Don't Drink the Water

Today as I drove into Wendell from Jerome I had the feeling again that I was coming home. It seemed strange to me since I grew up in a small town in North Dakota, but the feeling came from an interesting coincidence that I have noticed about the skyline of Wendell and that is that it looks amazingly like the skyline of the small town of Ross where I was raised. Now, every time I come into Wendell from the East, there comes a flood of memories of that faraway place that suddenly seems so very near.

Our town was exactly one mile long, from tip to toe. The first thing we encountered upon leaving the highway and entering our little hamlet was a mud puddle. Yes, a mud puddle. This little puddle was a fixture in the dirt road that marked the beginning of our town. It was always there, and to me, when our car bumped over it, it signaled the end of the outside world and the beginning of 'our world'. 'Our world' was made up of the little people who lived with the big people in the town, a little like a separate state within a larger country. We had our own rules, our own leaders, our own outlaws and our own way of dealing with them. Like the mud puddle at the top of the town, we may have seemed small and insignificant to some but we had our place and we loved it.

Our mud puddle, as I said, lay at the beginning of the dirt road that led off the main highway. The children (whoever happened to be in the group that day) often walked or rode bike to the puddle because that was as far as we were allowed to go. I remember one day in spring when the puddle was fresh and full, taking a walk to the puddle with a group of children. We laughed and talked the whole way but when we got to the puddle, decided that we were all very thirsty. My brother was the first to 'dare' to take a drink from the puddle. After that, some of the others drank, including myself. I can still taste the cool, earthy water in my memory. It seemed almost too good. I have never tasted water that was quite that refreshing since then. We walked home, content in our secret act of defiance, for we all knew that our mothers would never allow such a practice.

Much later in my life, I had a dream. In my dream there was a stream of water that ran through the town where we then lived. As I looked at the stream, I noticed that there were people drinking from it. After they had taken a drink from the stream, they became very angry and finally died. As I looked on in horror, I began to recognize people I knew also drinking of the stream. As they drank, I shouted, “No! Don't drink it, It will kill you!” They did not listen to me but drank anyway. Then to my utter dismay I saw even my closest friends partaking of the stream and dying. I awoke from my dream, weeping for the loss of my friends and wondering what it could mean. A short time later I understood.

In the little town where my husband and I moved to raise our family, water was everything and water was scarce but the community worked together so everyone could have what they needed. Then some businessmen with plenty of money came in and started buying water and changing the dynamics of the community. Wells started drying up, and people began to get very angry. Money is a terrible thing. It can make a man do what he doesn't even want to do, like a thirst that becomes so great you will even drink something you know is dangerous in order to quench it. Water was sold at extremely high prices and neighbors began blaming neighbors. Threats, fights, rumors and lies became common fare in a once-peaceful farming town. Finally, our closest friends, because of water, caused us to sell our home and leave the valley. Just as in my dream, I wept for the loss of my friends.

Looking back, I should not have drunk the water at the end of the road. It could easily have killed me. I knew it was dangerous, but I was willing to do it to prove I was brave. I wonder how many people try to prove they are brave by cheating their neighbor, looking the other way when someone needs you or pretending you don't know that you have caused someone pain. All I can say is what my mother would say if she saw me drink from the puddle, “ Don't do it. It might kill you.”

The Plain Princess

It was a relatively quiet winter day in the sixth grade. Stepping off the bus into the old, two-story brick school I walked into the coat closet where I began to remove my coat and boots. Boots! Oh no. We were not allowed to wear our snow boots into the school and I had forgotten to bring my shoes so I would have to be in my stocking feet all day. It's not too bad usually, as long as you can just sit at your desk and hide your feet. But today was different. Today, there was a Lycium.

I don't know if you remember the Lycium, but for us it was a special program that usually took up the better part of the morning, so it was always a welcome change to the daily grind. It was typically a cultural exhibition of some kind meant to enrich our education. On this particular day I was not at all happy that we would have a change in the class schedule. Every change meant another opportunity to expose my stocking feet.

As expected, our teacher announced the Lycium right away in the morning. Everyone was eager to go to the gymnasium for the program so they filed out quickly. This gave me the chance to hang back and wait for the others so I could be the last one to leave my seat and the last to enter the gym. By the time our class arrived in the gym there were several other classes present and the seats were beginning to be filled. I contrived to slip quietly up to the far corner of the balcony where I could sit near some of the teachers and be out of the way of most of the curious glances. Just let me blend into the background, I thought. What I feared most was recognition and ridicule. I lived in a painful shyness that winced at the slightest notice, positive or negative. But, of course, negative notice would be much more unwelcome.

To my great relief I was able to find a sparsely seated corner of the bleachers at the top of the balcony. I settled in to enjoy the show and began to wonder what was going to happen. On the floor of the gym was a young man with an interesting display of costumes, feathers, artifacts and all sorts of bead-work and weapons. I was so enthralled by the presentation that I even forgot about my shoes. Music, dancing, wonderful displays and then, it was announced that we were going to act out an ancient ceremony; one in which a Princess chooses her Prince and they are married, and that he would now choose one of the girls in the audience to be that Princess.

I had no fear of being chosen. I was so far in the back, and in the balcony, I thought, that he could not possibly go so far to choose his Princess. Besides, I thought, I'm not the kind of girl that people normally choose for such a role. I have a plain face, straight brown hair and unfortunately today, no shoes. So I sat looking on with eager anticipation to see which of the 'popular and pretty' girls he would choose. He walked slowly down the isles of the lower level of the bleachers looking at each girl. I had expected him to just pick the first girl who raised her hand. But he slowly and deliberately looked at each girl and went on...and on and on. Then to my utter horror he walked up the stairs and began to scan the rows of the balcony. Oh, where could I hide?, I thought. I didn't even want him to look at me. I curled my feet as tightly up against the bleachers as I could, trying to hide them from view. I looked away in an attempt to make myself invisible between and behind other people around me. But it was all in vain. Inexorably he came, closer and closer until finally he stood directly in front of me.

With my face turned the other way, I tried to pretend that he wasn't there. Maybe he'll just go away, I thought. I looked up to check to see if he had gone, when to my extreme dismay he was reaching out his hand to me. I refused to reach up, but he insisted. He took my hand in his and stood me up. And all I could think of was that he couldn't choose me because I didn't have shoes! Cinderella couldn't have felt more surprised.

We walked down the isle together, hand in hand (my other hand was over my face). As we walked I said to myself, “Me, a Princess?” (It changed my life.) The shy little country girl with the plain face and straight brown hair, a Princess? Yes. She is.

Smell The Memories

The other day a friend of mine took me on a walk through her Grandmother's farm in central Idaho and it was like walking back in time. First we peeked into the little milking barn where five or six cattle stantions waited for the cows to come home. On one beam hung an old steel-runner sled, and on the floor sat a forlorn not-quite-red Flyer wagon. One could still read the writing on the wall where someone had taught themselves the Morse Code while milking cows and you could almost hear the old milking machine chu-chooing in the background. The dusty smell, the sled, the wagon, the milking machine, together became my ticket to the past.

We walked over to the house, which I had expected to find empty since my friend's Grandmother had passed away two years before. But when we walked into the house I was greeted by sights and sounds of the past that overwhelmed me at first, and then just settled me back into the comfortable rocking chair of remembrance. The creaky floor, the pictures of four or five generations of family, the old china dishes, the porcelain dolls, the old books, the quilts, the big, flowered wallpaper, the tiny rooms, the old sun-porch, original paintings, the musty canning cellar, the crack in the ceiling, were all just as she left them, almost untouched. The woman who had lived in and loved that little house seemed as near as the next room as we stepped onto the homemade rugs and ancient linoleum. I saw her face smile back at me through the picture of her that hung in her bedroom and it seemed to say, “You are welcome here, only please leave it the way you found it because I like it this way.”

Out in the yard we saw the rake, the hoe, and the old rusty wheelbarrow, sitting poised by a tree, as though they had only been put there that morning, but like Rip Van Winkle, feeling maybe a little worse for the wear. The trees themselves looked like giant patriarchs standing guard round the place, unmoved and immovable for perhaps a hundred years. The little canal that ran through the trees holds the secrets of many a warm night spent skinny-dipping after a long day of work and of coutless hours of fun-filled romping by the children on hot summer days. How many tree houses, how many games of hide and seek, how many hours of sweet solitude those trees could tell about, I couldn't say, but you could just smell the memories. Rusty implements, an old tractor, beautiful old tricycles, milk cans, in short it was a perfect museum of the life of that family. I felt a strange kinship to them while I looked around. I had an incredible urge to see that farm working fifty years ago. I wanted to be a part of it, to see the cows come in, see the children play, help in the garden.

But, like the Grandmother, it is past. All the good that happened back then has happened for them and all my wishing won't bring it back. But, this wonderful family has taught me a lesson. They are keeping this little house and barn and yard in the family. They are going to care for it and keep it pretty much the way Grandma kept it. They will take turns caring for, living in, and keeping alive this most fragile piece of their family's history. By so doing, they are allowing the rising generation to see, feel and smell the past; to be a part of it. Tears filled my eyes as I stood in that Grandmother's kitchen and thought of my own grandmother. They were the same in many ways. And maybe, if we keep the memory of that past way of life alive, we can learn from it enough to heal some of the troubles of the present and perhaps even give our children a little better future.