Spring in the Country

We always went to visit my Uncle Fred and Aunt Hazel the Sunday that followed Easter. I don’t know for sure how that started. They were church people and we weren’t, and Daddy didn’t want to go during that Christian season, but he did like to visit them in the spring because they lived in Fowler and he always wanted to see the fields greening up and the leaves coming on. He said he liked the springtime smells out in the country, plowed dirt, manure, even skunk smell. Daddy was a summer man. He worked for the parks department so he was outside a lot and he hated the cold.

Uncle Fred, who was my mother’s brother, had a feed store and Aunt Hazel helped with the books and I think they made a nice living. They had a brick bungalow with a front room, kitchen and two bedrooms. My cousins, Vicki, who was a year older than I, and Wanda, shared a bedroom, which was OK since they were both girls. I had to share a bedroom with my little brother Jack and that was a problem but I couldn’t do anything about it. Our house had two bedrooms too, on Routt Street. Jack was always getting into my stuff and trying to read my diary. It had a little lock on it but anybody could get it open.

I liked to talk to Vicki. We saw their family several times during the year, at Christmas at Grandma’s house and at other family celebrations, and Vicki and I had been spending time together since we were little girls.

The year I turned 16 we made our spring trip to Fowler. Daddy had a four-year-old 1955 Chevrolet then. He drove out Highway 50 through Blende, past the Cheatum and Chiselem and the Silver Moon and the Mesa Drive-in. He had the window open and you could smell the fruit blossoms and hear the meadowlarks perched on the wires even though Daddy had the Cardinals game on the radio. He said Stan Musial always hit a home run on Sunday. Daddy didn’t drive very fast and other cars passed us a lot. It always seemed like it took us a long time to get there but I know it didn’t.

Aunt Hazel had dinner for us, roast beef, potatoes and homemade rolls, and after cleanup Vicki and I took a slow walk in the neighborhood. There were tulips and lilac everywhere and dogs barked at us. At Christmas she had told me she had a boyfriend. After we had walked for a while and talked about movies and school she told me that her boyfriend had “done it to her.” I was so dumb I asked what he had done, and she said, “You know, it,” and I turned red because of my ignorance. After a minute I asked her if she liked it, and she said it was always over so fast she didn’t know if she did or not. She said they had done it three times, and after the first time she had made him wear a rubber. That was all he wanted to do now, she said, and she was going to tell him he couldn’t do it any more.

On the way home, in the car, Mom said I was being quiet and asked what Vicki and I had talked about. I said not much, and she smiled and asked if it was boys. I said no, just school and Elvis. I was thinking that Vicki had already made love with her boyfriend three times and I had only had one date, with Walter Roberts, and his mother had taken us to the Chief to a movie and picked us up after. I didn’t even like Walter.

Right before Halloween Vicki got married, and she had a little girl in February. She had another one the following April, about at Easter time. We didn’t go to Fowler either of those years. Her husband was a big guy who helped his father on his farm, and they all lived together in his parents’ house out in the country. The story I heard was that she got pregnant a third time and said she was going to Tijuana to have an abortion. Her husband, in-laws and parents all told her that if she did, she shouldn’t come back. She went. In 1965 I got a letter from Los Angeles and Vicki asked me for $200. I wasn’t doing very well either and I could only send $100. That was the last I heard from her.

Anonymous

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