Sunday, February 2, 2014

52 Shared Memories - I Was Raised By A Cocker Spaniel And An Apple Tree!

Well, only until I was about 6, and only in the out of doors.  Susie, the black Cocker Spaniel, would stay close, and keep a very motherly eye on me.   [And mom kept an eagle-eye presence through the window or from the porch unbeknownst to me.]  I felt *FREE* to explore, and I did! Everywhere!

Truly wish I had a picture of all this beyond the one in my head....
We had an old farmhouse fronting the road, and behind that was an old apple orchard.  There was a small barn and a large vegetable garden. Behind the orchard was a polliwog pond, and a very enticing wild-strawberry-poison-ivy patch. And my mom's huge bed of gorgeous bearded iris.  Across the little side-lane was much of an acre of abandoned land mostly taken over by black raspberries.

I also had *my very own apple tree*.  [Part of the whole orchard, then.  Long gone, now.  Doesn't matter.  It's *MY TREE* still!]   It was in the row 40 ft from the back porch.  But it felt like it was my very own hidden world....  It had a thick, low, horizontal branch just clamber-up-able for a little kid.  And I would crawl along it, and sit out at the end, hidden among the leaves and apples.  Introvert heaven!!  Usually crawled out there with a book in my hand.

So many memories....  My dad, on the weekend,  with the long-poled apple-picker getting winesaps, and macintoshes, and romes, and mom would can applesauce.  Learning to ride a bike, at 6, on a 24" balloon tire adult bike on a gravel driveway. [ow, but it worked].  Sneaking out to the veggie garden, and eating green peppers like apples.  [my lips puffed, and mom always knew]. Managing to hoist up an 8ft metal fence pole to let it drop, and holler "TIMBER"!  It was about the 20th time I did this when my younger brother's head  got in the way.... Lots of blood in the bathtub, but not too much damage.  [Thanks, mom.]

Once a year, dad would take the little tractor out of the little barn and clear a path into the black raspberries across the lane so that we could go picking.  It was a yearly tradition from the time I could toddle. When I was six,  Susie, my outdoor mother, disappeared.  She was not a youngster, and her blond daughter, Sally,  was already a grownup.  We looked....  But dad finally said that she probably had gone off because it was her time.  My first experience with death.  Always figured that she had wandered down that cleared path into the raspberries,

The following year, we moved away.  My tree was still there.  More than half a century later, both the house and the tree seem to be gone.  Things change.  That 's the one sure things we have in life.  Things change.

But I must admit that when I die, in addition to all the people I hope to meet up with, I wouldn't mind having a little time sitting my very own, very special apple tree, with a book, and with a small black dog quietly looking up at me.