Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: June 16, 2014

The head of Saint Monica’s School at the time was Sister Willasene.  She was smart and a real operator.  She had pop wound around her little finger.  While I was in the first grade, three times a week, I brought over to the nuns a quart of real, think, beautiful cream.  The sisters also had to have ration books and so on, but a food distributor often had food that was old, or parts were spoiled or something and if you sorted through it, you got really good stuff.  So, pop used to bring a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables up to the sisters for them to sort and find the good stuff.  He would bring that up on a Saturday afternoon and they would get in and sort it out, take LOTS of good stuff and it was free.  They were delighted with it.  We ourselves had a lot of fresh vegetables and at certain times fresh fruit, in the fall, there were apples, late summer and fall there were plums – the best plums that I ever ate, there was a miserable pear tree that bore rather tasteless pears, in the spring, we had strawberries and early summer we had blackberries.  These were those special little Oregon blackberries that you never see anymore.  They  grew over the burned places and about every two years pop would have a big burn on the north side of the house.  Nobody worried about fire or smoke in those good old days.  Mom would pick a lot of those over the years and would sell the berries down town.  She would make enough money to buy our school clothes.  She also made pies and blackberry jam.  We had a lot of milk as well, more than we could drink, we could sell the milk and eggs, eat chickens.  Mom could make a good clabber that I really liked, but I think only pop and I liked the clabber.  In the late spring we had peas and over the summer a number of other vegetables.

One of the things Bob and I and later Louise liked was to put duck eggs under a chicken.  They would hatch and the mother hen would take them on and the little ducklings all thought she was their mother.  But what we liked was when they went by a pool of water, the ducklings would jump in and start to swim and the mother hen would just go crazy flapping her wings and cackling.  You can see that it did not take much to amuse us.

Pop built us a play house and painted it white.  It had one window and a nice little yard.  It was right close to where that big stump covered with roses was when coming down the hill.  But eventually, it was grown over and forgotten.  He had built us  tree house and the only way to get up to the tree house was to shin up a rope.  Later the rope gave up the ghost and we just climbed up the great big old maple tree.  There was also the hammock that we liked.  All kinds of things were taking shape.  I remember, too, the first flag pole that we had.  It was over by the number nine green.  Pop got the pole up, but the rigging had to be put up and we did not have a ladder to reach it, so true to form, he took another ladder and died it to the first ladder.  It reached.  It took a lot of convincing on his part, but finally I skinned up the ladder, hanging onto the pole because that second ladder was mighty shaky, installed the rigging and the flag.

At the same time that we moved out to Kentuck, we started rotating certain holidays with Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini.  So, Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini came out to our house on Christmas and Easter and we went to their house on Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.  They came out to our place a number of other times during the year, too, but those were “command performances” if you will.   Aunt Mamie was the best desert cook who ever lived.  Her pies and cakes were unique and so good, but the best was her candy, her fudge and divinity.  Pop and Brother Bob spent years trying to duplicate her divinity, but neither of them ever made it.  Pop finally gave up and took to making fudge.  His fudge was rock hard, not up to Aunt Mamie’s but good.  Bob said he came close to Aunt Mamie’s divinity, but even he said he never made it.  We loved Uncle Heini, too.  Bob and I would sneak up to him with a rope while he was “sleeping” on the couch, we would tie his feet together and then pull him out of the seat onto the ground.  That was wonderful.  As you can see, little things amused us.  Of course, he knew what was going on and Aunt Mamie even took a picture of it once and asked me if I remembered that and of course I did.  Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini did have a dog though, a German shepherd, a fearsome, wolf like dog, it was named Hans.  It constantly treed us when we tried to play outside.  Aunt Mamie also made their own soap, a strong, lye soap that was guaranteed to take the skin off your hands.  She liked it because it cut grease and no other soap you  could buy at the time cut grease.  Uncle Heini had a huge garden, too.  He was a good gardener, but he liked to mix horse radish in with his mustard and that was really hot and spicy.  Only milk would put out that fire.  After a while, he started to have two kinds of mustard, the kind without horse radish and the kind with.

By the end of 1946, the place looked almost like it was going to look the next long time.  The only difference was that where that row of holly trees was, there was still the cow behind a barbed wire fence which did not keep the cow in very well and often it would get out and head toward Glasgow.  Once it ate up somebody else’s strawberry patch and he demanded payment, but the folks never paid.  He was an odd duck anyway.  We also had trouble with the Selvors’ bull coming over.  Somebody poisoned our Saint Bernard dog and we got another one.  It was named Jeannie as well.  We were not original with our names.   If Jeannie was good enough for the first one, it was good enough for the second one as well.

To be continued