MY AUNT MARTHA’S FARM

We woke early because we had no choice. Aunt Martha’s rooster perched his arrogant, cocky self under our upstairs window in that large, white farmhouse in Litchfield, Pennsylvania, and screeched reveille like an unwelcome and despised army sergeant. But once we threw off the quilts and bounded down the back stairs, we didn’t give him another thought.

We had a whole world out there to explore. This was a children’s paradise; an unscripted, unprogrammed, unmonitored day to let us be kids, to swing in the hayloft, ride the old workhorse named Dick, run through the pasture, hitch a ride on Uncle Ardell’s hay wagon, create as much havoc as we wanted, with Aunt Martha never restraining or correcting us.

I’m sure she served good meals but I don’t remember any of them. I was eight years old and eating was at the bottom of my List Of Important Things To Do. I only remember her homemade ice cream, hand-churned in the dirt-floored cellar, made with thick cream from Bossie, her gentle cow, and packed full of fresh strawberries Aunt Martha had patiently hulled that morning. Each time, Aunt Martha would warn me not to eat the ice cream too fast, and each time I ignored her and ended up with an “ice cream headache” smack behind my eyes, begging her to relieve it.

Aunt Martha’s barn had an invisible Welcome sign over every door. It was a kid-friendly atmosphere, even though I once fell through a trap door and landed in the basement in a cow’s feeding lot. I was stung on the eyelid by a hornet while pretending to drive a hay rake in the barn but I never blamed anyone but myself. I thought a perfectly good raw steak from Aunt Martha’s ice box was wasted on my eye for no good reason. But that was Aunt Martha. She took care of us when Mother was ill, and we never forgot her kindness.

Under the little bridge near the house, we collected duck eggs and tortured toads. We sat in the shallow, clear creek and peeked under large stones, hoping to find snakes or large fish. We found neither. But if we crossed the adjoining field and headed up into the woods to cut small white birch branches for whistles, we found snakes and porcupines and many other unwelcome and unfamiliar critters.

My sister, Norma, was three years older than I and often accompanied me to Aunt Martha’s farm. Looking back on my childhood, my sister seemed bent on my destruction. The fact that I survived at all is more a testament to my survival skills than to her intrigue.

She told me there was no Santa Claus when I was only five years old. She locked me in a dark, marble mausoleum with wine velvet drapes when I was a ten-year-old, pretending to leave me forever. She held my head under water on Sundays when we washed and dried the Sunday dinner dishes because I sang a different tune than she to relieve the boredom. She pummeled me because I laughed uproariously when a cow she was riding at Grandma’s farm took off at full throttle down a hill and threw her onto the rocky ground. She pummeled me a second time when I bent double laughing when she stepped barefoot into Grandpa’s tobacco juice pan.

But one day she and Charles, Aunt Martha’s son, invited me into the woods at Aunt Martha’s farm. Knowing their penchant for torturing children, I should have had my antennae raised fifty feet higher. But I threw caution to the proverbial winds and helped them make sandwiches for our hike.

They wanted to show me a small cabin deep in the woods. As we followed a narrow path and stepped over dried and crackling saplings, they told me endless stories of notorious robbers who lived in the cabin, of bulging-eyed monsters who slept there during the days but came out at night to grab small children from their beds, of hermits who murdered little kids and hung their skulls to dry in the cabin. I wonder now why I didn’t turn back but I followed them robot-like through the dark woods straight to that cabin.

Once we were in the cabin, they dashed outside, locking me in with a padlock. They called goodbye to me from a distance. There were no windows and no lights, except for the visions in my mind of snakes and skeletons and skulls and all the horror these two had vividly painted in Technicolor in my mind.

No one heard my screams in that airless one-room cabin or heard me banging on the splinter-filled, wooden door. After several days (actually twenty minutes), they released me from my prison while I pelted them with rocks, wet pine cones and dirt clods.

Because of my patience and forbearance, Charles grew into a fine, handsome man and Norma became an outstanding wife, mother and missionary to West Africa.

She owes it all to me. I think.