This idea came to me after talking to my son Steve and reading his blog. This goes back quite a ways, guys, so be prepared. I am almost 90 years old, after all.
Last night, Father Hayes celebrated mass. He did not look well at all, and appeared to be very frail, not using a cane or a crutch (especially after his operation about a year ago, because of an infection brought on by his diabetes). He has only been celebrating mass for about a month since his return. It makes me wonder how much longer he will be able to continue.
I feel lucky and blessed to have a good mind and relatively good health compared to others my age. As a result, I have plenty of time to think about "things", especially the old days. So we'll start early on in my life.
I was born on a big ranch in Wawawai Washington, which no longer exist. It was about 20 miles from Pullman, Washington and is now the site of the Lower Granite dam on the Snake river. My grandfather's homestead is now almost lakeshore! There is now a beautiful park on his property which delights the college crowd from the nearby University of Washington at Pullman (yeah, dude!)
I spent my babyhood years there and then my parents moved to Everitt Washington where I attended my first couple of years at a catholic elementary academy. Then we moved to the country (near Beverly Park). This was "country living" although we only had about a 1/2 acre of land. My father worked on the docks in Everitt as a longshoreman, loading and unloading ships. Mother spent her time raising by that time myself, Genevieve, Bob, Theresa, and Jerry was born there. My grandmother and grandfather lived with us. It seems I was always cold there because the wind would blow in from Puget Sound. After one year in school at Beverly Park my mother sent us to a catholic school in Everitt where my aunt Josie was the cook and housekeeper for the nuns at the convent. We would go with my father in the morning to Everitt, where he would drop us off for school, then he would pick us up again after work at night.
We had such fun there because while waiting for Dad to come and pick us up, we would go around the corner from the convent to the bakery and look through the window and be fascinated by the bread being wrapped on a machine that was pretty new for the time.
When the depression hit, my aunt Della was in danger of losing her home, so she invited Dad to take over the house. It was very badly maintained and was a chore to get fixed up. Dad and his friend Jack Knight decided to raise chickens to survive. So they built a state of the art (for the time) chicken coop with cement floors etc. The chickens were not allowed to feed outside of the coop. There was also a new apricot orchard put in on the land that produced just at the time when apricots were selling for 35 cents a lug! My father would sell what he could to the stores, and then share the rest with the neighbors for nothing.
The chickens were not selling either, so we ate quite a bit of chicken those days.
Mother decided to make grape jelly one summer. After squeezing all of the juice out of the grapes, the skins were fed to the chickens by my grandfather. The had evidently lain out in the sun too long, because fermentation had begun. One day my grandfather saw that the chickens were all lying lifeless on the ground. So my mother said "Quick, bring them up to the house and we will pluck them and prepare them for canning!" As they were plucking the chickens, they started to come out of their drunken stupor, and walk around! All through the summer and into the fall, we had chickens with no feathers walking around. (Steve's note: I guess they were being pre-cooked!). We had many years of laughter over this incident. Next blog, I'll tell you about how we set an entire hillside on fire, playing with "punk wood".
