***(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...one of several. So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here. Okay?
Part 3
Uncle Wayne was tall and hefty. We said 'fat,' but looking back at them now, I realize they were just very big Dutch men. The family had inherited oil properties, not the booming exploits they had been in the 1800's, but still slowly profitable. The two brothers, my uncles - Wayne and Fritz, were the sole remaining brothers in charge of the lease lines and pump houses at the approximately 30 acre farm at the top of the hill in Oil City.
Uncle Wayne would come by the house (a long walk from his place on top of another hill in town known as Pollack Hill), no one drove in that family, for some reason; still the dust bowl mentality I guess. Then he would have me walk up the hill with him. It was straight up and curvy. I was about 2 feet tall. The uncles always held my hand, and I well remember the blood draining out of my arm long before we made it up that forever long ascent on a hot sweaty summer Pennsylvania day.
When we got there, I would spend a lot of time in the rabbit house. Dad raised rabbits for pelts. All my little years I was promised that someday I would have a rabbit fur coat. It never happened. They finally became quite popular in the late 70's and 80's, but my husband always referred to them as 'whore coats,' so I was discouraged from finally ever obtaining one, not that I could have purchased one anyways, and so one of the dreams of childhood goes away.
Anyway, the farm, I recall how the acres of weeds grew up over my head, and I could be lost all day there smelling dry heat from straw grass and drying leaves from the apple and pear orchards. There was beautiful golden rod, lots of wild purple flowers - even the purple thorn bushes were wondrous before they dried into trouble-some painful weedy things called 'thistles.' There were lots of wild rose bushes, we called them bramble bushes. and mostly there were white daisies and black-eyed Susans and orange day lilies and dandelions.
It was wonderful, and in the fall, the trees were full of all kinds of apples. We had an old fashioned apple cider press up there. Cider was everybody's drink in autumn. We never waited for it to 'harden.' That happened by accident on the back porch. It would suddenly foam up and pop corks or caps and spew a beery odor all over the place and be good and sticky and quite obnoxious, only making us laugh about it, and the good life, being able to pick those apples free and drink all you wanted before winter. It was the last of the party season, and a long heritage of Germanic Octoberfest, and proof that an apple a day, or several, would certainly stave off a great deal of things.
Uncle Fritz was the real wizard of the family on my Mom's side. He was blind from the age of about 30, very handsome, and another large burly Dutchman. Extremely intelligent and indulged by his mother, he came to know how to subsist without doing real work. Fritz maintained ownership of the lease properties and could do a lot without his sight. Mostly he walked miles each day from hill to hill and up to the farm. Also he collected antique guns - driven with a passion to do so, and coins.
He married a Polish lady, Aunt Bernie, who was pretty and worked her ass off to keep them barely alive and living in a small shack of a house built around a small potbelly stove. Myself and my twin cousins were up there a lot of weekends at that shack. We all sat on his big lap as he told us marvelous fairy tales with infinite details and forever lengthy at his own creative genius.
Fritz taught us how to count change and gave us mathematical riddles, which I hated (even now I have math anxiety) and he taught us how to use raw gun powder to make our own fun explosives! He even had a little cannon for the Fourth of July.
Fritz was also the unfortunate victim of constant belligerent kids who would mock him, and throw stones at him while he was walking blindly. No matter how young I was, I was always completely surprised at how stupid and cruel any one at any age could be to do that sort of thing. They amazed me. Maybe that instilled in me the anger that spouts up whenever I see some wretch being unfairly treated. In our family we were motivated very easily to take whatever measures necessary for defense and vengeance. It is part of the poverty background but probably a good part.
My Dad - although not very conversant - and quite reclusive, I do remember him saying before he died, that he always felt sorry for Uncle Fritz. He hated seeing the way people treated him sometimes, and that Fritz couldn't utilize the talents that he had. And here we are, with all of our senses intact, and fully capable of using talents which we choose not to. Such is life.
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