Memories, everyone has them.
Hopefully the good memories outweigh the bad. I realized today as I was walking to the back
pasture to switch water that all of my best memories are centered around one
particular house in Washington where I grew up and spent the best years
in. Just little things. Small snippets of different days that I remember. Playing with my cousins, trying to ride the
horses, cooking with grandma, working with grandpa, or relaxing on the
porch. Some things I remember in great
detail. Other things I just remember
feelings. Tonight the memories were
brought on by a smell. There was someone
barbequing close by and it smelled like the meat was a little over done, not
charred, just….. dark. For some reason
this made memories come rushing back, and I couldn’t help but smile.
The memories of times I spent at that house come at random
times. Stacking wood in the shed. Being taught how to cut kindling. Trying to help carry horse food. Getting locked in the feed room with my
sisters, dad, and cousins. Collecting
eggs, running with a broken broom from the crazed rooster. Two of us cousins DRAGGING a western saddle
out to the corral to ride. Big family
get-togethers. Thanksgiving dinner. The tomato plants. The wallpaper in the bathroom. That really old tv. The really yummy frozen juice grandpa
drank. Making grandpa ants on a log for
his lunch the next day.
One my fondest memories was after school, the bus would drop
me off at grandma’s house, she would be waiting on the porch, I would walk up
through the gate and sit on the chair next to her on the porch. Grandma would make me a peanut butter and
honey sandwich and chocolate milk made with Hershey syrup. We would eat on the porch and talk or look
through Home and Garden magazines. After
lunch, I would play on the rope swing my grandpa hung under the bigger of the
two apple trees, and I would watch and wait for grandpa’s little Nissan to
rumble up the driveway, at which time I would run up and give him a hug.
Another one, one Sunday morning, before church, grandpa and
I went out and saddled up the little Morgan mare he had, Tootsie, and we rode
double down the road behind his property.
He loved to ride into and then back out of the irrigation ditches.
Let me see. There was
the time that we picked the big rocks out of the pasture and round pen and took
them up to the front to make a small wall along the driveway. He told me he needed a wall because every time
my mother or aunt would back up to leave they needed a barrier to hit. After working we sat on the front porch and
drank a glass of tea.
Oh! And how grandma
always kept the clear, glass, pumpkin shaped candy jar full of those assorted
Hershey candies, the one with the Mr. Goodbar, and the Krakle, and the regular
hershey’s.
And grandma’s flowers.
In the summer I would water them, but I wouldn’t wear shoes, and that
wood got freakishly hot, so I would get the wood wet stand in the puddle, and
then water the plants, then the wood, then the plants.
Then there were the
cousins. Grandma and grandpa had two big
apple trees in their backyard and one crab apple tree in the pasture. We would pick the apples from the front
trees, sit on the deck, eat them down to the seeds and then see who could throw
the core the farthest. We would also
drink grape soda, which does not taste as good now as it did then, then spit on
the ground to see whose spit was more purple. Ahh, good times!
Ha! I have so many
more memories but I’ll end on this one. My
cousin and I (the two troublemakers) were in the back of the little red Mazda. We were on our way home with grandpa in the
driving. They had a little maroon
colored broom dustpan set they kept in the back seat. I had the dustpan out the window in my hand
watching how it moved in the wind and how tilting it would change what it would
do. Grandpa looked at us in the rearview
mirror with those stern eyes and said, “Don’t you dare lose that dustpan out
the window.” Sam and I smiled, “I won’t
grandpa, I am holding on to it tight.”
No more than 45 seconds passed that the little red dustpan was ripped
from my grasp into who or whatever dared be behind us. My eyes got huge, my heart plummeted, I looked
at Sam, her eyes were huge too and I am sure her heart was at her feet. We sat forward and didn’t say anything the
rest of the drive home. Neither did
grandpa. He never said anything about
that dustpan to either of us. We are
sure he knew about it, but he never, I mean never mentioned the dustpan. And we operated off of the “don’t ask, don’t
tell” policy.
The memories of that house are wonderful and I love when I
am lucky enough to get hit with another memory of times well spent in that
house, with family and friends. In all
of the houses I have lived in, I am almost certain that the little brown , green
trimmed house will always be my favorite.
