Blog Archives

Mom’s Poem

Posted on by Janene Bromley Piecuch / Leave a comment

I met my mother, Wilma Pickett Bromley, when I was eight years old, and it was love at first sight for me.

She died recently in Star at age ninety-three. She was a tough, tough lady—that’s how women were in the “Greatest Generation.” I’m more of a dreamer, with a heart that’s broken easily and heals slowly.

She had just married my dad in Seattle when we met. I was from his first marriage. It may have taken a little longer for her to return my love, as I was sick with malnutrition and viral pneumonia. I was taken to a doctor, who advised that I should be put in a hospital and allowed to die there. That made my new mom mad. She picked me up and said, “If that’s how you feel, I darned well won’t leave her here.”

On the way home, she told me, “Hospital people don’t know everything. I’m a farm girl, I know how to make you well.”

I thought she was an angel. Continue reading →

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Father

Posted on by Ginger Beall / Leave a comment

I never speak to my father. Stern, gruff, and ancient at the age of sixty-three, he terrifies me. He growls that we are no good, gives us orders, and swaggers around half-lit on homemade wine, telling of the rough work he does at the sawmill each day. I want him to like me, but I am just a skinny little girl. I can’t chop wood or milk the goats, like my big sisters. Our pigs and the dark scare me to death. I only do one thing really well, and that is spell.

In my second grade class at Weippe Elementary School no one spells better than me. That’s why I‘m going to Orofino for the district-wide spelling bee. Because I placed first in all the contests held at our local school, my teacher told me I had earned the privilege and responsibility of representing Weippe in the district competition. I’m nervous, but I tell myself I can outspell everyone in the big town of Orofino. Neither of my parents has ever attended any of my spelling bees, but Daddy agrees to drive me to this event. He decides that Mama will come with us. Such special attention makes me feel giddy.

Mama braids my hair up tight in long French braids, telling me she’s so proud of me. I put on my best dress, a red calico with short puffy sleeves and two layers of gathered ruffles for the skirt. Mama dresses up too, in her Sunday clothes and shoes. Instead of his usual work shirt and jeans, Daddy puts on his navy blue pinstripe suit that only gets worn when there’s a potluck at church and he goes with us to get something to eat. He warms up the old green truck and I climb in to sit between my parents for the winding descent on the Greer hill from Weippe to Orofino. Continue reading →

In Praise of a Place

Posted on by Shirley Metts / Leave a comment

One of the biggest mistakes my husband Rocky and I ever made was the year we allowed our grown-up children and their friends to talk us into letting them put in their inner tubes beside the bridge near Featherville and float a section of the Boise River down to Johnson Bridge.

The problem was we could not drive alongside the river to check for “strainers,” the fallen trees or branches in the water, or for any other safety issues. Even so, we blithely waved them on their way, telling them we would meet them in two or three hours at the bridge.

After three hours had come and gone, I began worrying that something had happened. We drove every road we could find that went to the river, with no sign of any of them. My husband, granddaughter, and I drove up and down the road between the two bridges, over and over again. About five hours later, we finally found two of the boys trying to hike out to the road. They had run into several strainers and had almost drowned. Having decided enough was enough, they had begun walking. But that still left six people in the water—and we could not find them.

The problem was we could not drive alongside the river to check for “strainers,” the fallen trees or branches in the water, or for any other safety issues. Even so, we blithely waved them on their way, telling them we would meet them in two or three hours at the bridge.

After three hours had come and gone, I began worrying that something had happened. We drove every road we could find that went to the river, with no sign of any of them. My husband, granddaughter, and I drove up and down the road between the two bridges, over and over again. About five hours later, we finally found two of the boys trying to hike out to the road. They had run into several strainers and had almost drowned. Having decided enough was enough, they had begun walking. But that still left six people in the water—and we could not find them. Continue reading →

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Splendid Misery

Posted on by Judy Grigg Hansen / Leave a comment

Camping is a great American tradition invented by masochists—or by children. What full-grown woman in her right mind would trade in her modern kitchen for a camp stove, and her comfy bed for a noisy air mattress in a tent where you can hear someone else’s husband snoring twenty-five feet away?

But to children, camping is magic: dirt is in and rules are out. The announcement to the family, “We’re going camping,” is greeted by cheers from the kids, who will have nothing to do but tease their siblings and test out their slingshots while their parents confront the real-life jigsaw puzzle of fitting seven sleeping bags, one extra-large tent, tarps, pillows, portable crib, bag of diapers, camp stove, grill, propane tank, lanterns, swimming suits, towels, snacks, water jugs, games, dining fly, stakes, tools, clothing, ice chests, and floating toys into the three-by-five foot space behind the seats in the SUV. Continue reading →

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The Ice Pond

Posted on by Dean Clark / Leave a comment

I was forbidden to climb on our first house in Idaho, a tarpaper shack across the meadow from where Dad worked at Clearwater Timber Protective Association (CTPA) near Headquarters. The house consisted of a framework much like a large, garden shed with a low, flat, board roof sloping nearly to the ground in back and covered with tarpaper for waterproofing. The board siding was also covered with tarpaper secured by thin wooden strips. There was one layer of unsealed boards on the floor, and even with throw rugs it could be drafty at times.

We had two small bedrooms, one for my sister Ardath Jean and one for my parents. I slept on a studio couch in the combination living room/kitchen. There was no inside plumbing and no electricity. Water was carried in a bucket from a spring about three hundred feet away for drinking or poured into the reservoir of the wood burning kitchen range used for cooking and other household needs. The outhouse was a two-holer about fifty feet from the kitchen door, our only door. Lighting was by kerosene lanterns. Of course, there was no refrigeration. Any perishable food was put in a submerged, covered box out at the spring, appropriately called a spring box.

A dirt road led to the tarpaper shack during the summer, but in the winter we waded through an average six feet of snow across the meadow on foot, climbed over Reeds Creek on a perilous, abandoned railroad bridgework, and then waded in snow for another two hundred yards to our car parked near the public road. I never had to wonder why my mother was less than thrilled with our new house. We lived in the tarpaper shack for two winters and three summers. Continue reading →

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Missing Gene

Posted on by Angela D'Ambrosio / Leave a comment

My husband Rick says my side of the family is missing a self-preservation gene. I hadn’t really considered it until my mother and father decided to build their dream house at the top of maybe one of the most dangerous roads in America.

Admittedly, reaching the summit is like breaching the gates of heaven, but it’s six miles of sheer rock cliffs and narrow thoroughfares just big enough for a single vehicle. And that’s the improved road.

The suspect road is an old logging trail that branches off Highway 95 in the mountains near Council. My dad, Jim Warren, had to dynamite parts of that road, which my kids lovingly call “the scary cliff.” We’ve actually convinced the kids that we installed a parachute on the mini-van just in case we fall off the cliff. It is always a life-affirming journey to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Continue reading →

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Pariah

Posted on by Melissa Whiteley / Leave a comment

In 2005 I married into a family of hillbillies, cowboys, and ranchers whose earlier generations began somewhere in Arkansas. In Idaho, they make their living raising cattle. They consist of five or six families living in the middle of nowhere, amid rugged mountaintops or in the wide-open desert. These communities are sometimes so small and so isolated that the bar is in the back of the convenience store and the bartender is also the Sunday school teacher. Some of the family, though—like my in-laws (thankfully)—live in a more pleasant manner, in manufactured homes perched on hundreds of acres. These homes are surrounded by flat brown plains, horse corrals, and looming haystacks. At times, the smell of manure and rotting carcasses fills the air—a smell that I have yet to grow comfortable with. Continue reading →

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Recycling Forever

Posted on by Les Tanner / Leave a comment

The time has come, my friend Al said,
To speak of many things:
Of bricks and rags and scraps of wood,
Of nails and worn out springs.

My usual excuse for picking up run-over gloves, rusty washers, and other lost and discarded objects is that I am a child of the Great Depression.

I was born in 1934 and thereby missed, or was at least unaware of, the financial and weather-related problems of the 1930s. But my parents didn’t miss them. Their parents had tough times, too. Nothing went to waste in any of those households. Whatever the reason, I am what is known in polite circles as a pack rat. If there is a glimmer of potential use remaining in a container, or a piece of wood or wire or cloth, or whatever­­—the list is virtually endless—it joins a wealth of similar objects in the storage location of our Caldwell home that I fondly refer to as “somewhere.” My filing system is simple. If it has come in the door, it is still here. Somewhere.

Numerous examples come to mind, but the fifteen or so banana boxes we bummed from a supermarket produce manager when we moved to Georgia in 1965 will do. Anyone who might see them would surely agree that they are fine boxes indeed, and they served us admirably during the several moves we have made over the years since then. Empty boxes, however, do take up critical storage space, so several years ago I spent a couple of weekends creating room for them. First, I cut a hole in the ceiling of the garage and manufactured a great door for it. Next, I built a beautiful ladder out of two-by-fours and hinged it to the ceiling, so that it can be raised and lowered by a very clever pulley system of my own design. Eight sheets of half-inch plywood (A/C grade), sawn in half lengthwise to fit through the hole I’d cut, became a good, solid floor, and voila’, problem solved. Continue reading →

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