Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 5

My ancestral home in this country is a small town in the Western US. My family founded the town and has lived there continuously since about 1860. Going back further, most of my ancestry is Irish, with a little Scottish, English and Jewish, oddly enough. Most of the family in my little hamlet is extended family, but that’s OK. I grew up with a LARGE extended family. Our reunions, on my father’s side, easily topped 1,000 people. These reunions were very important to me, as was the association with my cousins and my father’s cousins. They would be my first cousins, once removed. By way of explanation, a removal is a generation back. First cousins, second cousins and so forth are in the same generation as you (or me, in this case). A second cousin would be my grandfather’s brother’s grandchildren. Hopefully that confuses you as much as it confuses me. My wife knows these things instinctively, so I am sure she will correct me if I am wrong.

My father had 52 first cousins. The product of farm life. You didn’t hire hands, you created them and they were working as soon as they were out of diapers. These are salt of the earth people. They were generally poor families in England or Scotland who came here for faith and a better life. It was hard for them, coming from such a cool, green place like England to a hot, dry place like the American West. They walked or rode across the plains and over mountains for months to get to this arid place. it made them tough but they appreciated the good things as well.

I love all my cousins, first, second or third. They were my playmates and baby sitters when I was young. We would roam the fields of our little town, making up games and stories as the mood took us. There was one place across the street from my Grandma Grace’s house called the Forest. This was really a windbreak planted by my great, great grandfather when he started the farm. It had grown over time into a grove of trees that had little hollows lined with grass and shaded by big cottonwoods and poplars. One day, we were in the Forest, telling stories and my Dad’s cousin told us a story about dragons and how they rode the wind. These dragons were not the noble creatures you read about now in popular fantasy, they were slimy and mean and wanted to eat you, diving in from the trees above. The wind was blowing that day and the trees moaned in the wind, creating the sound of dragons and bats and other nasty flying things just waiting to eat or bite you. Even now the wind in the trees sends a little shiver down my back, half from excitement, half from fear with a dash of nostalgia to give it all the right flavor.

All these fields and trees needed water, which was supplied by a network of ditches fed by The Canal. The Canal was the product of many men digging with anything they could find in order to earn a share of the water. One of my great grandfathers hocked his wife’s wedding ring to buy a spade, which is a short shovel, so he could dig for his share of the water. It’s amazing to me what they did in order to achieve their goals. The sacrifices they were willing to make, would we make them today? That thought runs through my mind. More tomorrow on these people and the town they built.