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.
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