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| Photo: Skitch in the dirt yard at The Trailer Playing with the bullet necklace |
THEN:
When I was five we moved to "The Trailer" and resided there until I was eight. One of the first trips over to our new home, I ran inside excitedly because I'd heard Mom and Dad say that Lila was going to be there. She had just married Johnny and moved out of our Green House, only gone from me a few days and I missed her to my bones. I searched The Trailer frantically and found both her and Johnny in the small room that would soon be my bedroom. I ran out in embarrassment and told my parents, "Lili and Johnny are in bed!" When no one raised an eyebrow at that I added, "Together!" That got a reaction but not the one I expected. They roared with laughter. I didn't understand that Johnny and Lila were allowed to sleep in the same bed now that they were married. They had honeymooned in our brand new modern trailer with running water and new furniture, but as we moved in they were moving out. They moved into a small, rustic cabin in the woods to set up housekeeping as husband and wife. I missed her more than even a bookish wordsmith can properly express. Suddenly, there was a whole in my heart. My life was never as magical when she was not around.
The Trailer had an indoor bathroom but the plumbing hadn't been hooked up quite to par. Either the septic tank had been built much smaller than regulation or Dad was piping the sewage into the creek out back. I suspect the tank problem, because I was never told to avoid playing in the creek or told to stay upstream of a certain point, and Dad would have warned me about it if the septic was letting out into the brook, which in those days and in our mountains was not an unheard of practice at all. Dad told us to try to make all number two visits to the outhouse he and Crit had built outside. Discussion with mother followed and it was generally agreed upon that special exceptions would be made for sickness and for me if it were in the nighttime or if I was in a hurry. Being the baby of the family meant I was afforded many passes the others were not, including the "I gotta poop NOW!" pass.
Probably the coolest thing about the new digs was a boy named Randall that lived next door. He was two years younger than me. He had blond hair and blue eyes. Many people said he looked like my brother. I didn't care that he was blond and cute; I liked that he wanted to play the same rowdy games I did, like Cowboys and Indians. The only playmate I'd had very often up to that point was my cousin Becky who was opposed to playing pretty much anything except "house" and "baby dolls". I liked that Ran allowed me to make most of the decisions in our play. (It had proven impossible to bully Becky into playing the games I was interested in. That kid had a one track mind! babies. Babies. BABIES!! ) I also liked the fact that Ran had a toy barn. I had lots of plastic animals and they were my favorite toys. Usually I pulled out my mother's sewing machine drawers and carefully emptied them of the spools of thread and packages of needles. I then turned the drawers on their side and pretended they were barns for the farm animals, houses for the cats and dogs, and trains to move the circus and zoo animals to and from new and exciting towns. But when I was allowed to go play with Ran, I would drop all my animals in a bag and cross the tobacco field to play with them in and around Ran's big, red, plastic barn. Mom's sewing machine got a rest. I had the animals; he had the barn. It was a match made in Heaven!
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| Photo: Skitch, playing with the sewing machine drawers and plastic animals. |
My cousin Ramona, who was Becky's sister, was two year younger than me but became a favorite playmate during The Trailer years. Unlike her sister, she was not opposed to playing a good rowdy game now and then and she and I started what would become a very special life-long friendship. I still spent a lot of time over at Randall's house, since Ramona didn't visit very often. When he and I weren't playing with his barn we were digging in his coal pile, riding his mother's Volkswagen Beetle up and down their gravel drive way like a carnival ride, or playing in the creek that ran along behind both our houses. The bottom in certain spots was covered in flat rock and a slick green algae grew over it. We would scrub it off with our feet while making our way to the other side of the creek. That way we not only made it across the creek without busting our butts, but we created a slip-free path to come back on. One day I followed him into his father's garage, and was amazed to find photos of women with no shirts on hanging out in plain sight. I was even more amazed by the fact that his mother would sunbath topless and Ran didn't think it was the least bit odd. He was a boy! She was a girl! Didn't they know they were supposed to wear clothing around each other?! I'd rarely seen a ladies "boobies" and was only vaguely aware that I would have my own someday. Still, I tried not to stare. Some sixth sense told me that was impolite. Randall once found a photo of a naked woman sitting on a naked man's lap and showed it to me. We hid in the tress and bushes around the creek, took off all our clothes, and tried it for ourselves. It didn't seem very fascinating to either of us and we wondered at the ridiculousness of "grown ups". He and I played "doctor" a few times and watched each other pee, but it was all very innocent and did not hold our attention nearly as long as riding my big wheel or picking the Tiger Lilies around the creek to surprise our mothers. Once, he and I found a mining cart buried in the coal pile by his house and it brought all the adults over with great interest. "Why did the previous owners of the house bury a mining car in the coal pile, anyway?" The adults all asked each other this or similar questions, scratched and shook their heads, but no one had an answer.
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| Photo: Cowgirl Skitch (Dig them wild pink and yellow pants!) |
The only spanking I ever got from my mother happened when Ran and I decided to play in the creek even though we'd been told not to. I'd been sick recently and it was getting late in the warm season. Mornings and evenings were cool but mid-day was still miserably hot. My sickness had been allergies, according to the doctor, and even I knew staying out of the creek would not help you avoid allergies. Mother told me to stay out of the water, but Randall and I were so uncomfortably hot and we were sure it wouldn't hurt us to wade the creek, just a little. I held up my skirt that had belonged to my mother's mother, a gift I treasured, and he and I stepped right out into the creek. At one point, I clumsily dropped the skirt and, after a slight panic, decided it would have time to dry before I went inside, surely? Right? Mother would never know I'd been in the creek. We went back to having fun, but then Crit saw us and shook his finger at me, "I'm telling on you, little girl!" And he marched off to do just that. Ran and I hid in the trees above the creek, but when my mother came out yelling lividly at the top of her lungs I caved and he, who always followed my lead, came out with me. Mother stripped grandmother's skirt off me and wore me out with a switch until blood ran down both my legs. My first, my only, my crazy beating! When she let go I ran for The Trailer thinking Mom had gone nuts and Daddy would save me. When I made it to him I was unpleasantly surprised. Dad had recently had a motorcycle accident with his friend Billy and the back half of one heel had nearly been sliced off. He was on crutches, and he took one of those crutches and attempted to "guide" me into the corner for additional punishment. What with my frantic movements, this amounted to basically cracking me in the head with the crutch and left me cowering in the corner, assuming that both of my parents had gone stark raving mad. Many, many years later, my mother admitted to being stressed out about other situations in her life that day, and she apologized for whipping me at all, let alone so hard. I was in my forties by then. I accepted the apology and told her that I love her more than life. And I do!
When it was too rainy or too cold for Ran and me to play together, I spent a lot of time listening to records. Hits from the 50s, Donna Fargo, Dolly Parton, Roger Miller, Ray Stevens, and Lynn Anderson were a few of the records my mother owned that I pulled out and listened to, probably more often than she did. I would listen to them and sing and dance along. Sometimes I played alone with my farm animals and the sewing machine drawers, or with paper dolls, or Barbies, which seemed more interesting to me than most baby dolls. After all, how much trouble can a baby doll get into anyway? They get hungry, they mess their pants, they scream bloody murder, someone fixes it. The end! But a grown woman with a car, and a boyfriend, and a closet full of shoes? Now that's trouble! And Saturday mornings you would find me hovering over a big bowl of Cocoa Pebbles enthralled by Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny, or the Pink Panther.
One of the life changing events that happened at The Trailer was the birth of my future best friend/near daughter/almost sister/one of the major loves of my life, Tanya. I was seven when she was born and under the crazy assumption that if she'd only shown up a boy then I could be an uncle. I was very disappointed to be given the title of "aunt" but when they placed that bundle in my arms, when I held the soft warm squiggle that was her, all was forgiven. She was breathtakingly beautiful! And so much more fun than any of mine or Becky's dolls, even my favorties Cuddly and Drowsy, even my Barbies! She had dark hair and vivid blue eyes that jumped right out of her wrinkled little face and into my heart. She would make contented noises that had all the good in the world wrapped up inside them, and when she cried I wanted action! Do something! Fix everything! This baby should not be sad! I didn't know how to help her but I did know how to demand that someone figure it out and figure it out now!
The other life changing event was school - first grade. I had been warned repeatedly that I HAD to go. Mother told me, "If I had my way you'd never leave me, but if I don't send you to school "they" will come and take you away from me, and put you in a home with another family and they will send you to school anyway, so you just have to go." Despite the trepidation you can imagine that attitude evoked, first grade was a blast! When I started school I was six but looked four. I could not, despite my tom-boyishness and my time on horseback, open the heavy front doors to the school. My oldest sister Sandi, was a senior in high school and she was on the bus when I got off of it each morning. She had to ride on to the high school, and she worried that I'd be stuck outside some cold morning, completely unable to enter the school. So, she would enlist some kindly maternal 7th grade girl to go with me off the bus and make sure I got inside the schoolhouse. Other than that, the only hiccup I had was on my first day when I went to the bathroom and came out to find the classroom empty. Mother had given me dire warnings about how easily one can "miss the bus" and how important it was that I "catch the bus", two phrases I had never heard before. For all I knew, I would have to stay entirely alone in the empty schoolhouse overnight if I missed my bus. I panicked and grabbed my treasured book bag and stuffed my papers inside. I ran outside expecting to see the bus pulling away, but all I found was the teacher and the children enjoying recess. The teacher and the aide chuckled at me and I tried to not be annoyed. I found it frustrating though, that people would refrain from telling you things and then they would laugh at you when you guessed wrongly about what was going on! I found that all pretty unfair, but I just focused on the relief that I had not missed my bus, on the words the teacher gave me promising she would make sure I caught it at the end of each day, on the sunshine in her hair, on the laughter of the children all around us. Soon I was playing and laughing too and all was well. In first grade, we were not required to nap, and I had a teacher that I soon discovered was very sweet, despite laughing at me. She only "spanked" me once and that was on the last day of school and was just a ruler smacking my leather-tough hands (no oil glands or sweat glands in my hands had created some rough and tough surfaces.) The only thing that hurt that day was the fact that she intended to hurt me. My little feelings were hurt, my tiny heart was broken, but first grade was over and I was on to summer vacation before second grade. (When I would find out what true heartbreak was! My second grade teacher hated me, but that's a story of it's own.) In first grade, I had loved the smell of our little room. Markers, crayons, paint, glue, and paper all swirled together and created a scent you only find in classrooms. I loved the fun of coloring, the joy of learning, the bright colors on the abacuses. I learned numbers other than 1-10, and the letters that weren't in my name! I learned to READ! What a miracle! What a joy! Suddenly, Frog and Toad, and Harold with the Purple Crayon, and Curious George, and Madeline, and Amelia Bedila, and Billy and Blaze were my new best friends! Suddenly, I realized that a thousand exciting worlds had opened up just for me! I decided the only thing greater than reading would be if I had been the magician that put those words in the book in the first place! That became my secret desire. I told no one. Several months before I'd said I wanted to grow up to be a jockey and I was laughed at. My mother adding that I was not only likely to be too fat, but that I was a girl on top of that, and girls were not allowed to be race horse jockeys. I didn't want anyone laughing at my dream of writing (or as I thought of it then "book making") or telling me why it could not be, so I kept that one all to myself. It became my sweet, secret craving.
I continued riding horses, jockey dreams or no. Ran loved them too, and he and I spent many a happy hour on horseback. My family still had our red horse Flame, and Gideon, and Goliath. One of Daddy's mares (Polly, I think?) had a colt that he named Penny. Penny thought that she was a dog. At least, that's what I surmised when she took to greeting Pop by jumping up on him until he caught her two front hooves to keep her from injuring him. Usually, he then held her two front hooves in one hand and petted her head with the other. I came home from school one day to learn that I'd missed a visit from some of my Pike County cousins, mother's sisters and some of her nieces had visited. I was disappointed to have missed them, but when Daddy said the cousins had decided they wanted to ride Gideon and Goliath that angered me. I wanted to of approve anyone that rode my horses! And even after they were approved, I didn't like anyone riding them unless I was around to make sure my dear horse friends were not mistreated. I didn't realize this school business was going to leave my horses unprotected! Maybe mother was right and it was a horrible idea after all! Dad said I didn't need to worry about Gideon and Goliath. He wouldn't let anyone hurt them, but besides that, they could take care of themselves very well anyway. "As a matter of fact," Dad said, "Goliath decided he didn't want them to ride him at all. He refused to move an inch when they clicked and kicked him with their heels. He shook one of them off his back and he sat down and let the other slide right off." This story amused me greatly after Pop convinced me that they hadn't kicked Goliath or Gideon very hard when urging them to move. Daddy said Gideon let them ride but he went too fast for them and scared them, and my cousins didn't duck at the clothes line, like Ran and I always did. Those cousins were swiped off Gideon's back and landed in the yard flat of their rumps. Daddy said they hadn't grown up around horses like I had, the "poor little city slickers." The cousins were unhurt, but they never seemed interested in riding my crazy horses again after that day.
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| Photo: Pop with Penny the dog-horse |
Other than the horses, I had two black cats that Lila named Midnight and Tar Baby, I had two hounds I named Rock and Buck (because when I tried to ride them like horses, Rock sat there like a stone and would not move, and Buck sat down and caused me to slide off.) I had another dog name Wooley, and several other cats, including a gray one that got set on fire by the pilot light in the gas stove and went out the door in a stream of smoke and wails once someone figured out where all that meowing was coming from and opened the door under the oven.
Daddy, was horribly ill and had been all of my life. He had an ulcer right over the pyloric sphincter at the exit of the stomach. This caused him huge pain (though he rarely spoke of it you could see it in the grimace of his face) and made him vomit as many times a day as he ate, which was sometimes zero times and sometimes as much as three. He tried to keep the food down as long as possible, knowing he needed to get all the nutritional value from it that he could (as you can imagine he was painfully thin) but sooner or later he was so sick it had to come back up. All my growing up years, until he had surgery to fix this when I was twelve, Dad had a spot on our farm that he would go to to empty his stomach. The rest of us avoided that spot as much as possible. When he wasn't too sick, he busied himself with work in the tobacco fields, the family garden, and with a saw mill, trying to make just a little extra money for the household, or to provide some vegetables for the table. As always I was his near constant companion when I was not at school, and after stepping on several nails, I finally learned to put my feet right where his feet had just been, when following him through any area that had boards or planks lying around. One time a nail came through the top of my foot and another time I was wearing Dad's big work boots and the nail successfully stopped me in my tracks. I couldn't lift my foot back up; I was literally nailed to the board below me. I had to call for Pop and backtracked to me, picked me up off the board, and carried back home to Mother who washed the wound and dressed it. The pain was a deep ache that did not go away for two or three days, but I was nearly as worried about Daddy's boots as I was the pain to follow. I had just rendered them longer water proof and they were expensive boots. I stepped on approximately six nails while living at The Trailer and one nail in the place we moved to next. But that last time I was running, and not following Daddy, and I didn't even see the board, let alone the nail.
I caught chicken pox when I was in the first grade, but the doctor we went to at the time told mother it was simply impetigo. Turns out I likely had both, because I was in a pretty sorry shape and several years later (at the ripe old age of 14) I had shingles, which they say you cannot get unless you've already had chicken pox. The pox left me with a few small scars and one rather obvious one on the left side of my nose, very near my eye. I missed a lot of school and they sent the guidance counselor, Mr. Neal, out to ask after me. When he stopped talking with my mother and inquired of me how I was, I told him they'd given me pills I could barely swallow but he'd probably do just fine with them because he had a big mouth.
Another day (I believe in second or third grade) I was walking down a super crowded hallway in school during the Halloween season. The popular girls were selling popcorn balls, and candy apples, and brownies in an attempt to make enough money to be crowned Halloween Queen. In those days you bought the Halloween crown! I was squished up against Mr. Neal in the crowd and somehow, we managed to get his pants zipper caught in my hair. It took him and the school nurse a good fifteen minutes to get me loose. I hadn't been embarrassed by the crack about his big mouth, but I was red with mortification and wanted to fall through the floor by the time they got my hair unhooked from Mr. Neal's groin!
All in all, my time at The Trailer was a magical and wondrous time, a time filled with pain and pleasure, a time sprinkled with lessons, and love, and laughter, and life.
