The Summer Picnic

Sitting around the fire ring this evening, my mind wandered back…45 years ago, to a meadow up the old farm lane. There, once each year in the heat of summer, we had a wiener roast of (in a child’s mind) epic proportions.
     I don’t remember everyone who was invited, just that it was the second most exciting event the whole summer long–the first being when the local fireman’s carnival came to town.
     I think it might have been a celebration of the haymaking season.  Our feet were tough as leather by the time the party neared, after running barefoot since school let out--save for Sunday mornings, and walking through freshly-mown hay-fields, shoeless.  We probably could have originated the ‘walking on hot coals motivational revolution or, at the very least, had side jobs in the circus walking on broken glass.
     The wiener roast was held in a meadow, as I  already wrote, but that was to draw a picture in your mind of something lovely, like a country garden beside a stream…daisies blooming…birds singing…but, reality here <jerking hard> it was more properly known as a cow pasture.  And the stream that flowed through it was the “crick” where we caught minnows and crayfish.  And…when we were getting it ready for the wiener roast, we had to be careful of the cow patties…but there was that handy crick in which to wash our leather skin, bare  feet.
     Dad always referred to it as ‘up the hollow” because it was almost a third of the way out the half-mile-long, old farm lane.  He loved that piece of ground.  It was almost level, which probably made it difficult for all of us to walk on. You know, having been raised in the “hollow” on the steep hillside, we all had one leg longer than the other so we could stand straight. Okay, that was a lie…but I remind you, my first writing love is fiction <wink>.
     So, there I was, a little girl, with the second best event of the summer approaching, and dreaming of a galvanized washtub full of ice and ACME brand soda pop.  And all would be good as long as that can-and-bottle-opener did not disappear from its place next to the tub.  For you youngsters, pop top cans had not been invented.
     It just occurred to me that I AM getting old. I have lived long enough to remember pre-poptop cans, AND to be appreciative of a party that could be attended in bare feet ;-)
     The morning of the big day arrived, and dad went out, climbed on his Farmall H, and went and found a big old tree that had fallen. After sawing it into what looked like car-sized pieces <--practicing my fish stories, chained it to the tractor and dragged it to the middle of the pasture field.
     Mom was busy making macaroni salad–she put pineapples in hers (I didn’t really like it but that didn’t matter. ACME pop could wash down anything and make it taste swell) and baked beans, and  cupcakes and a cake or two.  And there were a couple five-pound boxes of wieners from the local packhouse.       Hmmm…what else?  Bags (plural) of marshmallows.
     Oh, and Hallelujah! There was a reason that I prayed; sometimes the prayers were answered.  Potato chips!  There would be a couple of bags of them…ACME brand too, and I think the pop was designed to wash them down perfectly.  Pretzels… I cannot recall anything else.  Just the important things…all the things that went well with ACME brand pop. Oh, and bless youthful ignorance…I had NO idea that it was not called “pop” the world over.  All I can say is when I found out that other people called it soda, I really had to doubt how smart the rest of the world was. Soda was that stuff that you put in cakes and cookies so they didn’t bake flat. Anyone knew that!
     We younger kids were just busy getting in everyone’s way, trying to help. Anything we could do to expedite the pop getting into the tub of ice.
     The time came to get everything up the lane.  Dad pulled the hay wagon with the “H”, to the lane below the house, and we all started carrying things down to what would be the transportation and the table.  And I recall excitement that mom had splurged and bought those candles, red, green, yellow, with the white netting over the outside. She told us they were to keep away the bugs.  There were straw bales on the wagon–those, with boards laid between them, would act as benches.
So we went, the tractor chugging up the lane, its motor keeping rhythm with my pounding heart. Second best day of the year.
     We kids were sent to find “wiener sticks”, and we knew not to get wild cherry. We looked for maple.  And we had to get lots, because sometimes the sticks ended up being part of the fire. Not intentionally, of course, but city people didn’t understand the finer art of roasting a marshmallow, blue flames shooting from its surface, without burning the stick too. It was a shortcoming that farmers just accepted, and instead of giving a wiener stick lesson, realized it was just a whole lot easier to cut down extra sticks.
     When we came back from our stick foray, the pop was on ice. I marvelled at the colors of the cans, red cola, brown root beer, dark red black-cherry, green lemon lime, orange (duh) orange and purple grape. This event was second only to Christmas morning for sheer beauty before my eyes.
      And we drank.  Without being aware, I am sure that I raised my can to heaven and toasted all that was good in the world (and that was…well…pretty much everything) and I toasted summer, and bare feet, and wieners cooked on a stick, and flaming marshmallows.  We played in the crick, and we ran and chased, playing “it” tag with any kids who'd come to visit.  Looking back, they were probably quite overwhelmed by us farmkids. Maybe even frightened,  I mean, kids who ran through cowpatties and never skipped a beat on their way to the crick to wash their feet.
     The black-cherry pop was the first to vanish.  Then the orange and the lemon lime.  And so it went, I could have told the time by the flavors of pop left in the tub. At the end of the day there was only root beer left…I reckon because we made our own homemade root beer, letting it brew in the sun.  It was not so special to us.
     Ah…and then evening came, and dad built up the fire, big, huge in fact, and we toasted marshmallows. Lots of marshmallows. And for those whom the pop had not given a belly ache, the marshmallows caught up with.  I leaned back and watched the flames, the fireflies, the sparks flying up in the air each time the wood was adjusted.  It was our fireworks.
     Out beyond where the flames illuminated, silent vestiges of the past haunted the darkening woods and fields (there were ghosts out there). But here, by the firelight, my once a year pop binge accomplished, all was right with the world.
     When the last visitor from town pulled away, their tailights illuminating the dust behind them with a strange reddish glow, we cleaned up everything, packed it onto the haywagon, and headed back down the lane.
      My wish for you all, this day of fireworks and picnics, fourth of July, 2015, is that you appreciate the simple things in life, like family and friends, a can of “pop” to drink, fireflies, and if you run into an unexpected cowpattie, a “crick” nearby to wash your feet in.  Happy fourth!

A to Z "D"

Continuing with country life...

D is for dams... 

Fifty years ago, a sunny, summer afternoon might find my four sisters, three brothers and me engrossed in a HUGE project. We liked to dam the crick (creek).  That was possibly the only time we all voluntarily pitched in to work on something together.  Wait, I take that back. Making homemade icecream was a group chore we never avoided either.   I digress.

Back to the creek. We'd take the shovels out of the barrel in dad's shed, and then set to work, cutting sod from the creek bank to widen the pond, and stacking it up in the narrow part of the crick, and then backing it with rocks we'd carried one at a time out of the pastures. 

Our cooperation level eventually broke down, and sometimes it spiraled into mud flinging, or a perfectly timed "placing" of a lump of sod into the water next to the dam-breast to get the biggest muddy splash out of it that we could. Oh there was the crayfish terror, too. Catching a crayfish--and holding it inches from someones face who just didn't care to be that close to the thing.

Of note* When we built a dam, out lofty goal was to have the water depth at least up to our thighs--and that included the half foot of mud at the bottom that we mucked through.  Most times, I admit, we fell short of our goals, and made it knee deep.

We had a few favorite spots in the stream.; some places were better than others--places where the little creek narrowed after a naturally wide spot. We thought we had it figured out--considered ourselves nearly dam engineers.  Farm kids trying to cool off is what we were; dam engineers we were not. Even with all of the planning, and proclaiming before each new dam was built that "This one will last!" None of them did; every time we had a gully-washer come through, the dam was gone.

We did manage to have a dam last through a winter, long enough to get to skate on it.  But for the most part, the joy of building a dam wasn't ever really in having a pond; it was in the actual building of the dam.

Country D memories:  Daisy bouquets accented with deptford pinks, yarrow and evening primrose.  Prettier than anything you'll ever buy at a florist shop.  And June evenings walking along the farm lane, the scent of dog roses hanging heavy on the air. And, caught off guard before sundown, walking though a dew drenched hayfield soaked to our waists--drinking in the scents of clover and alfalfa from the damp air, the timothy tall enough to tickle our chins.

Country life...a good life.  Is it a thing of the past?

A to Z "C"

My stories of growing up out here in the country might seem unbelievable,  but some of you might nod your head while remembering your own youth.  Considering the lives of today's children, it must seem to them that I not only grew up in another time, but it must also have been on another planet.

I learened very young, that on a summer evening when it's hot and you can almost drink the moisture out of the air, you can hear the corn grow. And there's a tell-tale rattle to the leaves when a welcome breeze ricochets through and along the rows.There's even a smell to it when the corn "comes to tassle", and the wind-pollination sets the scents adrift.Few things were so awe inspiring as a corn field, and the feeling that I was part of it, I was one with the field, the night, the world. Until I watched Chiller Theater one Saturday night--a local Pgh TV show that hosted a new frightening movie each weekend.  Anyway, they showed a movie called "The Triffids" and it was terrifying to, you know... to a child.  The premise was that there was a massive meteor shower one night, and somehow the meteors affected carnivorous plants and made them grow taller than most men. AND, if that wasn't scary enough, anyone who had raced outside to watch the meteors fall from the sky (nearly everyone had) went blind. Now we had 7 foot tall, man eating plants consuming the people who couldn't see them com ing. Yeah, they could move! Nd in a cruel twist to a girl who loved warm summer nights out watching the stars on top of the hill, Triffids looked exactly like a cornfield moving toward the blind!  Hah! I still can't walk through a corn field. ;-)

The milk cow that stands out in my memory was a brown swiss named Betsy. In the summer, when the barn was empty and the cows were out to pasture until autumn, Betsy would make her way to the yard fence, to the exact same post every day at the same time.  And that was where we milked her.

We had chickens.  The last peep to hatch on the farm (of which I am aware) we named cheeper because, well, you guessed it, made a cheep-cheep-cheep noise. So creative, I know!  Cheeper turned out to be a rooster.  And he was a rooster who needed anger management, or something.  Have you ever been around a nut-job crazy rooster?  Let me tell ya, they can run fast, they do have spurs that will make a person bleed, and it's rather terrifying having them beat their wings against you and peck at whatever they can reach.  So many times I've wondered why in god's name would any geneticist breed teeth into chickens?  Can you say "small velociraptor"?  I digress.  But who wouldn't?  Seriously, moving on now.

And on a late winter day, I can picture the cats, mousers that they were, stretched out on the logs of the barn at the edge of the hayloft--a southern exposure, sunning, absorbing the warm rays of the sun.  

Catching crayfish in the "crick", car-hood sleds, and the smell of clover in bloom...  C is a great memory prompt!

Have any childhood memories that start with a "C"?

A to Z "B"

A country childhood must surely put nearly anyone in close proximity to a barn.  They are pretty interesting, if you think about it.  Consider the materials they are built of--the old ones relied on local materials.  To some degree, you can judge the age of a barn by it's structure.  The roof-lines of barns in snowy areas might be designed to carry a snow load. Most of the local barns are hillside barns, as is the one of the farm I grew up on. That particular barn was constructed of logs, and had a barn-stone (quarried sandstone) foundation.

And in those country barns, sometimes you find a beenest. White faced hornets and yellowjackets are two types that often built inside old farm buildings.  And where you find bee nests, you find children who get stung because they do foolish things, like mess with the bee nests.

Behind the barn where I grew up, there were old ponds in the woods on the neighbor's property.  The ponds were edged in cattails, and were more swamp than open water.  The tree canopy was dense, and the woods were dark. So were the swampy ponds. My grandmother told us that was where the boogeyman lived. That was enough to keep us away from any danger of drowning. ~laughing~  Well played, Grandma! The creepy factor followed me the whole way to adulthood.  The really funny things is, almost 15 years ago, we bought property to build a house. The boogieman woods is part of it.  I've come to love the woods, but you still couldn't pay me enough to pitch a tent down there and spend the night in it.

Homemade butter, buttermilk, and homemade bread were part of every lunch. 


And berry picking was part of every summer.  And if you've ever done it, you probably know...it gets into your veins.  I loved to do it as a kid, and even slipping on the downhill side of fifty years, I still love to do it. One of my very best memories is of a summer day, getting home from work early, grabbing the berry pails, and we took off, me, my three children, and two dogs. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, and we picked wild black raspberries for hours. The kids' faces were stained purple from berries and we were weary when we made our way back to the house.  All that winter--and even still, when I open a jar of black raspberry preserves, I take a sniff and smile. I swear, I can smell that day, feel the warmth of the sunshine and the wind blowing, and I hear my children laughing.

Another day in the country...a good life.