Glenns Ferry is home to the school district for the surrounding area which includes Indian Cove. However, in the thirties when my Dad first attended school after their move here from Colorado, the Cove had its own little country school in the valley, and shared it with the community church. Then, Hammett was the place to get yourself to, for school. I have no idea when the district began bus service, which replaced riding horse, using your ‘shank’s horses,’ or a Model T, as it was in Daddy’s day.

The railroad town of Glenns Ferry would eventually become school to all grades, ending my country school days at Hammett, AND the long bus rides clear to King Hill Junior High School!

We called our school bus the “yellow worm.” Our road was the last on the route into Indian Cove, so we had time to scurry when we saw it drive past for the students further on down. This changed when Evanna Hamilton was our bus driver: The bus was parked at her house there at the last stop. Then, we had only time enough to grab our books and coats when we saw it heading up towards our place!

This past couple years I began to venture to Glenns Ferry when back in Idaho visiting my family in the Cove. The Three Island Park hosted our big Hooley Family Reunion the summer of ’17. And now I would just as soon drive to stores in Glenns Ferry, as to Mountain Home. Southside Market is still there, and always has beautiful, fresh berries for me, summer or winter!

I was heading to get groceries there a few days ago and…lovely, I had time to relax and check my messages when the railroad crossing bar and bell suddenly came alive there in front of me.

Railroad crossing; Watch out for the cars. Can you spellit, without any r’s?

My Daddy taught me that one. He is 97, now, and he enjoys a ride to Glenns Ferry for a hamburger and shake at The Stop Drive -In!  Some things stay the same, and we are so blessed.

Mom was “Mama” to me, way into my teens. Last Tuesday was the anniversary of her passing four years ago. Cousin Ken Kauffman did some remembering with me this week as he read about the “Sandbox World” we played in as children. I didn’t know that Mama, his auntie, taught him some of the same things she showed us.

Ken says, ” I am reading it, and recognize everything you describe.   This is interesting to me because we are about four years apart, and in childhood that is a large gap.    I recall the sandbox, making roads, sand houses, fields, houses and twig fences, and I recall your mom being one of the grownups who showed us how to do those things.  She also showed us how to make hollyhock princesses.”

Oh yes, the hollyhock princesses! Those flower dolls were so delicate and beautiful I don’t think we ever had them join us in our sandbox world: Did we? I think I took my flower families over to the grass, outside the sandbox, where they did well to last for an afternoon.

Moms who have nieces and nephews, are as blessed as the children who have the aunties, I’m sure. My Auntie Norma, Ken’s mom, was an executive aunt in my eyes, running a whole operation of farm family that was twice our number (at the time.) When she called me “Mackie,” as no one else did, I figured I counted, too, in her very busy life.

When it came to turning the desert into irrigated and productive farmland in Indian Cove, Idaho, the Mennonites were a perfect choice, to my way of thinking, bringing with them the necessary support system for pioneer farmers to make a go of it, where others had failed before them. It can be seen that where pioneer farmers had families, and families had each other and a common faith, the basics of life were held together, mostly, for most of them, and a community became established. Snake River water plus community, was the key.

How do families ‘make it work,’ today? How is your family a support to you, and you for them, to do what is needed, for what is important in life?

Dad was moved into the “Gene House” on the southwest corner of Indian Cove so others of us can take a turn at being with him, to provide care he needs at this time in his life. It happens to be ‘my turn’ and so I flew in from the state of Washington, and Dad and I began our settling in on January 1^st.

Dad can see his top eighty acres stretch out from the little house, and Bennett Mountain is looking mighty white and lovely above the line of the rimrocks to the north, making them his current orientation point. Our family farm sits lower in the valley, with no view of the mountains, so this is a surprise! On our first day here, when Dad was working hard to get his bearings and then spotted this ‘true north’ from the living room window, I picked up my book and read aloud the story, “Going to the Fourth of July.” Dad listened with his eyes closed, and then smiled and said, “That’s the way it was. Very good.” This was the Bennett Mountain I had known as a child.

Dad is the reader I want to please the most with my stories of growing up in the Cove! I want him to know how much I respect him and Mom, and the families who all worked together — Mennonite and not Mennonite– to make it such a good community, back then, and today. It’s good to be back!

Do you have any Cove event snapshots? I would love to see some of the community Fourth of July picnics up at Bennett Mountain.

Not a Christmas comes and goes that I don’t think about the sagebrush Christmas tree that graced our family’s living room at home in the Cove. (There was the one Christmas we wintered in Phoenix and enjoyed the decorated green tree that Judy ‘won’ from school; and, – oh, what a ‘God-send’ that was, since we saw no sagebrush around, and we wouldn’t have wanted to resort to a Creosote bush!)

To capture our Christmas traditions, I rendered (with lots of help – thank you!) a poem Twas that time in December. This is what I described about that sage Christmas tree:

We treckked through the desert to search a sage ‘tree,
That’s perfect in balance though just three foot three.
When shortening-can planted and carried inside,
The sage smell o’er-powered, but soon did subside.
The lights scattered through its soft grey-green hue,
Made decorating together a fun thing to do.

Now, it’s your turn. What Christmas traditions were unique to the time and place of growing up in the 1950’s – 1960’s?

The collection of stories I put together in Pigtails and Other Tales: Growing up in the 50’s & 60’s is publishing this week. It includes remembering our Christmases in Twas that time in December.

Details coming soon!

One day last July I sat under the big OLD elms at Willard and Ola Hooley’s old place in Indian Cove, editing my stories for Pigtails and Other Tales. (The house was built by my Uncle Paul, and is now Mark and Lucille Hamilton’s home, Mark being my second cousin.) There were swallows in the trees and swallows darting out and over the open fields, and there were a couple splats of white-wash on the lawn chairs beneath the tree. Looking up overhead we spotted the nests, each ensconced by a parent bird. I had forgotten about the birds!

A bird with yellow, chatted and tweeted from a nearby sapling along the fence, and I figured it was the bee martin, that bird that scolded and dive-bombed our cat walking under an elm at our place down the road. Dale tells me these birds are not martins, but kingbirds.

The swallows and this kingbird got me to thinking and listing other birds I had known in the Cove. There are the cooing morning doves, musically-inspired red-wing blackbirds and meadowlarks, the common English sparrow, and those irritatingly noisy magpies and starlings. In Spring Mama made sure we caught sight of the migratory yellow canaries that flitted through. And, when Robin Redbreast would appear, I was hopeful we might be able to shed our shoes for barefoot days; but no, we must wait for the first butterfly. The geese and ducks flying in formations over us, came with the cooling Fall, and the “Chinie” (Chinese) Ring-necked pheasant was game to hunters (–visiting hunters should get permission to trapes through Cove fields, even if there was no “NO HUNTING” posted on a post.)

How could I have forgotten to talk about the birds? One afternoon a strange, tall, long-legged bird was discovered leisurely walking in our driveway, and daddy invited it clear into the kitchen with some morsels of food! It seemed quite comfortable with the whole scenario, and was probably as busy checking us out, as we were it! It didn’t stay long, and was never sighted again.

Birdie, birdie, flying by,
Dropped a white-wash in my eye.
Birdie, birdie, I won’t cry,
Just be glad that cows don’t fly!

It’s your turn to share some remembering, with the rest of us. Please do!

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton