Chapter 7: Our First Winter

I hope you’re not getting frustrated with me, since this chapter was supposed to be the one where you learned about our first winter. I’ll get to the first winter, but as I was thinking about our first winter I remembered something that happened in the fall right around Thanksgiving. I don’t think that it warrants a full chapter, so I’ll stick it in the first of this one. This way, you’ll hear our story in the right order of time. 

That fall Alice and I felt really lucky, and grateful. Having our own spot in the country was even better than we imagined. Our brook babbled away, deer came into the meadows, and Fifi liked chasing the squirrels. The squirrels even enjoyed it too, as they easily outsmarted Fifi. They sat in the old pine tree near the house and chattered down at her. I swear that one big one was laughing at Fifi. I suppose the experts would tell you that squirrels don’t laugh, but this squirrel sure looked like he was laughing. He would prance back and forth on a low branch taunting the hell out of her. Fifi would just about blow a gasket. Looking back on all of this, I can see that this whole squirrel thing was the start of the end for old Fifi, but you know what they say about hindsight. 

Anyway, fall was good for the three of us. We took a trip back to Vantage to look for arrowheads in the desert in October when the nice fall colors were starting. I opened up the old car just outside of Moses Lake just to see what she’d do. Boy oh boy, that old girl could still move! I wasn’t sure how good she still was at steering, and not wanting to add to the cross business, once was enough for me. Thanksgiving was coming. The fall leaves had been colorful and with our breasts filled with thankfulness, Alice prepared our Thanksgiving turkey. You keep this in mind, while I set the stage for our conversation. I didn’t keep notes on everything, but I’ll relate our conversation as best as possible. 

Alice was at the kitchen table putting together the stuffing. I was in my usual spot sitting by the kitchen door with my feet propped up on the wood box. Fifi was lying by Alice. All was right with the world. Before I start retelling the conversation, I should add that this conversation caught me by complete surprise.

Alice: ’You know Frank I’m real thankful I didn’t come from a monkey.’

Me: ‘Huh?’

Alice: ‘I never liked that idea, being from a monkey and all.’

Me: ‘Huh?’

Alice: ‘You know, a monkey.’

Me: ‘Do you have a particular monkey in mind (thinking of her brother)?’

Alice: ‘Frank. I’m serious. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest after all these years.’

Me: ‘Oh.’

Alice: ‘The idea of coming from a monkey. I knew in my heart it wasn’t true, but it’s a relief to have a good man like Ike set it straight.’

Me: ‘What did Ike do?’

Now, I have to break into this historical rendition to tell you what I was thinking during the start of this conversation. Like I’ve told you before, I don’t read much and was never interested in politics. So I didn’t know anybody in the government was working on this monkey thing, let alone Ike. I didn’t know Alice had been working on this monkey thing either. I didn’t know that I should worry about this monkey thing. I flat out just didn’t know, but it had me worried. Maybe I should have been worrying about this monkey thing. Alice seemed to think it was important, and I looked to Alice for help in those areas.

The only thing I knew about monkeys and man up to that point was that Mark Twain had said “I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey," or was it “I believe that our Heavenly Father invented the monkey because he was disappointed in man?” Either way, I didn’t remember him being particularly worried about where he came from, but what did I know? Lots of progress has been made since Mark Twain’s time, so maybe he should have been worried but didn’t know any better. So, I became more interested in our conversation which I will now continue relating.

Alice: ‘Ike made it official that we did not come from monkeys. There is a new law just passed that this monkey foolishness can’t be taught in schools anymore. Thank heavens for good men like Ike.’

Me: ‘Oh.’

Alice: ‘I’ve seen monkeys, and I was sure I couldn’t have come from monkeys. Show me a monkey that can bake a turkey with stuffing. No monkey can do that. They can’t even spell turkey.’

Me: ‘Monkeys can’t paint houses either.’

Alice: ‘Or set a proper table.’

Me: ‘Or watch television.’

Alice: ‘Or thread a needle.’

Me: ‘Monkeys can’t even cuss, not even one word.’

Alice: ‘You’ll never see a cussing monkey.’

Me: ‘A saw a bird that could cuss with the best of them.’

Alice: ‘Mrs. Smith has a bird.’

This is where I’ll stop the historical rendition of our conversation as you can tell it began to drift to new subjects, as all conversations do, even ones that start out on a serious subject as this one did. Before I end this part of the story I want to relate to you what Ike said on this topic the week after Alice and I had this conversation. Ike was speaking in the public square next to a building that I was painting, so I took a break and took notes on what he was saying. Of course, I’ll put his words in double quotes since I can exactly write what he said, this being the beauty of my note taking system.

“Our children are our future,” Ike said. “We must make sure that their education is the finest we can give them. All of us, their government, their teachers, their parents, their community must work together to make this happen. This is why we passed a new law, effective the first day of next year, which makes it a crime to teach theories in our schools. I don’t want our children learning, and I’m sure you will join me in this feeling, theories in school when we can teach proven facts. No, we want only established truths taught, and this new law will accomplish that. I feel sorry for all those children on the west side that will still receive a sub-standard education next year. I hope the educators over there can learn something from us.”

Now, the odd thing about this whole monkey business is that I never worried about the idea that we came from monkeys. Now that I’m better informed, I realize that I should have been worrying about it all along. The best thing to happen is to never know that something needs fixing, until someone fixes it for you. That way, you get the benefit of the fix, but not the worry. But now that I’ve told you all that, I want to tell you about our first winter as I promised to.

Alice and I were really looking forward to our first winter. Being from Seattle and all, we were anxious for a snowy winter. I looked carefully at Fifi to see if she might be anxious also, but she didn’t look any different than she usually did in the fall in Seattle. In Seattle, we missed experiencing a Bing Crosby Christmas, glistening tree tops, listening children, sleigh bells in the snow. We didn’t have to wait long. Our first snow came in the first week of December, right after Thanksgiving. Alice walked around the house singing snow songs. We even bought chestnuts to roast over the fire. I never had tasted roasted chestnuts, but once I did I liked them. After that first snow we could still drive to town, but I don’t work much in the winter, so getting out to work wasn’t a problem. However, Alice and I like to take in a movie once in a while, and we needed to get out to shop for groceries. It didn’t snow again until the last week in December, when it really came down. Nice big white flakes. Alice and I sat in front of the fire, watching out the window. That night we snuggled in bed, cozy and warm. 

Two days later we were still snowed in. I plowed out our long driveway to the main road, but the main road still hadn’t been cleared. Four days later I was getting tired of roasting chestnuts. I asked Alice if she knew when the main road would be plowed. 

Alice: ‘When you give me a hundred dollars.’

Me: ‘What for?’

Alice: ‘The driver of the plow.’

Me: ‘How come?’

Alice: ‘We have to pay him.’

Me: ‘We never paid to have roads plowed before.’

Alice: ‘It’s the Ownership Society. We own the plow so we have to run it. If we can’t, then we pay someone to take our place. If we pay for things, we will take better care of them.’

I couldn’t see what that had to do with the price of potatoes. All I could see was the hundred dollars going out of my pocket. So Alice got on the phone and transferred a hundred dollars to the plow driver. The next day the road was plowed. 

“See,” Alice said, “when we own it, it works for us.”

I wasn’t completely convinced. I never paid before, but I never owned a plow before neither. Just after the road was plowed, it snowed again. I spent six hundred dollars on our plow in three weeks. I didn’t know owning a plow could be so expensive.

There was a nice older lady living a few miles down the road who owned most of the property next to us. Now that it was winter and the days were short we didn’t see much of her. In the summer and fall she had walked a lot outside and we had waved to each other. She didn’t have family in Washington, but had a son living in New York who, we had heard, came once in a while to visit. Like I said, we hadn’t seen her often after Thanksgiving so I didn’t think much about the fact that we hadn’t seen her since it started snowing. She must have given her son our number in case of emergencies, because he called us asking if we could check on her. He called her every two weeks, but when he last called she didn’t answer or call back. We weren’t worried since she liked being independent, but we bundled up and headed out to her house.

We normally turned left onto the main road from our driveway, but her house was right on the main road, so that’s the way we turned. We didn’t get far before we hit the end of the plowed road. 

“What the heck?” Alice asked.

Actually what Alice really said was “What the hell,” but since she is trying to cut down on her cussing, I’m helping her out in this book.

Alice: ‘Maybe she didn’t know she owned the plow.’

Me: ‘Maybe she didn’t have the hundred dollars.’

Alice: ‘We can’t get through.’

Me: ‘Let’s go back and call the plow company.’

So we returned home and immediately called the plow company. The owner asked the plow driver who remembered plowing the road a couple of times, but when she stopped paying, he stopped plowing. That was a week ago. I guess she asked if she could pay late, but I guess with ownership comes responsibility. That’s what Alice said at her funeral; not to the general audience as a speech or something in front of the church, but to me on the way from the church to the cemetery. Well, I should backtrack a little since I’m getting ahead of my story. We paid the plow driver to plow up to her house; they didn’t have to go that far since they found her in her car about two blocks in. Now the conversation Alice and I had on the way from the church to the cemetery will make more sense.

Alice: ‘She looked real good at the viewing.’

Me: ‘I didn’t think they would get her straightened out.’

Alice: ‘I didn’t either.’

Me: ‘The way she was frozen sitting up at the wheel; stiff as a board.’

Alice: ‘How did they get her out of the car?’

Me: ‘Someone got the idea to start the engine and turn on the heat.’

Alice: ‘That’s disgusting.’

Me: ‘Actually, it worked really well. They didn’t thaw her completely; just enough to work her out of the front seat.’

Alice: ‘Here’s the cemetery.’

What happened to our neighbor makes me think about a story I heard from my great aunt. So I’ll tell the story to finish up my chapter about our first winter in our new house in Eastern Washington. When my great aunt was little, an aunt of hers died. This woman had been bent over for years, so when she died they had the same problem straightening her out; like they had getting our frozen neighbor out of her car. Cars hadn’t been invented yet so they couldn’t start the engine and turn on the heat, so to speak. They decided instead to tie her down on the dining room table with dish towels. It was an awful struggle, but having strong men in the family they managed it. 

While the adults were visiting at the wake, some of the kids got bored and started hiding under the dining room table. Kids being who they are, they started horsing around, and one of them untied the tablecloths holding the old lady down, which very quickly turned out to be a mistake. She sprang right up into a sitting position. It was the custom in those days to place large, old fashioned pennies on the eyes of the dead, and when she sprung up the pennies flung across the room and bounced off the wall. 

Now I’m telling this story for reasons other than the fun of telling it. You know how I talked about how some kids have perfected the silent cry? The same thing happens when someone is scared speechless, but to the extreme. It’s called the silent scream. The mouth opens up for a good scream, but no sound comes out. It’s very effective, especially on those around the silent screamer. My great aunt said that until that time she had never seen an adult that had perfected the silent scream. I guess the old lady popping up brought out a latent talent for silent screaming in some of the people there. Eventually the scream comes out, but sometimes it takes awhile. I’m relating this because Fifi experienced silent barking under similar, but different circumstances (as you will find out), but in her case the bark never had a chance to come out at a future time. 

So the rest of the winter passed without further excitement. I really felt like I owned the plow after spending over 1,000 dollars on snow clearing. There were lots of old people that couldn’t pay for plowing that first winter, and some of them didn’t make it. Alice said that they should have planned ahead. The neighbor’s son, who inherited her house and land decided to sell it. You wouldn’t have thought that decision would have led to the end of Fifi, and a move for us, but it did. I guess we never know what small thing might change our whole life until later, when it might be too late. Sometimes a thing will just hit the right resonance, as I’ve already related.

So he put the land up for sale in the spring. Now several things happened to us in the spring besides the neighbor’s property going up for sale, two of which I will relate to you in the next chapter entitled “The Storks Return to Eastern Washington.”