***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words. It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail. well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...the beginning of a life change for him that can be chronicled later. So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here. Okay?
Part 1
When I first got to Reno at the age of 10, and discovered my new best friend, Linda, we were given a wonderful surprise by my Dad. Somehow he managed to find a tiny old gas station building. They were turn-of-the-century, only about 6' X 6' with peaked Asian looking rooftops of red tile, and corrugated metal siding. He bought it for a few bucks and put it in the field up behind the house and trailer. It was knee deep in weeds and brambles and thistles all the time, and we loved it. This became the club house.
We lived right below the seventh hole at the local country club, so it was only right! This was the place where we could keep our old dolls, our paper dolls, (most of which I made for us, since I was a budding artist and we couldn't afford to buy them often) and our .....marbles! It soon became apparent, however, that the little building sitting out in the middle of the field was also the focal point of a number of red-neck hunters who thought it was just fun to use for target practice. Lucky for us, we were never inside when target practice began, but the thing did become well ventilated after a few years.
Linda and I spent a lot of time under The many apple trees that grew about us. We ate apples, we made sauce, we made mud pies, we made tents out of blankets swinging from the lowest branches of the big pines out back too. The best part of this was the trips to the river. The river was just two blocks down the hill. We all lived on a river bank off the Allegheny right before it joined French-creek, where George Washington traveled with Lafayette. We would go down with poles and big diaper pins on string and do our attempt at fishing. Maybe our parents never realized what exactly we were doing. Maybe they thought the river was shallow where we went, I don't know, but if my own kids went there today, I would be croaking right up from my naval. We were on the huge rocks that fell straight down into the 20' deep water, no place to hop along the waters edge at all.
One day I found a beautifully fossilized fish embedded in one of the sandstones, but couldn't successfully remove it. We were really into geology and fossils at that time. So we started spending our days hanging out at the sandbanks, a large pit cut into the hillside below the golf course property and just above our own. For a short time a sand and gravel industry prospered at that spot, but then moved back to dredging out of the river bed. So we were left with the large dusty remains of the ice age from which to pick pieces of Jurassic Junk, the Pleistocene Past, and I could cleverly go on about that....
Anyway, it was full of coral and bone, and stones, quartzite; great stuff of all kinds. We perseverated greatly there day after day sifting in the sunshine and the hot damp Pennsylvania sultry summer. Wen we wanted to cool off, we climbed the steep banks to the woods above and laid down on the softest moss in the world. We used to take samples of the moss back to the yard and plant it. There were about five kinds. The toadstools that grew there were a constant source of amazement. We could not believe the size of some of them, and the colors. It lent veracity to the myths about the little people of the Irish. Well, the Irish were small to begin with; all they needed were a few particularly midgety among themselves, with a few tall mugs or drams or liters as they were accustomed to downing, and one could imagine about anything.
The golf course above the moss area beyond the trees, was sort of off limits. We would walk around it though, it was surrounded by the woods and very lush and beautiful. The rolling hills and the old club house, ponds, sand areas, people who dressed strangely to us, in two tone shoes, and skirts that had legs. The local guys would get jobs there as caddies and sometimes try to hit golf balls down to my house. The yard always had a few! Once again, lucky for us, we were never outside when they decided to do this particular dumb sport. Sometimes Linda and I would watch the golfers hit balls into the rough, and we would run out and snag those! Then we could sell them back!
The toboggan was only big enough to seat about five people at a run, but being the teenage dumb shits that we were, we 'stood up' and got 10 on it. The thing would just blaze down an icy run and almost everyone would make it down about half way, the last few on the back (always me) would fall off there, and the total idiot standing in the front would get all the way down thinking it a great accomplishment until they realized that the guys behind them were just about to pile up on his butt. We never broke any bones, but I know there was a lot of brain damage. I couldn't say for sure which ones went into this without a big disadvantage to begin with however...
One night we got so cold we set fire to a caddy shack and burned it down to keep warm. We what can I say? It was the good old days when kids could get away with a little mischief, tom foolery, a few dollars here and there, a scolding, a lot of laughing about it and plans to do a lot more of it. The night we burnt the shack, I think is the night I put my wool mittens on the gas stove in the living room and watched them go up in smoke. This produced a totally organic odor, kind of like setting fire to your crotch, and not nearly as exciting, but just as excruciating when Mother finds out about it. After-all, she made the damned mittens....
I gave up tobogganing after we demolished the third toboggan to pieces and burnt it too. We then went into ice skating on all the local ponds and puddles. It was a closer walk, not nearly as cold (usually) and I couldn't get talked into being the first one in line for a pile up again.
These days of childhood, these foothills are still here in the orange clay, the field lark songs, the soft distant hum on a highway and the deep verdant range facing our side of the river valley. and on pages of yellowed paper.
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