Summer vacation

Summer vacation? You mean we had a summer vacation??

Summer vacation started with Memorial day. We visited the dead relatives in the cemetery and met and visited with some of the living ones also. The kids played with their cousins who came to visit. The last weekend of May was the the first 4-H horse show in Alamo 60 miles away. I hauled 3 horses and 4 kids in a venerable 79 Dodge crew cab that once belonged to the US Forest Service. On the way we put-putted 2000 feet up Caliente summit. We are talking 2nd gear and a few steep stretches in granny. I suspect the Dodge tried to vapor lock but luckily didn't.


June arrived in all it's green glory and turned out to be one of the coolest June on record. June brought the 2nd 4-H horse show in Caliente the same week as the state high school rodeo. Number one son and his father went to Winnemucca to compete at the rodeo and mom stayed home to cover the horse show. This time it was 3 kids and 3 horses in the venerable Dodge 15 miles down the road. The horse show was remarkable for the number of horses and riders who parted ways. Leo who seldom bucks, crow hopped through the barrel pattern. Number 2 son stayed with him to win 1st place in the barrels. June was also the month we celebrated my parent's 50th wedding anniversary. This necessitated a trek to the ranch 8 hours away. My siblings and I did a surprise party for our parents. It was a fun time. I cooked peach cobbler in the dutch oven for the guests. We got to visit with people we don't get to see very often. My children met some cousins they had never seen. We left number 3 son at the ranch for an extended visit with his grandparents. He returned with one of his aunts in time for the family reunion.

We returned home in time for the 4th of July and the Farm bureau barbecue. Dutch oven chicken, potatoes, and cobbler. Next came Pioneer day (July 24th) and the family reunion. A couple of hundred people mostly children converged to visit and play and eat prodigious amounts of food. Pioneer day celebration consisted of a pancake breakfast, races, a pig scramble (number 3 son furnished some of the pigs) another sumptuous dutch oven dinner, lots of visiting, a parade ( the kids and their cousins rode horse back).

August arrived and the frantic scramble to produce the county fair. Months of planning culminated in the 2009 Lincoln Fair complete with amateur rodeo, exhibits, horse show and jack pot roping. No one got killed or maimed although there is permanent dent in the arena panels where the saddle bronc number one son was riding in the rodeo collided with the panels and ejected said son into the top rail. He walked away without a scratch and won the saddle bronc riding that night. Number 3 son won 2nd place in the steer riding. Mom collected a few more grey hairs. Once the fair was finished then came the annual peach canning festival. Eleven 20 pound boxes of peaches into quart bottles for winter consumption.

School has started and it is my opinion that school is a vacation.

Memorial Day

For those of us who live out at the end of a long winding road, Memorial is the day we go visit the dead relatives.

During my growing up years Memorial day meant a trip to the cemetary the day before to spruce up the graves before the out of town relatives arrived to decorate graves. The community cemetary was a fenced 10 acre plot of sagebrush and Indian rice grass littered with tombstones on the east facing slope of the Cemetary Hill. On the north boundary stood the white washed outhouse for the convinience of the low capacity bladder crowd.

We would load the back of the pick-up with rakes and shovels. Dad and Grandpa would ride in the cab, kids in the box. When we arrived at the cemetary custom dictated that we would start with the graves of our direct line. We would remove the rements of last year's flowers if any. We would take a shovel to the cheat grass growing on and around the mound then reform the mound with the rake. While we worked, Grandpa would tell stories about the people who were burried in the grave we were working on. When we finished with the direct line, we would branch out and start doing the extended family. Grandpa would explain the relationships and maybe a few of his memories about that person. Often times there would be other families at the cemetary doing what we were doing. This would be an excuse to exchange stories of common ancestors and maybe gossip about some members of the extended family. We would go home knowing a little bit more about who we were and how we got here.

I learned my family history. Some of my cousins envy the knowledge I have of the family and the relationships. I didn't work very hard for it. I just listened and tried to remember what I was told.

There are people from the city who are shocked and appalled at the condition of the cemetary. They are used to manicured greens with no effort on their part. They ignore the history staring them in face and don't recognize the opportunity to teach the rising generation about their roots. A lot of that rising generation is so busy playing with their electronic toys that they are cutting themselves off from their roots.

Now I'm working on teaching the rising generation about their roots. It's challenging. We don't have the excuse of going to the cemetary to clean graves. The school year doesn't end until after Memorial Day. So they don't have much opportunity to know the dead relatives on my side of the family. I do make sure they learn about the dead relatives that are buried here where we live.

The Thirty Year Reunion

Last fall I attended the 30 year reunion for the class of 1978. It was a hoot. We told stories and laughed until our sides ached.

I graduated from a small rural high school. There were 30 people in our class. I was related to about a quarter of the class and several of the teachers. Because we were a small high school everyone was involved in as many activities as they wanted or as their parents would permit. Every able bodied man that wanted to be part of the football team played on the team. If the football coach could have worked out separate showers there were several females he would have recruited also. Because we were so small people who played sports also participated in drama and music. When we went to speech and drama contests around the state we competed against the big schools. The speech and drama contestants from the large schools were much more flamboyant people than we ever met.

By the time we graduated we knew each other pretty well. It's fun to get together and vistit and find out what everyone is doing. Our last reunion alot of people who live close didn't bother to come but we managed to have a fun time.

The most memorable conversation involved Trudi, wing commander in the space cadet corps. You know her, the cheer leader who always dated upper class men. Who had to have the teacher's jokes explained to her. She's the one whose junior prom dress still fits her. She was there with husband #2. We were going down the list of people who weren't there and filling in where they were living and what they were doing. Someone mentioned that Kenyon was living with wife #2 in Santa Clara, near St George. Trudi speaks up and says, "I like St George. That's

where I'm going to find my third husband." We all laughed and laughed. Trudi was bewildered and then it dawned on her what she had said. As she fumbled around trying to extract her foot out of her mouth, June, one the more out spoken members told her, " I know I've said this to you before, JUST SHUT UP." We laughed some more.

Writing What You Know

I am not a writer by profession. My forays into writing fiction have ending up sinking into a mire of detail. On the other hand I've had alot of fun tellling stories (mostly true) about people and places I've seen and known. To communicate with a wider audience than found around the kitchen table I've written some of them down in letters or journal entries or Friday Challenge entries.

Writing what I know is the only way I know how to write. I enjoy reading a wide variety of fiction. Louis L'Amour is one of my favorite authors. I will agree that his plots are not the most original, but what a gold mine of information. My paternal grandfather was born in 1892. He left school at the age of 11 and went to work. He herded sheep, farmed, mined and eventually put together his own outfit. I grew up living next door. From an early age I remember sitting in the truck with my grandfather waiting for my father to finish what he was doing. To pass the time my grandfather told stories about his younger years. He told about his parents, siblings. grandparents, and assorted other relatives living and dead. When I started reading Louis L' Amour I recognized the characters. I think the reason Louis L' Amour was so successful was that he wrote what he knew. He had listened to the old-timers tell their stories, he had lived the life therefore his stories had a ring of authenticity.

We are all story tellers in one way or another. Story telling is how information has been passsed between humans for millenia. Some of us are good enough to get paid for it when we write it down.

I was thinking about our need to discuss issues as a committee. I thought about the diversity of our schedules and the long distances and the high price of gas. I thought of using the internet. We could use a chat room, but then we would all have to get together on the computer at the same time. What do you think about using a blog?? This blog was easy to create. I can post an issue for discussion and people can drop by and comment as they have time. Post a comment and tell me what you think.

Jule