While we lived here things were always happening. You wouldn't think so as we were so far out in the country but it seemed to have been a busy place.
We picked tons of wild berries here. We gathered nuts. We weren't always working our butts off. We had some fun times and lots of adventures.
"There's no electric in it, girls. It's turned off!" I grabbed the wire with my bare hands to prove my point. I was also standing in a puddle of rainwater. A valuable lesson was learned that day. Farmers use an alternating, on-off current. It wasn't my first experience with electro-shock therapy but it was certainly a "teeth chattering" one.
Growing up, I spent more time outdoors in the summer than most kids today do. Maybe the absence of TV helped, but I like to think it was my Indian heritage, my one-ness with nature. In any case the fields and woods and the streams were my favorite places.
Over the years my sisters and I have picked tons of
berries.
We didn�t always pick strawberries.
We�ve picked red raspberries, black
raspberries, and even golden raspberries.
We�ve picked blue berries, huckleberries,
currants, and even gooseberries.
We have had many adventures while picking this
�fruit of the gods.�
One of our cousins
was surprised by a rattler once while picking blue berries.
Maybe the snake was more surprised than he was.
He was in shock.
The snake was so scared he hastily slithered
away.
Once, while picking
black raspberries in the woods we were surprised by a cat.
We took Duke, our boxer, with us.
We had been picking for hours.
We never stopped till our buckets, as well as
our stomachs were full.
It was addictive.
We headed for the
road, taking a route through a swampy area.
I heard a cough behind me.
I ignored this, thinking it was Duke.
We cleared the stand of cattails and approached
the edge of the road.
Cattails in the fall are drying and letting
loose fluffy stuff that resembles silken doll hair or the angel hair on the
Christmas tree.
It gets in your nose and your eyes and makes
you sneeze.
I just assumed all the noise came from Duke.
Climbing on to the
road at last, I heard another cough behind me.
It sounded as though it was about a yard away
in the reeds.
It couldn�t have been my sisters.
They were all in front of me climbing the hill
to our place.
I said, �Come on Duke.
You�ll be late for supper!�
What came out of the bushes wasn�t Duke.
It was a huge cat, such as I had never seen
before.
He wasn�t as big as Duke, but he was no house cat
either.
Duke was growling and the cat tore across the road and
disappeared into the pasture.
We had never before or since gone up that hill
faster!
We told Ma all about it when we got inside and calmed down enough to make sense. That night the farmers got together for what they thought was a coon hunt. What they caught was a Canadian Lynx! It had been terrorizing the dairy cows around the neighborhood, but no one knew what it was till they caught it.
The Haynes kids and us all hung out together, even if it was in the woods, in the fields and in the streams, rather than in the malls of today. My sisters and I have always loved wild strawberries. Every summer we checked the progress daily of the berries we knew and loved. We knew where the biggest and best tasting berries grew. We also knew where the bulls were at any given time.
One summer we were picking wild strawberries in a field about two miles from the nearest other human. We could hike for hours in those days. We would leave the house after breakfast and find something to do till supper time.
I think Mom was at work this day.
There wasn't a cloud in the sky, the sun blazed down on us. It seemed like we had been picking for hours. I think we ate more berries than we saved. We weren't hungry anymore. We had a natural spring nearby, so we weren't thirsty, either.
I began to wonder how long we had been out there. I looked up in the sky to see where the sun was. Farm children know these things. The sun was directly over head, leaving us almost shadow less.
From out of nowhere, suddenly, there was another shape in the sky. It was white and saucer shaped. It was not the sun, which was right where it should be. It didn't move. It just hovered in that one spot. I wasn't thinking UFO. I was just thinking, "This is weird."
I got my sisters and friends to look up, too. We all saw it and wondered. We discussed it. Children who spend a lot of time away from the TV actually know how to discuss things.
By now, we were all thinking UFO. We made a pact to never tell anyone. Of course, the minute we got home, we told everyone.
It was our big story. You couldn't shut us up. The adults all said, "It must have been a weather balloon." This was the typical excuse at the time. My sisters, the ones who hadn't been there, just thought we were nuts or making it up for attention or imagined it or all three. I'm going on the record, here and now, that whatever it was, we saw it, and we'll never forget it.