.

One of my chores by the time I was eight was to make sure there was

enough wood split and stacked near the wood stove in the kitchen.

My uncles split the bigger logs into fourths, then I made smaller pieces

with a hatchet so we could start fires in the cooking stove in the kitchen.

Even in May, it felt really good to run into the kitchen

first thing in the morning and feel the heat from the stove

as I dressed for school.

The smell of muffins or biscuits always made my tummy growl

while I was washing my face and hands in the kitchen sink

with the warm water from the stove.

Grandma kept a kettle of water on the stove all the time.

She said the humidity would keep us from getting sick.

I guess the neighbors didn't keep a kettle on their stove,

because in the middle of the summer the twins got sick.

One of them died after being sick two weeks.

The other one got well, but couldn't ever walk after that.

They said it was polio. Another friend had whooping cough and

had to stay in his house the whole summer.

No one could go near him.

When my uncles came down with the mumps at the same time,

they had to stay in bed more than two weeks,

and the doctor said they would n't be able to have children because of the Mumps.

I couldn't go near them because Mom didn't want me to get the mumps too.

We all got the measles at the same time, so no one had to worry

about us getting together. The moms said might as well get them all at once

and have it over with. Some of the moms even brought kids over to my house

so they could have them and be through with it.

The next winter we all had the chicken pocks.

Grandma worried more about small pox than about measles.

None of us ever got small pox.

But after the polio crippling my neighbor a

and measles making another friend so he couldn't hear,

I thought I couldn't think of anything worse could happen,

then we started getting strep throad and rosiola --

they called it scarlet feaver.

The doctor said it might hurt our hearts,

but there was nothing they could do to prevent it.

We just had to let the feaver burn itself out.

Grandma made us drink Brigham tea and alalfa tea every night,

and when we had lemons or oranges she sliced them into the tea

with honey and said that would keep us from getting sick.

She wrapped us up in quilts during the day and night to sweat out the feaver.

When I as really little, I somehow came to realize that my friend,

who as the same age as me, wasn't growing.

He couldn't sit up, and he couldn't talk.

I guess I was about three and I wanted him to play with me.

I kept praying every day that he would be able to walk and talk and play with me.

I prayed for a long time, and then he died when I turned five.

I didn't understand why God hadn't answered my prayers.

I had prayed everyday for as long as I could remember,

but my friend died anyway.

And we had a funeral for him.

We buried him in the cemetery in a little tiny coffin

that his father built for him.

When I got bigger I walked to the cemetery

sometimes and looked at that little tiny grave,

and wondered why God had let him die.

I wondered if he would let me die if I got sick,

even though I would pray and ask him to make me well.

The left over heat from the dinner fire kept the

pot of water on the stove warm through the night.

It was so much better than having to break the ice

in the bucket on the mud porch, or worse,

go out to the well to get a new bucket full.


Grandma always made hot bread, eggs and bacon or sausage for our breakfast.

She said we had to have a big breakfast to get us through the day.

Sometimes in the summer time we had apples, peaches or pears.

I thought the apples were best to eat when they were green.

I bit into them then sprinkled with salt.

But pears only seemed to be good on a certain day.

First they were too crunchy, but without the sour tart taste of the green apples.

The pears had to sit in a basket til the day they turned yellow,

then we had to eat them and bottle all we could, because in a day

or two they would turn brown and be smushy and rotten.

Once in a while during the winter my uncles would bring

a whole box of oranges from Phoenix.

They were so juicy the juice would run down my chin.

I love the smell of oranges.

Grandma would cut the oranges into small sections,

then I liked to bite out all the pulp and keep the peel in my mouth

covering my teeth. I'd punch someone and grunt

so they could see my great orange smile.


So when we had that first sleep over in grandmas yard she made us

some buicuit dough and let us cook it in a dutch oven.

They were burnt on the bottom and were doughy in the middle,

but the tops were brown and with enough honey,

we all thought they were the best we'd ever had.

We drank gallons of cold milk.

By the time I was nine I could milk the cow all by myself.

From the time I could walk steadily I helped herd the cow into the barn,

close the stanchion bar across her neck and brush the udder

so it would be ready to milk.

I loved it when my uncle sprayed a stream of milk

right into my mouth while he was filling the bucket with warm foaming milk.

Our kittens would stand close by hoping for a stream to shoot their way.

We always had a litter of kittens around.

Tabby was the greatest mouser in town.

She could catch a mouse on the run and snap its neck before it knew what happened.

The neighbors all wanted one of her kittens for their barn

because they knew what good mousers they would make.

We never had to drown a single kitten.

There was always a home for good mousers.

Old grey was usually the father,

so the litters would turn out orange and grey

some looking like the pop and some looking like the mom,

and a few were just all mixed up looking like little racoons, or small tigers.


Everyone was always telling me not to hold the newborn kittens too much,

because it would kill them, but I loved to feel the velvety soft fur

against my neck, and I sometimes carried one around under my shirt.

It tickled me when it wriggled around and I could never hide it for long.

Anytime one of the kittens died, I knew everyone blamed me, and I felt terrible.

When I was baptized, I hoped that I would be forgiven for killing kittens.


When I was still little my uncles found Old Grey

caught in a cayote trap with his back leg all mangled.

They didn't want to kill him so they used their boy scout first aide skills to

finish cutting off the dangling back leg and bandage it all up.

After a few weeks it was healed up and Old Grey ran around the farm on three legs

legs good as he ever had on four.

They let me help them when they made a parachute for Old Grey.

They climbed up the ladder to the windmill and I handed them the cat.

Up they climbed to the top, fastened the parachute harness around

Old Grey and tossed him from the top of the tower.

Sure enough, he landed on his feet and ran like crazy.

We didn't see him around for three days.

He never slept under the windmill tower after that.

The windmill pumped the water up from the well.

Since the wind blew most of the time in Our Town,

we always had plenty of water and electricity.

It was the windmill that ran the generator so we could have electricity

in the kitchen. The windcharger had six big batteries that charged up

from the motion of the windmill, storing it and turning it into electric current.

We could only use it a few hours a day, and only had hook ups in the kitchen,

but grandma was real proud of it.

Our house was the first in town to have electric lights.

Once my uncles came back from Phoenix with a box of oranges

and some tales about all the houses having electric lines to them,

and all the rooms in the houses had lights.

Then I knew they were lying when they tried to tell me that

some people had a box in their living rooms that showed moving pictures.

They called it a television. I couldn't even imagine how that could be.

I had never even seen a moving picture, and I didn't believe for a minute

that they were telling the truth, but I always tried pretend we had one.

So I read stories, then pretend they were on my imaginary television set.

We did have a radio, and a victrola with some records.

The victrola we had to wind up the handle, it was one

Grandma had a long time before I was born.

She liked to play music records and sing to them.

The radio was electric so we could only run it when the generator was on,

but almost every evening we listened to a radio show, Abbot and Costello.

Burns and Allen or a special music variety night program.

Sometimes we had to listen to a news broadcast.

It seemed like all they ever talked about was the Nurinberg trials.

Grandma and Mom would sit forward on their chairs,

drop their darning in their lap and just listen.

I asked my Mom what the trials were about.

She told me during the war some of the German army officers

did some really bad things to people and then they

ran away when the war ended.

So as they were found, they were being tried for criminal acts.

By that time the war had been over most of my life

and I just had to wonder why they would bother.

The guys were probably so old it wouldn't matter anyway, I puzzled.

To me, the war seemed like ancient history.


Nearly every Friday night during the summers we got together for a sleep over.

Sometimes we slept in my aunt's yard, or in the neighbors.

We took turns at all the houses.

For the night before the fourth of July we planned a sleep over at the old dam.


It had been built just up river from the settlement

to divert water to the irrigation ditches for the farms.

I heard it was built three or four times, and then when the spring floods

came from melting snow up river, the dam broke and had to be built over again.

The joke was that Out Town just wasn't worth a dam.

We liked to say it because we could swear without getting in trouble.

It was kind of like talking about Hadies using a bible verse.

It just felt so grown up to use words like that and not get in trouble.

We walked from Grandma's house with sacks of home baked bread

and cold fried chicken and cookies.

Up the road, past the school house and west two blocks to the edge of the

river canyon, then hiked down one of the trails that led to

the bottom of the old broken dam. The huge rocks lay tossed around

like a kids blocks where they were droped by the raging river when the dam broke.

Most of the time the water flowed in a small stream,

not more than a couple of feet deep.

It was still mud colored, red from the last flood.

I had never seen the water so high.

Even the grownups said they didn't remember the water ever being so high.

At the edge of the bridge there was a tall pillar of concrete

with painted markings on it to measure the flood level.

We had late spring rains after heavy snows and

the river had raged for several days.

We all thought it was going to spill over the banks and flood the town.

The water lapped at the planks on the bridge,

and completely covered all the support structure.


Each day we had walked down close to the bridge to

check the level and watch the debris that passed through.

Whole tamerick trees and limbs of cotton wood trees caught against the bridge,

building up a restriction, and causing the water to back up more;

then something would dislogdge and the whole collection of branches and weeds

would break loose, flushing down river.

The banks washed away cutting deeper and deeper under the roots

of the huge cotton woods trees. An abandoned car fell into the bank and lodged

itself in the sand just down from the bridge.

That summer we used it to play in and leave our clothes in while we were swimming.

Then suddenly one day all the water was gone,

leaving debri and silt along the river banks,

and the Little Colorado River returned to a gently flowing stream of red water.


That's why it is called the Little Colorado River.

Colorado means red in Spanish, and the canyon it has cut

looks like a miniature version of the real

Colorado river that runs through the Grand Canyon.

Just below the old dam was a bend in the river

where the water swirled around and cut a nice swimming hole.

It was just a few feet deep and a few yards wide,

but it was a great place to swim and jump from the rocks.

We weren't really supposed to swim without adults there,

but we figured it was OK because it wasn't under the bridge,

and they told us not to go swimming under the bridge without adults.

Anyone who didn't jump from the ledge was a chicken,

so we all had to jump at least once.


We fished off the rock ledge, far below the flood line and

some caught tadpoles that were already starting to change into frogs.

The mud cats and carp in the river were fun to catch,

but eating them was a problem with all the bones,

so we threw them back into the river and ate our chicken and bread.

We could hear cayotes howling in the distance, but we knew they were far away,

so we built up our campfire from the loose drift wood and tamericks

and threw rocks into the river until it got completely dark about ten o'clock.

We wrapped up together in our blankets and tried to count the stars until we

realized it was morning and the sun was coming up.

It was chilly early in the morning,

but we were jerked awake by the booming of cannon shots.

We raced back to the school yard to drink hot cocoa and

eat pancakes and eggs with our families.

The fourth of July was always a big town celebration,

and even people from Other parts of the county came.

Some came from even further away to visit family and return to their roots;

others came to be with friends or meet new friends.

People from Phoenix drove through to buy sweet corn from our fields,

or cantaloupe or watermelon, and picked out pieces of petrified wood

and broken Indian pottery.

Everyone said our little valley raised the best tasting corn,

and melons in the world, and all the families that raised them

were able to make extra money selling them by the pick up truck load.


We were the first ones to salute the flag, and right up front

singing patriotic songs with our families.

The scouts put the flag up and led everyone in a flag ceremony.

One of the old ladies sang the stars Spangled Banner really highpitched and loud.

I cringed my shoulders to my ears the whole time

because I had to keep my hand over my heart.

When she ended it my little cousin breathed a sigh of relief and whispered,

"finally she relaxed."


There were always races in the school yard.

Three legged races, relay races, jumping contests and ball throwing competitions.

I won the race for eight and nine year olds,

but I tripped at the finish line and skinned my knee.

I didn't even cry. Mom got all woried and came rushing over to try to fix it,

but Grandma said I'd be just fine.

Then Mom ran with me in the three legged race and

my uncle pushed me in a wheelbarrow race.

The women went home and brought back kettles and bowls and platters

of food for a pot luck dinner.

Each family brought plates and forks and drinking cups in baskets,

and the Elders and older boys set up tables and chairs

around the school yard.

It took over an hour for everyone to eat 'til they complained

they were full to bustin', then the women settled down

in the shade of the willow trees and umbrellas,

pulled out their knitting and crocheting and began to gossip about the neighbors.

The younger men started up a game of baseball,

and the older men gathered around one of a new John Deare thrasher on the street

to admire it and talk about farming in the old days,

before the war---before the depression.

The little kids ran around screaming and chasing each other,

and their moms reached out with their voices from time to time,

telling them to be careful, or be nice so the other mothers would know

they were disciplining their kids.

The toddlers climbed into their mom's laps wanting to nurse,

then napped on blankets in the shade.

We bigger kids decided to go swim in the river.


By two in the afternoon the day heated up and we begged

my uncles to come watch us in the river so we could swim,

cause our moms said we couldn't unless we had an adult.

That was always their chance to tell us about the little kids

that went to the river alone and when the littlest one fell in,

there was no adult to save him and he drowned in the river.


The little boys had wandered around trying to decide what to do

for a long time before they went home and told their parents.

That happened before I was born, I thought they should just get over it.

But one of my uncles was all google eyes over his new girlfriend,

and the other one was mad that Grandma hadn't let him go to St. Johns

for their celebration, so he wasn't doing anything she asked him to.

Mom just looked at her younger brothers, shook her head and rolled her eyeballs.

Finally one of the other dads said he'd go watch us,

and a couple of others joined him so we could swim.

We raced the two blocks down the road,

then took a left turn to race across the bridge.

We scrambled down the canyon wall like a line of ants scurrying to their hole.


"Last one in is a rotten egg!" someone yelled, and we all raced out

through the sandy river bank and into the icy cold mud colored water.

A few feet out the water was deep and we had to swim to get to the other bank.

There we climbed up on a railroad tie someone had planted

into the bank in the shasde of a cotton wood tree and

began to dive into the water.

While the first three were diving head first into the water,

the dad that was watching us was yelling that we should always

check under the water before diving in, but after three had dived in

and come up again still alive, I guess he decided it was safe enough,

stopped yelling, and swam out into the middle.

By four, some of the moms started climbing down into the river bottom

or yelling from the bridge for their kids to go home and do chores.

We all grumbled and complained that we hadn't got to swim long enough,

but we knew we had to hurry and do the chores

so we could go back to the school for the evening barbeque and program.

Someone came back from California with fireworks and enough sparklers

so each of us kids could have one lighted and wave it in the air trying

to write our name before it stopped burning.

It was the best fourth of July ever.

We didn't have to hoe so much after July because the corn and melons

were big enough so the weeds couldn't take them over.

If we kept the bind weed chopped down during June

it wasn't so likley to twine around the corn stalks,

choking the life out of them.

Bind weed had a little flower that looked like a miniature morning glorys,

but no one liked to see them.

The Allen family had a big yard with a stone wall and they let real morning glories

grow all over it in the summer.

They blossomed in the morning then closed up during the afternoon.

In front of the fence they planted four o'clocks, which blossomed

and opened in the late afternoon, so they had something blooming and pretty

all summer long.

Sunflowers grew wild along the roads near the ditch banks;

they stayed open, but followed tthe path of the sun with their faces

always turned to watch it.

Irigation ditches ran along every road, so the cottonwood, willow and elm trees

always got plenty of water, and shaded the fence line along the road

where we walked and packing firm foot trails.

In the summer asparagus and sun flowers, grew along the ditch banks,

and the Mulberry trees shed their blossoms in heaps, then the mulberries ripened

through the summer from greet to yellow, then red and then

turned almost black when they ere pe perfect to pick and eat right off the tree.

Early in the summer the cottonwood trees began to shed their cotton seeds,

protected by tiny parachutes of cotton as they drifted and floated to the ground,

falling in waves and piles along the rows in the fields and along the ditch banks,

looking as if we had a warm summer snow.


Each family had an irrigation box where they could turn the flow of water onto

their land when it was their turn.

The town water boss kept track of whose turn it was

and told people when they could irrigate.

We signed up at the school house on a list to say how many hours

we would need the water, then we had to go back to look for

our time slot, or sometimes the water boss would come by the house and let us know.

Sometimes we got the water during the day time,

but other times our turn came late at night.

We had to take shovels out to the field and dig a hole in the small ditch

across the top of a field to let the water flow into the rows in the field.

We'd watch it while it filled the furrows, soaking the ground deep and wide.

By the time the water reached the end of the rows the top was fully soaked,

but we had to let it run a while longer, to be sure the bottom was soaked,

or the crops at the bottom would dry up before it was time to irrigate again.

Some rows would soak faster, so we had to shovel dirt or mud back into the gap

to close it and stop off the water.

If we shoveled up some weed and dirt together it helped heal the wounded bank

and stop the flow. Sometimes the water would swirl around and find a little crack,

then wash away the new dam of mud in a rush to flow back through its chosen course.

We had to be real careful stepping on the higher ground,

the mud would suck our boots down with a squishing sound and trying to get free,

our feet would come right out of the rubber boot.

Especially mine, because I never had boots that were small enough for my feet.

After irrigating we replaced the gate in the box to turn the water

on down to the next field. If we didn't finish before our turn was up,

we had to wait til the next time we could get the water,

because it was time for the water to move on to the next field.

As soon as the tomotoes and cucumbers got big enough to eat,

and the radishes and onions got big enough that we had to

thin the rows we could pick and eat all we wanted right out of the garden.

The taste of a red ripe tomotoes picked right off the vine,

warmed by the sunshine was beter han any candy ever was to me.

I liked take a little packed of salt in my pocket

so I could salt my raddishes and onions.

I'd wipe he dirt off on my jeans then dip the onion into the salt and eat it.

Sometimes I put salt on the little cucumbers,

but mostly when they were fresh off the vine,

I just brushed he dirt off and stuffed it into my mouth.

For the first few days after irrigating it was too muddy to go into the field,

or garden so we didn't have to hoe for a week.

The heavy red clay took nearly a week before e could even walk on it,

then had to be dry enough to hoe it without turning it to pottery.

Then the second week we had to hurry up to dam up all the little breaks

we made in the ditch and and get all the rows hoed so the weeds wouldn't

take over and the garden would grow and it started all over again.

It was important to walk the ditch from time to time to repair holes

and take out weeds and block off sink holes.

Sink holes were cracks my uncle said ran clear to the river and

sucked out all the irrigation water back into th river.

I never knew if he was telling me the truth,

but it seemed like that much water went through those cracks,

and no matter how much water flowed down a row with a sink hole,

none ever got to the bottom of a row without we dammed up the hole

or made a way around it.

Each week the corn grew, taller and the melons grew fatter.

By the 24 of July, Pioneer Day, we had sold truck loads

of garden produce and started bottling tomatoes, green beans,

and anything else that wouldn't keep fresh.

My favorite thing was when the first corn and chiles came on.

Grandma would chop up spring onion sprouts, corn, summer squash and green peppers

into a pan and kind of fry them all together.

Sometimes she threw in some choppped Spam or left over meat to make it really good.

When she fried Okra, she used only the little tender ones,

and dipped them in a mixture of egg and milk, then in flour with salt and pepper

and fried it in hot lard that we rendered out when we slaughtered the pigs last

fall. She cooked zukinni squash that way too, dipped and fried.

And in the fall when we had bottled all the tomotoes, sauce and soup we could use

during the winter and the frost came, she sliced and fried the green tomatoes.

My uncles said they could probably eat buffalo chips if

Grandma dipped and fried them up, it made everything taste so good.


I loved to help render out the lard.

After a pig was butchered my uncles took it to Snowflake on their way to work

and left it at a butcher. He cut it into porkchops, roasts, ribs and bacon

and wrapped it up in white paper and froze it in a big deepfreeze he had gotten

after the war. He ground up the scraps and some of the fat into sausage

and seasoned it. The rest of the fat he ground up and packaged in big old

packages. Then we'd put all the white packages into our deep freeze,

which was the tack house where it would stay frozen until we needed it to eat,

and take the packages of spare ribs and lard inside.

Grandma cooked the spareribs in the oven and put the white spirals of lard in heaps

into a large kettle on the stove. I stood on a bench to watch it melt.

I liked to pretend it was a whole kettle full of worms cooking,

but I didn't dare tell Mom or she would have gagged, so I just watched and stirred

as the worms melted into pure white lard.

When it was all melted we skimmed the little browned pieces of meat off

and put them in a pile on a platter then poured the greese into clay pots and set

them in the pantry with lids to be used all year frying good things like doughuts

and scones and chicken and porkchops, or zukinni, okra and onion rings.

I liked to eat the pieces of meat that we skimmed off,

but Grandma always said it would give me a stomach ache.

When I was littler I thought she was saying stumma cake,

and I wanted a cake so I snuck and ate more pieces

after she was out of the kitchen


After the fourth of July the summer rains started.

Nearly every afternoon the thunder clouds moved in and turned dark.

The thunder roared and lightening flashed.

I don't know why Grandma thought we had to stay inside.

I loved to sit on the proch and watch the lightening splitting the sky and

lighting up the underside of the dark tumbling clouds.

From the time I was a little kid Mom would sit me on her lap in the doorway

or on the covered porch to watch the lightening.

We wouold laugh and point to the biggest ones and say,

"Did you see that.' Then we'd count slowly until we heard the thunder

and we knew that as long as it was far enough away to count,

it was safe enough to sit outside.

One Thursday morningd while we were in school,

Grandma and Mom started out for Relief Society meeting at the church.

Mom walked next to Grandma, but Grandma said to go on ahead while she went back

for her knitting. Grandma walked back into the house,

grabbed her knitting and her umbrella, because she noticed the clouds were

gathering early that day.

Mom looked back to see if she was coming,

and waved to her as she left the yard and turned down the street.

Just as Mom waved, lightening flashed,

and there was no time to count before the sound of thunder.

We all heard it at the school and dived under our desks like we had been taught

for duck and cover.

Some of the little kids started bawling and screaming.

Me and some others in the big classroom ran to the window to see what was going on.

The huge willow tree that had stood in front of the house since Mom was a baby

was split in half.

One half fell oto the East and one half fell to the west.

The branches crashed to the ground covering the entire yard,

but not one branch hit the house.

Grandma said that was because we always paid our tithing and the Lord blessed us.

For weeks we chopped and hauled pieces of the willow tree to the wood pile

in the back yard. It wouldn't be good to burn for at least a year,

but it sure made a mighty big pile of wood.

A lot of the neighbors came and asked for branches to start their own trees.

They stuck the bottom of the branch in the ditch or pond where it would grow roots,

then planted the trees in their yards, so it seemed like Grandma’s tree had a lot

of baby trees growing all over town by the next summer.

I wondered about the neighbors up the street, when later that summer,

lighteing struck their barn and burnt it to the ground,

killing all their chickens and two calves.

I guessed they had forgot to pay their tithing.


We all had a swell time riding our bikes through the rain and the puddles,

but Grandma was always afraid we'd catch colds.

Mom used to tell her, "they aren't sugar, they won't melt if they get a little wet Mama."

Grandma decided the rainy afternoons were the bests time to

clean the barn and out buildings.

While it was raining it was cooler, but as soon as the sun came out after the storm,

it got hot and sticky from the humidity. Grandma caled it "sultry".

"I feel moisture in the air," my Uncle said stomping into the mudporch

from the fields. "Time to clean the barn." We had to give it a good cleaning.

We took the flat scoop shovels and shoveled off the concrete slabs

where the cows stood in the stanchons.

We raked the last strands of alafa hay from the barn's dirt floor,

and nailed the broken boards back in place.

Then we whitewashed it inside and out.

That kept the boards from weathering so badly.

Outdoors we walked along the entire fence line,

replacing staples on lose barbed wire and replacing broken wires.

By the time I was eight I could handle those fencing pliers that had a wire cutter,

a little hammer combined in one tool to do everything we needed to do to a fence.

I liked cleaning out the tack room.

There were three saddles, and reins and bits, even saddle blankets,

and the musky smell of old oats and grain that had been stored

in the big bins along the wall.

We patched every tiny hole that animals might get through

so we could store grain without feeding the entire countryside of racoons

and skunks, and built shelves to put frozen meet on when the weather turned colder.

We swept the floor, and swept the spider webs from the walls,

and rubbed saddle wax into the leather saddles.

I asked when we could get a horse, but Mom just sighed and said,

"We used to always have horses around when I was a kid, but after Daddy -- uh --

went away... they are expensive to feed."

Then she hurriedly changed the subject and scooted me toward the house.

The 24 of July was even bigger celebration than the forth of July.

Pioneer Day was when the first wagon train of Saints entered into Salt Lake

with Brigham Young, and some of those people were sent up south to Arizona

territory to settle and colonize along the Little Colorado River.

We celebrated for the Salt Lake people, but more for Our Town settlers

that came to build at Tenny's fort that became Our Town.

We turned our wagons into covered wagons, and some of the old horse drawn wagons

were covered with canvas and we paraded through the town,

across the dam and down the side of the hill toward the river

where there was a grove of cottonwood trees.

There we circled the wagons and celebrated with a pot luck dinner,

and stories about the pioneer heritage and our foerfathers.

I wondered how only four fathers could have settled this whole town by themselves,

but I figured there must have been at least four mothers along too,

and probably some kids came with them.

We sat around a campfire and sang "Come Come Ye Saints", and "Rock of Ages",

and held family prayer, with all the families together

in the cottonwood grove near the river.

Bishop prayed, "Father thank thee for the pioneers who had the courage

to face the barren wilderness to settle along the little Colorado River.

Thank thee for our families and our homes and this town

where we know we are safe and protected from the sins of the world,

and that our children can live safely without being exposed to the evils

outside of this little valley.

Then we slept on the ground or in our wagons just like the pioneers.

In the morning we had biscuits and gravy, then went home to do chores.

Just after that, one afternoon my uncles drove up

in the yellow pick up truck. I ran to see what they had in the back.

It was filled heaping up with small pieces of wood.

They said they got it from the box factory near St. Johns

and that it would be good for firewood.

We unloaded the whole pile in the leant-to shed near the barn.

I made sure I kept the fire logs chopped and splintered so

no one would have to burn any of that precious load.

I even got some of the other boys and girls to help me with that chore

to be sure we could keep the wood slats.

We built houses from it by laying a huge circle of slats with gaps between them.

Then over each gap we laid a second layer in the same way,

but just slightly toward the center of the circle.

Each layer tipped in slightly til the last few layers made

the final structure into an igloo shaped playhouse.

We had to be careful to leave a crawl in space by putting a

long bord across the opening to keep it solid.

If anyone stood up suddenly or bumped against a wall,

the whole igloo would fall and we had to start over again.

We had to experiment several times before we got one the size we wanted,

and had to rebuild it many times.

But it made a great rainy afternoon fortress in the barn,

and even on into the colder days of winter we stacked and restacked

the blocks of wood in all different arrangements.


After the corn dried we shelled it.

We had a metal stripper that fit around the corn cob

and pulled the kernels off real neat.

We stored the dry corn kernels in buckets and it didn't take up

so much room as storing the whole cobs.

We had a big stack of dried corn cobs so we stockpiled them in our fortress

to use for soldiers and dolls and bombs, hangernaids and other great toys

we could play house or war or play house and bomb out each others houses.

Grandma ground the dried corn with her stone grinder by turning the handle;

sometimes she let me turn it. With the ground corn she could make the best,

sweetest corn bread and corn muffins. She didn't add sugar because the corn was so

sweet it didn't need any. And sometimes on winter nights she would parch the

whole kernels of dry corn in a big black cast iron skillet.

It didn't pop, but would swell up and almost burst open,

then she poured on a plate and salted it.

I always tasted it before it was cool and

burnt my fingers and mouth even thought she warned me it was too hot to try.

Every night Grandma gathered us around the kitchen table for dinner,

we knelt by our chairs and listened to her say a long family prayer

and blessing on the food. She never called on anyone else to say that prayer,

because she had things she wanted to say to us.

She blessed each of us with the things she wanted to tell us,

but never talked to us about. She would warn me in her prayers about being honest

and respectful and helping around the house.

If she was worried about one of the uncles doing things he wasn't supposed to,

she would pray for him asking Heavenly Father to help him make the right choices

so he would be worthy to go on a mission and be married in the temple.

She would pray for my mom to be content with her life and her family,

and lose herself in service to others and the Lord.

Early in August we had a wedding in the house.

The bishop came over and performed a marriage ceremony for my uncle

and his girl friend. I was afraid that meant my uncle would move away,

but he just kept his old bedroom, and his wife moved in with us too.

I couldn't wait to get married and have someone to share my room and bed with.

Grandma stopped praying for him to go on a mission and prayed for them to be able

to repent and lead good lives to prepare a home for their family.

She still kept praying for my other uncle to be morally clean and go on a mission.

She told the Lord she was

"counting on him to represent the family in the mission field."

He just had a few months before he turned twenty-one so he would be old enough

to go, so Grandma prayed every night and morning meal that he would.

Mom and this new auntie got along pretty good.

They did a lot of things with Grandma, and taught her to cook and sew.

Mom told her she always wanted a sister.

Grandma kept telling them they had to learn to take care of a house of their own.

I didn't think I wanted to have a house of our own.

I liked the way Grandma cooked and did things for us.

Every day of the week had special chores.

On Monday we had to wash all the clothes.

We had an electric wash machine on the back porch that

we could run with the generator when the wind was blowing.

We plugged it into the kitchen electricity and put hot water in it

by carrying buckets from the stove.

The clothes sloshed around in the hot water and lye soap for several minutes.

Then with a wooden paddle one of the women would lift the clothes

one by one from the hot water and push it through the wringers,

which were like two rolling pins rolling together to squish the water out.

The clothes would come out all pinched together and flat, but nearly dry.

It was my job to guide the clothes into a big tin tub

as they came through the wringer, I wanted to be able to push the clothes through

but Grandma said she knew a lady that had her hand caught in a wringer

and was crippled for life. Then when all the clothes had been washed and wrung out,

we opened a valve on the wash machine tub and the water drained out

into a little ditch through a pipe.

We filled the tub back up with hot water, but no soap, to rinse all the clothes.

We followed the same order we had washed them in.

First the white clothes, then the lighter colors, then the levies and jeans.

After the whites were rinsed and put through the ringer,

I helped put the colored clothes were put in to slosh around,

I helped carry the tub out to the clotheslines and handed each piece to Mom

or Grandma as they pinned them to the clothesline.

That's how I learned to count and tell colors when I was about three or four,

my Mom always just talked to me about colors and counting

as we wrung the clothes and hung them up.

Grandma could snap the clothes so hard they made a sharp crack

and sounded like a shot gun. When Mom or Auntie tried it,

the sound wasn't nearly so swell.

I practiced snapping dish towels until I could get a pretty good cracking sound,

then practiced aiming at my cousins with swim towels in th summer.

Then we carried the empty tub back to wring out the colored clothes

and repeat the process. The last load was the levies.

These had to be straightened out before putting them through the wringer.

The bottom of the legs went through first with all four seams lined up just right,

then they were rung out flat and folded into the tub and

hung by the hems to dry straight.

If we hung things right to begin with,

it took a lot less time to fold them or iron them later,

Grandma taught me.

Some of the shirts and dresses that needed starch had to go into another tub

with starch water and be rung out again before

we hung them to dry stiff and crackly on the clothes line.


In the summer it only took an hour or so to dry the clothes,

then we could go out and bring in a big pile all warm and smelling like sunshine,

but in the winter sometimes we had to let them freeze,

and then when the ice evaporated the clothes would be dry,

but it took all day, sometimes two days to dry a load.

If it was raining or snowing we had to string lines back and forth in the kitchen

and mud porch, and when we hung up all the clothes,

it seemed like a little jungle and would have been a fun place

to play hide and seek, but Grandma forbad it.

When all the clothes were dry, we gathered them carefully into the tubs,

then for whatever reason we sprinkled water on the ones that had been starched and rolled each up in its own little bundle.

Then wrapped them all together in a large towel or sheet.

Early the next morning Mom and Auntie would take turns ironing.

They explained that the clothes had to be a little damp to make the ironing nicer.


We had two kinds of irons.

One was a heavy iron that heated up on a special pan on the wood stove.

We had two of them so one could be getting hot while the other one was being used.

I liked the other one, the kerosine iron,

but Mom was always afraid to use it after it blew up one day.

It had to be pumped up with a little valve, then lit with a match and

the flame kept it hot the whole time so there didn't need to be two of them.

Grandma used that one sometimes.

I helped hang the shirts and dresses, and fold the underwear

and match and roll the socks into little bundles.

If there were any holes in the socks I put them in the darning basket

to be mended later in the evening.


Mending socks holes was not a fun thing, but Grandma made all of us learn how,

she said "even boys should know how to darn socks and sew on buttons

for their missions, or, Heaven forbid, army life.

We had a wooden egg that we pushed down into the toe of the sock.

Then with a needle and special cotton thread we stitched around the hole,

then made a little warp by stringing the thread back and forth across the hole,

tacking it at each end with a stitch or two.

Then we wove through the warp going back and forth the same way,

so we actually had a little woven patch where the hole had been.

We couldn't leave any knots or wrinkles or it would make blisters on our toes

when we wore the sock. Most evenings we sat around mending socks

or stitching on lost buttons while we listened to the radio

or to someone reading a book.

We had to wash again on Saturdays because Grandma liked

to wash the towels and sheets on a different day.

She didn't iron them because they just went right back on the beds for

Saturday nights, and she would hang them straight and flat so they

weren't wrinkled when they came off the clothes line smelling like a

warm summer day or a cold crisp winter afternoon.

Wednesdays and Saturdays we baked bread and pies and cakes.

After we got the butane stove Grandma liked to bake things everyday.

Saturdays were also cleaning day.

We had to scrub everything so it would be clean for Sunday,

then we would take baths and go to bed as soon as chores were done.

As soon as the snow melted and the first warm breezes began to blow,

the willow twigs began to swell and burst open.

Each day the trees took on the yellow gre3en color of the budding leaves.

Time to clean house, Grandma would announce.

In the middle of the day, while it was warm enough,

we opened all the windows and doors and let the

breeze blow out all the winter germs trapped inside iln the cold weather.

The uncles rolled up the carpets and hung them outside over a fence,

and then we beat them until no more dust would come out of them.

Grandma swept and scrubbed all the floors on her hands and knees

with a stiff brush and lye soap.

We scrubbed the walls and door jams, and swept the corners around the ceilings,

where the smoke from the wood fire accumulated.

Early in the spring the spiders would try to spin webs,

but Grandma never let them get that far,

but I saw in some houses, the smoke turned the spider webs black,

and the design of the web showed up in every tiny detail.

We scrubbed out the pantry shelves and floor,

and wiped off all the jars that still had food in them.

The empty jars were lined up on a shelf all by themselves,

with the flat lid put on upside down and screwed on loosely with the ring

so no bugs or dirt could get inside.

We carried buckets of ashes from the wood stove and fireplace

and scattered the ashes in the garden to enrich the soil.

Then before it got dark we put the carpets back down on the floors,

shut up the house against the night chill and sat down to bread milk

and early spring onions for supper.

Grandma said it made her feel clean all over to have the house sparkling clean,

and in her prayer at supper thanked Heavenly Father for the strength

and means to keep a proper home.

By the end of August the carrots were ready to dig and

store in river sand in the root cellar.

The cabbage plants were big and round, and we picked them

and stored them with the roots pointing up, buried in the sand.

We left a little door way in the cellar door for

the kittens to run in and out to keep the mice away.

Grandma said that they used to cut ice from the river

and store the blocks in saw dust in the root cellar,

so they could keep fresh meat and milk and butter cold,

but I never saw them do that.

Now we had a big modern refrigerator with a little freezing compartment

big enough to have ice cube trays for ice whenever we wanted.

The refrigerator ran on a gasoline engine and made a lot of noise,

but we could keep milk cold all through the summer and even keep meat fresh.


One day my uncles drove the pick up close to the back door.

They had a big white tank in the back and a huge cardboard box.

They said it was a new stove for Grandma.

It was white, and I couldn't see how we would be able to build a fire in it,

because there was no chimney pipe or fire box.

They said it was a butane gas stove and didn't need wood.

Grandma and Mom and Auntie came rushing out of the back door.

That was about the only time I saw Grandma just standing around

watching without being very very busy.

She wouldn't let them take out the wood stove, just in case she needed it,

so we had to rearrange everything in the kitchen.

Outside away from the house, out near the windmill they poured a concrete slab,

and placed the butane tank on that.

The gas company came the next day to hook up the pipe line to the house

and fill up the tank with propane gas.

They showed us how to light the stove and use the oven.

It had a thermostat on the oven so it would stop heating up at whatever

temperature we set the knob at. Grandma just couldn't get over that.

"Well, I bet I can judge the temperature of an oven," she said,

defending her natural instinct and talent.

"Well, the girls need it," my uncle defended, ribbing my mom and auntie a bit.

"When can we take out that old wood stove?" they asked grandma with a grin.

"When Hadies freezes over," my other uncle mimicked Grandma

when her back was turned.

I did see the river freeze over that winter.

I started fourth grade, but since there were only two rooms in the school house

I was in the room with the older kids.

There were only a few in the older grades so my age went in with them,

and the little kids were in the other room learning to read and write.

I liked to listen to the older kids when they had their lessons on math

and history, and after I did my work, I did their lessons too.

I didn't let the teacher see me do it, but when they checked their arithmetic,

I checked mine too and usually got all the answers right.

When they did spelling tests, I would write down the words on my tablet.

I could do most of the work the seventh and eighth graders did.

I liked to read library books too.

The stories of King Author and Camelot were my favorite.

Homer's Iliad and Odessy were really hard for me to read,

but I loved to read about the Trojans and the giants.

Mom read me all of Louisa May Allcotts' books,

starting with Little Women and Little Men.

Grandma mumbled about ladies dressing like ladies back then,

and wondered what the world was coming to with little girls and boys

all dressing the same in levies and flannel shirts except for church.

"Why in my day," she would mumble.

Grandma sewed on her Singer sewing machine.

She made her own dresses and Mom's, and about all my clothes,

except Levies and shoes.

I liked to lay on the floor watching her feet work the treadle

that made the sewing machine go.

She did it so smoothly and so quickly it seemed like there was nothing it it.

I tried it once and the thread got all tangled up,

and the needle got stuck, and it took Grandma a long time

to get if fixed so she could sew.

She didn't say anything, but I could see her jaw moving,

and I knew she was clenching her teeth,

because the little dent ion the side of her chin was going in and out.

In the winter it got dark so early that we had to all gather around

the electric lights and heater in the kitchen to read or listen

to the radio in the evenings.

We had to have the chores done before dinner so we wouldn't have

to go back out in the dark.

The uncles talked about putting in an electric light in the barn

when the electric company ran electric lines out.

Then the other one would say, "yeah, when you know where freezes over."

And they would laugh because Grandma would give them a really

mean look and shush them.

By mid October it was freezing every night.

I would run from the warm kitchen and jump into my bed.

The cotton sheets were like ice, so I would stay real still

in one place to get them warm, and pull the heavy quilts up around my face,

just letting my nose stick out to breathe.

Sometimes when it was really cold, my nose would get so cold I couldn't feel it,

and I had to pull the covers over my whole head to warm it up.

I didn't dare move my feet or hands because

anywhere else on the bed felt like cold tin on the barn roof.

I wondered if I stuck my tongue out on the pillow,

if it would stick there like my mom was always warning me about.

Sometime the iron rails just looked so frosty and so good

that I wanted to taste them, but Mom and Grandma told me over and over

that they knew of little kids who had done that

and got their toungue stuck so it had to be cut out and

they could never talk after that.

That winter the snow came in November, and it snowed nearly every week.

The sky was grey and it seemed like it would always be cold and dark outside.

It stayed under freezing so the snow didn't all melt away like it always had before,

so it piled up layer after layer until the whole farm was covered in deep snow.

We kept the cow in the barn and fed her hey, so the milk really tasted sweet.

And we butchered the two year old steer, hung the meat cut in quarters

in the tack shed and had our meat for the winter.

We didn't even take it to the butcher.

When I brought in a bucket of milk and set it on the counter

my mom would take out a clean white dish cloth and fold it over

the edge of the pail, then pour the milk through the cloth to strain it

and fill the glass gallon bottles. We set the two full gallon bottles

out on the table in the mud porch where it chilled overnight.

In the morning the cream was all at the top,

and it was so thick that we cut through it with a knife like butter.

We could spread it right on our biscuits or pancakes.

Then grandma would tell us we had to skim the milk

and save the cream to make butter.

We scooped the cream and a little milk into quart jars and

put the lids on tight. Then shook the bottles for a few minutes

'til we could see the milk separating out and

little curdles of yellow butter forming.

A few more shakes and we could reach in with a wooden spoon

and scoop the butter out leaving a jar half full of buttermilk.

It was funny,if the milk was too cold we could shake forever

and it would never turn, and if it was a little too warm it just

went kind of mushy.

But Grandma always knew the exact temperature

to have the cream to turn it into butter.

I liked to drink it right from the bottle,

but Grandma always told us to save some for the biscuits and bread.

Then she supervised us to be sure we washed every drop of milk

out of the butter before we salted it and pressed it into the ceramic butter molds.

I liked to press it in, then drop it out on a plate with the

little rosette designs molded into the top of each cube.

Sometimes I ate bread just to spread the butter thick over the slice.

I would have eaten it right off the cube, but mom wouldn't let me.

When we cooked popcorn in that clean fresh butter

it was the best treat in the world.

When we couldn't use all the milk the cow gave in the spring,

just after she calved, Grandma made cheese.

She had little blue renit tablets that she used instead of having

to use the lining of a baby goats stomach like her Grandmother had.

She let me dissolve the renit tablets in a cup of water,

while she carefully heated the milk in a big pan on the stove to l03 degrees.

She stirred it and measured the temperature every few minutes til it was ready.

Then she poured the mixture into it along with a yellow color tablet

so it wouldn't be white cheese.

After several hours we went back to check the milk and it had turned solid.

Grandma let me take a long knife and cut the curdled milk into cubes.

I carefully cut to the bottom of the pan going across one way

in strips about one inch wide. Then crossed the other way making long squares.

Then she would take the knife and cut across below the surface several times.

After that set a while, the whey separated out and we poured it off

into another pan. She used that to water her house plants and the flower plants

around the outside of the house.

The pan that had been clear full of milk was only about a third full now.

This curd was poured out into a loosely woven cloth called cheese cloth,

where it was tied up and hung up over a pan to drip out the rest of the cheese.

It shrunk even more. We had to rinse the curds with cold fresh water

and then salt it. That's when it was good to taste.

It squeaked in our teeth when we chewed it.

Grandma let us eat all we wanted because she said it was really good for us.

Then she pushed the ball wraped in clean cheese cloth into a gallon can.

Grandfather had cut wooden circles to fit exactly inside the gallon can.

One circle was placed in first, then the ball of curds,

then another circle of wood. A weight was placed on that

and as it squeesed more whey out,

another circle was put in to push it even further.

We kept putting more weight on it throughout the day til every drop

of whey was pushed out of it. Then it was ready.

We could cut slices of cheese to eat right away but

Grandma said it was green cheese.

She would fry the slices in butter and make sandwiches out of it.

That was the only time we could fry it,

because after it sat on the pantry shelf for a few weeks to cure,

it would just melt in the pan.

But fried green cheese is chewey and squeeky like

chewing soft rubber and has the best taste of anything.

When the hens were laying we had eggs every day.

My favorite were eggs boiled in milk or cream,

especially when we had asparagus and toast to go with it.

If we had lots of eggs grandma made lemon mirangue pies.

She made the pie shells by rolling out a crust she made in a bowl.

She could make the rolling pin just fly over a

little ball of dough and it would stretch and grow

into a thin circle large enough to cover a whole pie pan.

Then in a second, she would have it trimmed and pinched up around the eduges.

The shells were baked quickly and set aside to cool while

she made lemon pudding for the filling.

Then she busted some eggs open and separated the yolk from the white.

She told me that was called albumin, and it had

to be at just the right temperature like cream to whip.

She could separate an egg with one hand.

She'd be stirring the pudding on the stove with her left hand and

whack that egg on the side of a bowl with her right hand,

pull the two halves of the shell back and plop the yolk in to one bowh

and the albumin into another bowel before I could even get one egg cracked.

When I tried to do it with both hands,

I ended up breaking the yolk and they both went slithering

into the same bowl with chuncks of egg shell.

We threw mine out for the cats to eat.

She had a wire wisk and she beat the albumin in a glass bowl

'til it looked like whipped cream, then beat it some more

'til it was stiff and held its shape in stiff little peaks,

gently stirred in white sugar, then spread it evenly over the top of the yellow

lemon pudding in the pie crust.

Then she put the pies in a hot oven for just a few minutes 'til

the whipped mirrangue browned, the peaks were brown,

the sides of the peaks were gold and the valleys were just cream colored.

I could taste each different color as I held the mirangue

on my tongue while it melted away.



Apple pies were different.

Same quick movements to roll the crust,

but apple pies had to have two crusts, and we didn't cook it

before we put in the apples.

In autumn we used fresh apples, but the rest of the year we used

bottled or dried apples. The pie crust lined the bottom of the pan,

then we heaped sliced apples in the pan with cinimon and sugar and butter,

then put a top crust on, either one whole round piece or ribbons of

crust woven in and out in a design.

There always had to be a design to look pretty,

but also to let out the steam or the pie would

explode in the oven from the steam when it baked.


I found out that pototoes can explode in the oven too.

I never noticed Grandma poking holes in the potoes she baked in the oven,

so the first time I tried it, I scrubbed the skins

and laid them on the rack in the ovren.

Some of the exploded all over the inside of the oven,

and I had to clean it up.

We thought it was funny when they exploded in a camp fire,

but cleaning that mess in the oven, I learned to always poke a hole

in a potato before baking it.


Grandma served meat at every meal during the winter.

Sausage, bacon or salt pork at breakfast.

For, our big dinner about one o'clock we had fried battered chicken,

pork chops or fried stakes and pototos and gravy and two vegetables,

like corn or string beans that we'd bottled ourselves.

I loved to run home from school to eat dinner with my family.

The uncles would stop work and come in from the fields,

or bring their wives over and have dinner during the day.

In the evening we had soup made from left overs, or bean porrage,

or sometimes in the summer just thick slices of bread and butter

with slices of onion in a bowl of milk.

Sometimes I liked to put popped corn into a bowl of milk.

I read in a book that if you put popped corn into a glass of milk that was

full to the top, it wouldn't spill over, so I liked to try that.

Grandma always said I was going to make a mess and made me stop.


We took baths on Saturday night and washed our hair.

We used a big tin tub in the kitchen, and since I was the littlest,

I got to bathe first, and then Grandma or Mom would srub me dry with a rough towel,

wrap me in a blanket and tell me to hurry on to bed.

Then I would put my flannel pajamas on under the blanket and race to my bed

to make a warm spot. I'd lay there and shiver even more than on other

nights til I got warm enough to fall asleep,

There were a lot of great things to do in winter, even though

the days were shorter. One of the neighbors had a pond behind their barn.

We checked it everyday until it was frozen hard,

then played ice hockey on the frozen surface.

We didn't have ice skates, but our shoes slid around on the ice,

and we used sticks to hit a rock around on the ice.

We didn't know any rules or how to play but we had a lot of fun.

We'd get about 20 kids out on the ice running around and sliding into each other,

and forgetting which team they were on until everyone just laid odown in the snow

on the banks to rest. If there had been a fresh snow we could

stretch out our arms and move them up and down to make snow angels in the snow,

then get up carefully to see the imprint.

On those really cold clear nights the angels would still be there in the morning.

We took old inner tubes from the truck tires, and boards and anything else

we could find to the hill at the south end of town.

We climbed the hill over and over and slid further and further down the hill

as we broke dozens of trails and had races to see who could go the farthest.

We'd get so hot racing and dragging the sleds and tubes up the hill,

we'd shed our coats and knit hats and scarves, and got home without them.

More snow fell during the night and most of our things weren't found

'til the spring thaw.


The best things about a fresh snow was snow ice cream.

After it had fallen a few inches Grandma sent us out to scoop up the top layer

of fine flffy flakes. My uncles always warned us to look out for the yellow snow,

but I knew better than that. I found the fluffiest, whitest snow I could,

and filled the big turkey pan heaping.

Then Grandma mixed pudding into it carefully,

and it made the most delicious ice cream ever.

It was different than the ice cream we made in the

big ice cream maker in the summer.

This just melted as soon as I scooped a spoonful into my mouth.


In the winter on clear nights we could see billions of stars.

My favorite was ORION, the great hunter of the winter sky.

I made Grandma tell me the story over and over of how he was a hunter

until he was thown up into the sky.

She showed me the dippers, and the bears and the queen constelations

in the winter skys, wrapped together in a blanket standing together in the

back yard, or walking back from the barn after doing chores,

because we didn't get to them before it got dark.


Everyone got together at Grandma's house for Thanksgiving.

Since she was the oldest of her brothers and sisters and their parents were gone,

they had just formed the tradition of meeting there at the old homestead.

Grandma and Mom would wake up before it even got light, even earlier than usual,

and start fixing the turkey to put into the oven.

Our turkey weighted about 25 pounds, so Grandma washed it inside and out,

and salted it all over, rubbing the salt into the skin and into the clean inside.

Then they took the bread they had ground up the night before and spiced it up,

added celery and onions that had been cooked a little bit in butter and mixed it

into the bread crumbs, then stuffed it into the two inside cavaties of the turkey.

Then they lifted that huge turkey into an even bigger roasting pan,

saved just for turkeys and cheese making, and took all but one racks

out of the oven. The turkey cooked all day, and made the whole house

smell like turkey and onion stuffing. Then when it was cooked,

they put it on a big platter in th middle of the table and

scoooped out the stuffing into a bowl, and made the best brown gravy

in the same pan that the turkey cooked in.

I always liked to make a hole in the middle of my mashed pototoes

and pour gravy over them and the stuffing and the turkey.

I loved that gravy.

After dinner dishes were cleared and stacked in the kitchen sink,

everyone went out and played baseball in the field next to the barn.

Even Grandma took her turn to bat and play field.

We let the little cousins bat and helped them run the bases.

Nobody cared about keeping track of points.

We just played all afternoon and had a great game.

Everyone brought gloves and bats they had for their families,

and we put them all in a heap near home plate so we could take turns using them.


Then when it began to get dark, the temperature dropped sudddenly,

and we grabbed the coats we had shed earlier and ran into the house.

Everyone gathered around the kitchen fire to wash and dry dishes.

We made a factory line, and had them done and put away

in less than thirty mintues.


Starting a week before Christmas Grandma made everyone help out with the

Christmas baking. We kneeded yeast dough in balls,

then braided it with cinimon and sugar and raisins,

to make beautiful Christmas wreaths for neighbors and visitors,

and all the Bishopric and Relief Society people and primary teachers

and the school teachers. I guess we made a wreath or cookies for everyone in town.

We cut sugar cookies with cutters shapped like trees and stars,

and decorated them with butter cream frosting or granulated sugar.

I could make butter cream frosting from when I could stand up to the table.

Just mix soft butter with powdered sugar and vanilla and whip

it real light and there was your butter cream frosting.

Then we'd put food coloring into it or sprinkles on top to decorate it.


Then we made batches of fudge, and peanut brittle

and salt water taffy and molassis taffy. I loved to help with the taffy.

When it had boiled on the stove for just the right amount of time,

Grandma could tell exactly when it was ready by dripping it off of the spoon

into a stream that turned into a thread when it was ready.

Then it had to cool just enough so we could touch it without we got burnt.

We buttered our hands and plates, then stretched big gobs of it back and forth,

folding it over on itself until it was just ready to set up hard,

then laid it on the buttered plate.

When it was hard we cut it into small pieces, and each piece had little holes

running through it and beautiful etched stretching marks on the outside.

It was hard when I first put it into my mouth,

but then it softened as I sucked and chewed on it,

and my teeth stuck together and then I'd try to pull them apart,

I thought they would all come out until finally the piece was melted away,

but that sweet molassis taste lingered making

me want to sneak another piece right away.


The candy and cookies were arranged on plates that we took to each neighbor,

and passed around when company stopped by.

Then neighbors dropped by in the evening with plates of cookies and baked goods

or pies they made in their kitchens for our family.

I wondered why we couldn't just keep the candy and cookies we made and just visit,

but Grandma said it wouldn’t be the same thing,

and Christmas time was a time for giving and sharing with neighbors.


On Christmas Eve the whole family of cousins and aunts and uncles got together

again. Two or three days before the men went out on the range

and cut a cedar tree and nailed crossed board base on it and

put it in the living room. We all sat around putting popcorn on thread

with needles and cranberries in between.

Grandma and Mom let me make any design with it, whatever I wanted.

We had some paper chains I had made in school

and some ornaments we had made other years to put on it too.

During the summer we made strings of cedar berries from the

soft sliver juniper berries when they were soft enough to put a needle through.

We had some colored beeds that we put in between and made patterns.

We used several strings of those along with the

popcorn and cranberry garlands to drape on the tree.

We made some orniments from pine cones that we had decorated,

and Grandma crochetted little tiny doilies and stars to hang all over the tree.

I even made some with Mom's help. Mom and auntie tried to make them

as fast as grandma, but Grandma could keep up with both of them at the same time,

even when I was making them too. Grandma said they used to put little candles

on the tree on Christmas eve and light them, but we never did.

She was afraid they would burn down the house, but in the light of the kerosine lanterns and firelight from the fire, the tree was beautiful.

Some of Grandma's brothers and sisters came with their families,

and we sang Christmas carols and walked together

to the barn with kerosene lanterns.

The youngest baby got to be baby Jesus, and I always had to be a shepherd,

but that Christmas I got one of the main roles carefully walking

into the barn to find a place to have baby Jesus born.

We sang the holy Christmas carols, and Grandma's brothers

read the Christmas story from the Bible.

Then we raced back to the house to gather around the kitchen stove

and warm our hands and hearts with family stories and more singing.

Then everyone that lived close went back to their houses,

and those who had traveled settled in to extra beds and couches

to sleep until Santa Clause came during the night.


In the morning I raced to the Christmas tree and my stocking.

I didn't really think I should believe in Santa clause because

I was eight years old, and some of the kids told me I was a baby

if I believed in him, but I just wanted to believe in him this one last year.

And I had written him a letter asking for a BB gun.

It was just too hard to give it up, and being the only child,

and the youngest in this house, I knew that when I stopped believing

in the old elf, he would stop coming forever.

We got an orange and nuts and a candy cane in our stockings.

And for presents under the tree we had new underwear, pajamas and school clothes

and a new pair of rubber boots. I looked behind the tree, and behind the couch.

I really wanted a BB gun to go rabit hunting that winter.

Finally after we folded and put away all the wrappers and boxes and ribbons

I went into the kitchen to help wash the breakfast dishes.

Grandma always made us eat a big breakfast, even on Christmas morning

before we could eat the candy in our stockings,

so there were plates with syrup and left over pancakes sitting around on the

kitchen table. I just got really busy and started scraping the scraps off

and setting them by the dish pan. The water was hot on the stove,

so Mom helped me pour some into the dishpan.

When she saw that I was really dissappointed, she asked me to

come back into the living room. She said she thought I had forgotten something.

I shrugged and walked back in and there under the tree was my new BB gun.


That afternoon a bunch of us went out to the little butte and gathered up

some old beer bottles and pop bottles to shoot at.

I heard Grandma muttering about girls and boys shooting BB guns,

and wondering where in the world girls got the idea they should be able

to shoot like boys, "Why, in my day, she mutterd."

We lined the bottles up along the rock ledge and stood back to shoot at them.

We had about five BB guns so we took turns shooting at the bottles.

I shot at one and shattered it the first shot.

My second shot I thought I had hit the bottle but it didn't shatter.

I ran up to look at the bottle and I had hit it.

It had a hole through both sides of it from the BB, but hadn't even broken.

I kept the bottle on my dresser as long as I lived there.

Every time I shot the BB gun I thought about Santa Clause,

and wondered if it had really been him that brought it.

I had to believe that it was. I was afraid I would have to stop believeing

in Jesus next, and I didn’t want to do that.

I think I loved Jesus even more than Santa Clause,

and Grandma read me stories about Jesus all year around.

Mom sang songs about Jesus when I went to bed at night

when she came in to tuck me in and say my prayers.

Then she alays told me , "Jesus loves you darling. Don't you ever forget it."

Then kissed me on the head, and put the blankets up to my chin

and took the light with her.



We had a New Year's party at the school house.

The Elders fired up the wood heaters and warmed the rooms that

stood vacant since the day before Christmas.

Every family brought a bundle of wood or coal to keep the fire going all night,

and their christmas tree for the bonfire at midnight.

"You know," Bishop said before he lit the bonfire out in the school yard,

in ancient days, the people got frightened when they saw the days

getting shorter and the sun sinking to the south like it does every winter.

They thought they had many gods, and that when their gods got angry,

they punished the earth. Every year to please the sun god,

and make up for anything they did during the year

they built huge fires and kept them burning through the

longest night of the year. Customs in many countries have come from that

very idea. Although we know that our God, our Heavenly Father,

doesn't punish us by taking away the sun, but that it is a natural miracle

because of the way the earth moves, we continue to light up the night sky

at Christmas time, in a reverent display of thanks to Our Heavenly Father,

not only for the sun that warms the earth and gives us light,

but for all the blessings and miracles that we have living on this earth."

Then we had a long prayer, like the ones at Thanksgiving,

and the Bishop lit a torch soaked in kerosene, then lit the bonfire.

The sparks flew up and the crackling sound of burning cedar and pine

filled the air with such fragrance.

We had to stand back away from the heat of the fire

as it roared through the stack of tree.

Sparks flew high above the roof of the school house and

everyone kept watch to see than none fell back down near the roof.

We sang Christmas songs, and hymns, then

"Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind,

should old acuqintances be forgot for the sake of old lady Zion."

I guessed Old Lady Zion was one of the early pioneers that settled Woodruff.

The fire died down to embers and we threw in potatos

that we had washed earlier in the day.

The desks were pushed back along the walls making a big empty floor for dancing.

Everyone was allowed to dance, even the little toddlers got out on the floor

and danced. We danced the Virginia real, and some square dances.

The then uncles and their friends showed us some new dancing

they had learned on a trip to Phoenix.

Grandma and her friends acted kind of shocked, but Mom clapped her hands

and went out with her brother to try to learn the new steps.

We stayed at the school house and tried to stay awake until the new year.

Then the moms served hot cocoa and biscuits and doughnuts they made

the day before and we all went back to our homes to go to bed.

We stuffed the baked pototoes into our pockets to keep our hands warm

just as our grandfathers did in pioneer days.

I kept mine and ate it when I woke up the next morning.

Dads carried sleeping kids out to the cars and pickups parked around

the school yard, while moms cleaned up the mess so it would be ready for school

on January 2.

It stayed cold through January and February.

Icycles hung along roof lines at the house and barn,

they seemd to grow bigger each day.

Some were fat and long, nearly to the ground.

Uncle took a shovel and knocked them down near the doors becasue

Grandma worried that one might fall and kill someone.

We had what they called an inversion,

where the clouds made a lid over the valley and held in the fog and the cold.

The fog froze during the night and coated every twig and barb on the fences

with white crystle when we woke in the morning,

the whole town looked like a magical kingdom dressed in crystle and diamonds,

sparkling in the weak winter sun that struggled to shine through the overcast sky.

Until the church was built, every Saturday we helped

push back the desks and set up chairs.

We moved the piano and put up a table in the front for the sacrament,

then passed out hymn books so they were distributed among the chairs.

After the church was built we met at the church;

at nine every Sunday morning we all met for Sunday School.

We sang hymns, and little kids gave two and a half minute talks

and a sacrament gem scripture, then we sang a sacrament song and

the sacrament was passed. Then we divided into classes.

The adults stayed in the chapel, the teen agers went on the stage.

The littlest kids stayed with their moms, and the four five and six year olds

went into the little chaple with minature benches for their lesson.

The rest of us crowded into the kitchen or the little classroom

for a Sunday School lesson.


Then we went home for Sunday dinner.


Grnadma always put a beef or pork roast or whole chicken in the big roaster

with onions, carrots and whole pototoes around it into the oven

before leaving for Sunday Shcool.

Then she would take off her apron, wash her hands and check her hair

just before going out the door.

When we came back from Sunday School at 11:00 the dinner was ready to

put on the table. I helped set the table with the best dishes and napkins,

and Grandma would let me put a decoration in the middle of the table.

Then we would kneel down at our chairs for family prayer and blessing on the food.

Grandma served our plates, heaping them with meat and potatoes and gravy.

Then she would fill the glasses with fresh milk and pass around bread or hot

biscuits or cornbread.


After we ate and helped clean up the dishes we read scriptures from the Bible.

I usually fell asleep at the table while they were reading.

Sometimes Mom would shake me awake and tell me to go in my bed and

take a nap before church time, but if it was too cold she would

let me cuddle up on the couch near the heater,

put a blanket over me and let me sleep there.

At six o'clock in the evening we walked back over to the church

and had sacrament meeting. It seemed like it was three or four hours long.

We'd sing, have the sacrament again, and then adults would talk about things

I didn't understand. Then the Bishop would get up and talk like the meeting

was over, and I'd start getting ready to go and he'd say,

and our closing speaker will be, and I'd groan and slump back down in my seat t

o wait for the closing song. Mom would punch me with her elbow and grin.

Grandma would give us a mean look and shush us.


Four times a year there was quarterly stake conference in Snowflake,

but we didn't go. Grandma always rode in with her older sons,

and Mom and I would do things different from any other Sunday.

They stayed all day because there were two sessions and they had to attend

both of them, then drive thirty miles home.

Grandma would pack a cold lunch to eat between the sessions.


Two times a year in October and April they held General Conference in Salt

Lake City, we listened to it on the radio.

It was hard to just sit there and listen to people talking.

But sorting and cleaning beans was even worse.

I bent over the table with a pile of dried beans, pulling out leaves and rocks

and broken beans. Grandma said we shouldn't have the broken ones

because they might not be good, but we saved them and used them to plant

in the spring. Grandma said we should be grateful to be able to hear conference

on the radio. There were so many people in the world that didn't get to,

and when she was young there was no radio to listen to the conferences

and hear the prophet of the Lord speak right to us in our homes.


In winter it was dark when we went to sacrament meeting.

On Tuesdays, we all went straight from the school to primary.

When we turned nine we were Home builders and Trail Blazers

and we got to have opening exercises in the big chapel,

while the little kids had theirs in the junior room.

Sometimes the eleven year old Seagals and Blazers would sit way in the

back row instead of up front, but there were only six rows, s

o it wasn't too far back.

The teachers would make them move up to their assigned row, right behind us.

I could hardly wait to be the oldest class in primary.


The new little cousin was born in February,

so I wasn't the youngest in the house anymore.

It seemed like he was always crying.

I thought it would be fun to have a little cousin living in the house,

but this baby was so little all it did was cry or sleep.

I was really surprised when I came home from school one day and

Mom told me about the baby. I wanted to ask where it had come from,

but everyone was real busy fixing up a baby cradle and changing furniture around.

I guessed they didn't know where it came from either,

or at least didn't know it was coming so soon.

Eight of us had bikes so we filled sacks with blankets and food

and other kids and rode the two miles south to the New Dam.

We couldn't believe it had frozen over, but there it was.

The water fall on the spill way had turned to thick white ice,

as if had frozen as it spilled over the dam.

The pool at the bottom was solid ice as was the trail of river

leading away from the dam.

The beaver dam we swam in last summer was a perfect ice skating ring

and the icicles hanging from the tamerick branches,

the snow clumps sitting softly on the cedars made a perfect winter wonderland.



We didn't really talk about the Easter Bunny.

In school we painted hardboiled eggs and hid them around the school house

for the little kids to hunt.

We had to do it on Saturday, because of course,

Sunday wasn't a day to play outside.

I had a book about a big Easter egg that a bunny found.

He tried to guess what might be in it as he rolled it around on the grass.

He imagined all kinds of animals and was really surprised when a

little chick came out. I couldn't figure out why he was surprised.

I and seen lots of eggs hatch and knew they would be baby chicks or turkeys.

I guess he wasn't much of a farm rabbit.



After Easter the school year seemed to end suddenly.

The sun came up earlier and it stayed light later.

Walking home from Primary, it was still light and not nearly so cold.

The willow trees began to bud out and the fruit trees blossomed

in white and pink boquets.

The first week in May we woke up to snow and freezing temperatures.

There would be no fruit on the trees that year, everyone said.


We counted down the last thirty days of school, turned in our books,

cleaned up the school room before we went on our

final field trip with the teacher.

This would be her last year teaching in Woodruff, she said,

and she wanted to take the older classes on a special field trip picknick.

We all piled into the backs of pickups and some of the dads

drove us out beyond the butte. I had never gone beyond that cattle guard.

We drove on following the river to the red bridge then parked and scrambled out.

Carrying knapsacks we followed our guides down to the river,

climbing over rocks and fallen trees.

We could still see signs of the spring floods and the

water mark high above our heads.

A layer of silt covered the beach showing plainly

the day by day marks of the receeding water.

We hiked a long ways, then followed the path around a corner and reached our goal.

There on the canyon wall were flat slabs of black granite

carved with anient pictoglyphs from some ancient indian tribe.

And painted right beside in in black paint was a heart with an arrow through it

and the initials KF plus RG. We spent the whole morning there,

exploring all the small caves and writing walls,

ate our lunches then went home with great plans for the summer.


Our first overnight hike was to the small buttes east of town.

We rode our bikes as far as the cemetary,

then walked across the fields to the buttes.

The lake was full from the spring runoff,

and we took the flat bottom boat tied there to row out on the lake.

We built a fire in the small carve half way up the butte and ate our sandwiches.

Some of the kids started telling ghost stories and making scary sounds,

trying to make it sound like they were coming from someplace else,

but we started giggling, and couldn't stop.

Everything anyone said from then on made us giggle more.

It didn't matter if they just said, "OK, we're not going to giggle anymore,"

they couldn't even finish the sentence and we'd all be giggling.

We tried singing primary songs, but nothing would stop.

Finally we rolled up with our partners in our blankets

and fell asleep under the blanket of stars,

as the giggles petered out and sleep came.


We hurried back in the morning to do our chores,

because we knew if we didn't get back on time we wouldn't get to sleep out again.



Our next outing was to the big butte north of town.

I was surprised to see my uncles and some of the older kids already there.

We didn't know they were going to join us.

They acted real mad when we came up and told us to go somewhere else,

but we said it was a free country and we could camp where we wanted.

We climbed up the south side that we called the face.

Years before someone had arranged a bunch of rocks into a big W

that could be seen from all over town.

Some years the teen agers in MIA took white wash up and

painted the rocks white so they showed up better.

We could hardly wait til we were big enough to paint the W.

I was hoping that was what the older kids were going to do

and maybe we'd get to help them.

When we climbed as high as the W, we turned to look back at the town.

Crops were starting to grow in the fields and looked like

Grandma's patch work quilt that I had on my bed.

Some of the squares were red with freshly tilled soil,

others were a bright green with newly sprouted alalfa,

and others were gold with the left over winter wheat, or light brown,

full of last winters unplowed corn stalks.

The main road stretched out, blackened by scattered cinders along the path

of the river, and the four side streets divided the town into squares

with tiny houses like a Monopoly game board. The tiny cows grazed in the fields,

and flocks of birds swarmed, then lighted in a cottonwood tree,

then swarmed again.

We climbed on to the cone of the volcano and stood precariously

on the ledge. I dared a cousin to drop down on the shelf just inside the cone,

so a bunch of us climbed down in, then threw rocks down into the caveren below,

counting to see how far to the bottom.

We scrambled out and sat on the ledge, dangeling our feet over the side.

"You know," one of the older boys approached us and began to tell a story.

"Long ago when the Indians were here, they came from miles around to gather here.

See the rings of rock around the side of the butte.

That's where they put their T-pees, maybe where they buried their dead.

We've found a lot of arrow tips and pottery pieces digging in those circles.

Some were stuck in human bones." he added with an eary voice,

then continued. "Anyway, every year they had a ceremony.

They kind of mixed the things the Nephites learned about the birth of Jesus,

with their legends and pagan ceremonies.

So each year they would gather and three wize men would get together

to choose a young virgin to throw into the volcano as a sacrifice to the sun god

to keep the sun from going away in the south.

But when the white men came, they had to stop doing it."

I fell right into it. "Did the white men make them stop?" I asked.

"No. After the white men came they couldn't find three wise men or a virgin."

All the older kids laughed and slapped their knees, and repeated the punch line.

I laughed so they wouldn't know I didn't understand the joke.

I didn't know what a virgin was.

We moved toward the base of the butte on the east side,

near the three cylos where we left our bikes and packages for dinners.

We each brought a scout stew. We chopped up onions and carrots and pototoes

and mixed it all together with ground meat, then wrapped it in cabbage leaves

then in tin foil to cook over coals.

We had built a big bonfire before climbing the butte so the coals were

just perfect for putting on the foil wrapped dinners.

Just as the sun was setting, we saw a dust cloud on the road to Holbrook.

It was getting closer, and we realized it was a pick up load full of kids

from town. We didn't see many town kids except driving through on their way

to a swiming hole on the river.

They drove directly toward the three silos and parked.

They roared their engines as they skidded to a stop near our fire,

throwing up dirt and rocks into our camp fire area.


"Hey did you bring the beer." One of our older boys shouted,

and they all pulled out bottles of beer.

Then one passed around a package of cigarettes and started lighting up.

Some of the bigger kids with us called out their names and went over to them.

They were friends with them at school.

I thought they must have planned to meet them there.

When they got out of eighth grade they rode the bus into Holbrook to school.

It was better than when grandma's friends had to go live in s bigger

town if they wanted to go to high school.

I watched in horror as our own guys lit up cigarettes

and took drinks from the bottles as they passed them around.

Their voices got louder and their jokes got worse as they drank.

The girls were hugging and kissing with the guys right in front of us.

Some of them were lying down on the ground, and a couple of them were

throwing up in the rocks.


One of the Holbrook boys came over and grabbed at a cousin standing near me.

"Come on over here, little girl. Who's your brother?"

She just looked at me pleading for me to help her.

I stood frozen, my feet were planted and I couldn't make them move.

She didn't answer so he asked her again.

"Why do you want to know? I don't even have a big brother."

She clenched her teeth and her fist defiantly trying to step away.

"Cause if you have a brother, then you know what I want you to do.

I heard all these Mormon boys use their sisters to learn on.

Come with me, I'll show you. I'll do my brotherly duties."

He pulled her close to him, grabbing at her shirt with one hand and

feeling around to open his zipper with the other.

He was kissing her on the mouth and tearing her shirt.



As one of the other boys stumbled and grabbed for another one of us who was only

a little older than myself, I found my strength. I took a large malpai rock and

threw it at him as hard as I could.

I had a pretty good arm from baseball and throwing rocks at targets at the river.

Both cousins were on the ground, screaming in pain and begging for help.

It had gotten dark and I couldn't see what was happening,

but I knew I had to do something, and none of the older Woodruff kids were even

trying to stop them. Some of them had fallen down on the ground themselves,

and the rest were so drunk they didn't know where they were.

The screams echoed from the side of the butte, and when the rock hit,

I grabbed my cousin and pulled her away as I pulled her up to her feet.

I don't know where I got the strength but I dragged both of them

out to the road where our bikes were.

I pushed her up on the handelbars shouting at the others to ride fast.

I peddled the half mile to their houses,

checking to see that the other got safely to a bike.

They were both still crying and sobbing but managed to balance on the handelbars

of my bike. I didn't even look back, but I could hear what was happening.

I just kept peddling 'til I got her to her house.

At least she had stopped screaming by the time we got to her house.

The other cousins were right behind us on their bikes quickly peddling

on to their own homes. We could hear the big boy swearing and yelling

at his friends to come help him get us. Someone yelled,

"Oh, just let them go. They're not going to tell anyone.

They wouldn't dare." And another answered,

"Who's going to believe them anyway, there just babies."


All the other kids followed us down the path, turning to throw rocks

back toward the attackers. When we got to the house we pushed our bikes

quietly into the back yard. It was dark already,

but I could see their clothes were torn and there was blood on them.

The full moon lighted the yard well enough to cast shadows.

I handed them the bucket of water from the well,

and they cleaned up as best they could.

I helped tie my jacket around her waist by the sleeves to cover her up

and hide some of the blood, and smoothed her hair back from her tear stained face.

I looked at the boy. He looked just as bad.

I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything.

Then he ran on up the road to his own house, and she ran in the kitchen door.

I clutched at the pain in my chest trying to stop crying.

I rode home, snuck in through the back door and into my bed

and quietly cried myself to sleep.



None of us ever said anything about it.

I don't think she even told her parents.

We just silently wondered what had happened to our innocnce,

but didn't have the words to express it. I didn't say anything

about the older kids smoking and drinking either.

I was afraid they would hurt me if they even thought I told.

And like they said, who would believe me anyway.

Everyone thought we were so safe in our little world,

and they were always so thankful we didn't have sin in our little town.


Things were never the same for any of us kids after that.

I watched those same boys bless and pass the sacrament each Sunday,

and I watched the girls sing in the chior, or give talks about Jesus and repentance, and I just felt confused and somehow, I felt dirty.

They just sat there and watched.

They told the Holbrook kids where to find us,

and they drank and smoked and made out right in front of us.

They joked and laughed while we were loosing our innocence and our youth.

I began to wonder if I could take the sacrament often enough to make

the dirty feeling go away. I wished I could have stayed a child,

or be baptized again to feel clean and pure. I wondered if I would ever feel cle

an and pure agian.


We didn't have any more sleep overs away from home except

when the adults went with us. They didn't seem to notice.

We invited them to take us out to six mile.

That was our name for Sheep's Crossing, becuase it was six miles from town.

The New dam was called two mile because it was two miles out.

Our Town was the center of our universe and everything

was measured from there and named accordingly.

We chose six mile because, of course, we couldn't go that far by ourselves,

so the adults would have no reason to question our inviting them along.

We piled shovels and food and sleeping bags into the pickups.

Drove out. It was a ways off the main road on a rocky path,

but we drove over it and parked near the canyon edge.

Everyone had to carry stuff so we would't have to make a lot of trips,

because it was quite a climb down sand dunes into the river canyon.

Six mile was the best beach along the river.

The sand was deep and after a good flood it was clean

and it was above the Little Colorado along the Silver Creek

that ran into the Little Colorado so the water was clear and we could see our feet.

Down river just a ways was a beaver dam that made a small pool deep

enough to swim in, but not to dive.


Near the path down was spots of quick sand.

We called it slow sand, because we really had to work hard to sink down

even to our knees, but we'd heard stories of animals getting caught in it

and dying when they couldn't scramble out.

We liked to stand in it and pump our feet up and down trying to

work our way down into it.


There was a swimming hole up river that was really deep with high cliffs

where the older boys would jump from.

I could never make myself climb that high or even think about jumping

from the high cliff. I felt small and vulnerable and was glad there were

Moms and dads along to tell us not to even try it.


We dug holes in the sand with shovels then climbed in and took turns

being buried up to our chins. My uncles left just their toes and heads

sticking out and it looked really funny.

Then they jumped up and tried to talk all the other older kids

into jumping from the cliffs. They raced into the water and ran across

the river in knee deep water and scrambled up the cliffs just out of

sight of the grown ups who were busy cooking foil and visiting

over the coals when the teen agers slipped away.


Some of the girls jumped from the lower cliffs,

but the boys kept teasing and daring them to climb higher and dive in.

We were all watching, thankful that we had been forbidden.

My young uncle called his little wife. "Let Grandma take care of the baby,"

he laughed. "Come on and play with us."

She followed glancing back to see that the child was sleeping.

He jumped first and she followed. There was a splash and a scream.

We all ran toward the cliffs. My uncle ran into the water and

pulled out her body. She jumped too close to the cliffs,

they said, and hit her head on a rock under the water.

They said she must have screamed with pain when she hit the rock,

and drowned from sucking the water into her lungs.

They wrapped her in a blanket and my uncle carried her to his pick up.



We all silently gathered up the shovels and blankets and followed up the cliffs

to the top. We followed his truck back, in silence.

She was burried two days later in the cemetary,

three days after her sixteenth birthday.

We stood around the grave the Elders had dug the day before

and lowered the casket into the deep dark hole.

I felt the bump as it hit the bottom, and as I took my turn

to toss in a spade full of dirt along with each of the family members,

I looked at her tiny baby, and at my young uncle and

felt again that same stabbing pain in my heart,

I thought my heart must be going to break in two.

It wasn't long after that when Dwayne came to town.

He was working on the highway and my uncle brought him home to dinner.

He and my mom talked and smiled at each other all through dinner,

then said they were going on a walk.



"You go on to bed," she told me. "I'll be back to tuck you in."

I woke up to the sound of arguing. "Mom, I'm 27 and I have a child.

It's not like someone is just going to come along and marry me."

"But he's not even a Mormon."

"He'll probably join after we get married. He's talked to missionaries."

"You don't even know him."

"I've known him all summer. We've gone to dances in the other towns nearby.

He's fun and I love him. I can't just stay here all my life, alone."


"You can't possibly love him. You only met him. You can't give up your family,

your home, everything you have here to just run off with the first drifter that

come through town."

"He's not a drifter, he's working on the highway to earn money for college.

And I'm not giving up my family, we're taking my family with us."

"He expects you to work while he goes to college?"

"Mom, he has his G.I. money for college from the army, and..."

"You have a husband. You are sealed to your child's father."

I hated it when they called me "the child."


"My husband is dead. I only knew him six weeks, and then he abandoned me

and went off and got killed in the war. I don't even remember what he looked like.

At least Dwayne's alive. Mom, I'm sealed to a dead man... just like you,

but I'm not going to put myself in a coffin and live in the cemetary

the rest of my life while I wait for him to come ressurect me."


I put my pillow over my head so I couldn't hear any more.

It wasn't so bad that she wanted to get married, I liked Dwayne.

But to leave this home. Where would we go, I wondered, trying to imagine what

a college was like. I had never once stepped out of the boundaries of my safe

little world on the edge of the Little Colorado River and the high Northeastern

plateaus.


I heard my uncles joking about another shot gun wedding,

and watched all through the ceremony in the living room to see who would be

holding a shot gun. Eddie and my mom didn't look like they were scared of

anything, and I never saw anyone with a gun of any kind.

Grandma cried through the whole ceremony.

Bishop shook their hands and told them that he hoped he could go

with them to the temple soon, he ruffled my hair,

then gave me a hug and turned away.

My uncle drove the three of us into Holbrook in his pick up.

I sat in the back with the suitcases.

He dropped us at the train station.

I didn't know that Uncle had signed papers for Mom to take

his orphan baby with us to raise as her own.

He kissed the baby good by and hugged each of us and just said,

"Zion has fled."

The Santa Fe train whistled as it ground to a stop at the station,

and the three of us climbed aboard heading east to cross the entire continent

and begin a new life -- a new family.

I never returned to The Town.

By the time my dad graduated from medical school and became a doctor in Cleveland

so we had enough money to travel I was nearly grown.

He raised me as his own son along with two two sisters.

We got Christmas cards every year from all the uncles as they moved away to find

work and raise their families, and Mom flew back to Phoenix

where her brothers picked her up and drove her home to attend Grandma's funeral

when I was fifteen. I knew just where she would be, buried next to Grandpa

in our family section. She showed me the spot many times.

"There he is, " she would say, "and this is where I wil lay next to him until

he is resurrected and reaches out to me to resurrect me,

then we will be together again, for all eternity."

I could vision the open grave and the casket being lowered,

and hear the sound of shovels full of Little Colorado caliche clay

hittig the coffin.

I wondered if that meant Grandpa had finally come to resurrect her.



I never saw the inside of another Mormon church as I grew up.

I married and raised my kids without any memory of the church.

One day, two missionaries knocked on our door.

We invited them to come back in the evening when we would all be home.

We listened to their lessons and after several months of studying,

we joined the church. Well my family joined, I just became active

after being lost for thirty years.

The first time I heard a child get up in sacrament meeting and say,

"I want to bury my testimony" I thought, "that is just hat I did,

I burried my testimony when we left that town, and

never even thought about it again for thirty years.

I wanted to be baptized again. I had been so long,

and I had been so young, but Biship assured me one babtism was enough,

I only needed to remcommit and take the sacrament.

It took me a long time to feel ready to take that step because

as I studied the gospel and attended church I began to have flash back memories.


The bishop gave me a blessing and offered me counseling through

Church Social Services. It took me a couple of sessions to feel

comfortable about talking. I told the counselor I had no memories of my childhood,

but I knew it had been happy without any traumatic experiences.

After all, we had lived in in Our safe little Town the first nine years.

The counselor taught me some relaxation methods, and some mental imaging

techniques. I first began to remember visitng the dump near the butte in Our Town.

There was an old spring mattress with the cloth cover and cotton rotting away.

I stepped on the springs and tried to keep them from springing up through the

fabric, then put another foot to step down another spring, but as I would press two

down at once, two more would spring up and the harder I tried, the faster they

popped up and got out of control.

When I told the counselor I felt like all my life I had been trying to

press down springs, but now there was no way. "There are just too many."
"I feel like," I stared hard into my inner vision, "I feel like all my

life I have been swimming upstream against the flooded Little Colorado River trying

to keep my head above water. I've never made any progress because the current is

too strong. It's all I can do to keep my head above the water."

"Can you let go, stop fighting the flood -- swim under the water."

The counselor asked. The panic that swept through me was closer to terror.

We explored the terror. I insisted that I had no traumatic memories

in my childhood. It was a beautiful peaceful little town where we were

all safe and protected. As we began to explore my early memories and talk about

each one, dealing with the fear and the pain, I was abale to walk across the ankle

deep water and peacefully sit on the river bank to view my childhood from an adult

perspective.

None of the trauma had been my fault.

I wasn't even there when grandfather, uh, went away.

Kittens die sometimes, as do little boys that fall in rivers,

and young women that dive from cliffs onto rocks.

I didn't rape those two kids, and even did all I could to protect them.

But all I gave, all I had wasn't enough.

"Then why," I asked, "does God let such things happen?"

If he loves us why doesn't he protect us?

Especially little kids." I wept oopenly, the tears of a small child needing

comforting, the tears of a child who had lost close friends.

My counselor and Bishop explained the concept of agency and natural laws

and consequences. "I just don't think I can be forgiven for things

I've done, forgiven for the things that happened to me."

I cried over and over.

"You not only need to let go of the guilt for things that weren't your fault,

but as you recognize sins you have comitted, you can confess them to Heavenly

Father or the Bishop and resolve to stop that behavior.

If it's something you have already changed in your life,

you have repented then you must trust in God that you are forgiven."



"How can I know when I have been forgiven, if I can be forgiven."

"You not only have to believe in Jesus Christ,

but you must believe Jesus and the promises he has made us.

You must trust that because he said we can be forgiven we will be,

when we do our part."

I gazed at the picture of Christ above the desk that said,

"I didn't say it wuld be easy, I said it would be worth it."

And wondered how such tragic events could be of any value.


I prayed and searched my conscious.

Could I forgive those whose actions had silently tormented my entire life.

That was my final hurdle.

It took more than one counseling session to come to the conclusion

that if God can forgive me, he can forgive others, when they repent.

For me, I realized I was in no position to judge anyone.

I jumped off the old mattress letting the springs go where they would.

It was trash that I had carried around long enough,

and it truly belonged at the dump.

I imagined myself diving down under the flood waters,

swimming along in a calm gentle current of cool fresh water.


I took more than a few sessions to let it all go.

Finally I said, "It's too much. I can't throw away all my bundles.

I have wrapped all my sins and all the abuse into bundles tied in brown paper.

I am trying to throw them all into a huge dumpster.

The more I throw, the faster they appear.


Then my counselor asked the question that changed my life.

"Is there someone you want to ask for help.

I closed my eyes and searched my mind for the help I desparately wanted.

I viewed the statue of the Cristus we'd seen in the visitors center in SLC.

In my vision, I saw the huge statue of Christ

step down from the platform and reach out toward me.

Then, with one sweep of his hand, the bundles were gone and my heart was light.

Jesus stepped forward and took me in his arms and hugged me.

He held me against his heart. I could feel the warmth;

I could hear his heart beating. I could feel his breath upon my head,

and I traded all my sins for his love.


Many times throughout the years, I have gone into my private vision

to relive the memory of that feeling of being totally loved.

I carry that memory near to my heart, and when I need love or

friendship or any need that I have, I can recall the very real feeling

of having been embraced by th love of Jesus Christ.


" My family was bapized the following week and confirmed

members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

A year later we went to the temple and were sealed as an eternal family."

I explained to my grandchildren as we drove eastward.

"Then your mother and dad were married in the Washington DC temple

and you and your brothers were born under the covenent."

Exiting Interstate 15 at the middle exit I was lost and disoriented.

But as I drove south on the main street I begin to have vague memories

of the train station, and heard the sound of a train whistle.

I watched the long train lumber by headed west,

then drove across the dry river bed of the little Colorado River

on a modern concrete bridge, scanned the businesses and buildings

spreading along the highway. Seven miles of two lane traffic,

I watched anxiously for my first view of the big black butte.

I gasped at the sight, instead of a pointed cone, there was a flat top hill.

As we drove closer it became apparent that it had been turned into a mining

operation and the north side was badly chewed and mutilated

from the large machinery.

We continued to drive, then as we topped the point of the hill and in

a sudden apparition the little valley cuddled the little village.

Here at the change of the century, little had changed in the

looks of the town from that hill.

"Are you sure it's still out here," a sleepy grandchild asked

from the back seat of the Astro mini van as we traveled along the road from the

Holbrook Highway toward Our Little Town That Time Forgot.

"Well, I don't know.

My mother always said it might have been taken up with the city of Enoch.

Maybe before the new millennium began, Our Town fled with Zion."

I gasped at my first close look at the butte.

The cone was gone, the north west side had been chewed away by

cinder mining operations.

We drove over the last hill and caught that first glimpse of the

Little Town Time Had Forgotten.

The rising sun broke through the early morning clouds,

coloring the whole world pink and orange.

I drove from the new concrete bridge past an old C style red brick meeting house,

then turned north on the paved main street.

Passing several new trailers and mobile homes,

I looked for our old house, but it was gone.

A few new houses and barns had been built along the road years before.

The irrigation ditches were covered;

the giant cottonwood and willow trees no longer lined the main street.

The bridge I knew had huge boulders at each end and a sign that said

"do not enter."

The new bridge spanned the width of the canyon carved by the

Little Colorado River through past millennia.

Just before the bridge there was a broken post holding a faded sign

made as an Eagle scout project. "Welcome to Woodruff."

I drove out to the south end of town where more new houses had been built,

then back to cemetery road.


Cannon shots blasted the silent air, awakening a new generation to the

mid summer day, and the sleepy little town echoed the sounds

of past generations as cousins and aunts, uncles and grandparents gathered

in the school yard for a Fourth of July breakfast.


I touched the headstone on my grandparents' grave.

There they lay, side by side waiting patiently for the resurrection,

along with generations before.

My young aunt lay next to them, and my little friend,

along with numerous other family members who died throughout

the last fifty years.

As we walked from the cemetery toward the van

I held my grandchildren's hands in mine,

and gave them a little squeeze.

"Life makes a circle sometimes.

And sometimes it turns out OK.”


"Families can be forever," I promised.