Chapter 1

This probably won’t be the best organized story you ever read. That’s partially because it’s real and real life doesn’t follow a script. And it’s partly because I didn’t write any of it down for the first 30 years or so...

The story starts in October 1972-- which was 50 years ago as I type this-- when Frank bought an old pickup truck. So the dialog is going to be what I think was probably said. But you weren’t there, so you can’t correct me if I get it wrong. We lived way out in the woods, daddy drove a truck for a lumber company and momma kept the house going which was a full time job back then.

We weren’t poor, we owned the house, a big vegetable garden, 4 acres of land that grew cash crops, and 35 acres of woods that we leased to daddy’s employer. They planted it with fast-growth pines that were harvested every few years for pulp.

We didn’t have cash to spend on frivolities. Mom and dad never taught us anything at all about sex. I guess it just wasn’t done back there, back then. But they taught us a lot. How to grow our own food, how to be good people, and how to look after each other. We were able to figure out the rest-- including the sex part on our own. This is that story.

As I said, it started with an old pickup truck: a 1954 butterfly hood Dodge, with a Massie flathead six, that my brother Franklin bought.

We kept pretty busy, it was a working farm, so in addition to school we had a lot of chores. Frank was the oldest boy in the family. He had a drivers licence and momma didn’t really like to drive at night or in rain or wind or ... Well, you get the idea. So Frank was given time off from other tasks to get the truck running. It was “just, kinda, sorta, barely, running--” if’n you sweet-talked it properly-- when he bought it and then he was given time off other chores to run errands with it.

Franklin and I are close in age-- I’m Florence by the way, but most people call me Flo. We’d always gotten along really well together. I volunteered to help him work on the beast-- chase down and clean tools, and hold onto something rusty with both hands while he oiled, heated, bolted, or unbolted it. Afterward, because the beast’s reliability was an unknown factor, I volunteered to ride shotgun-- to load, unload and help fix it if it broke down enroute.

Riding along-- even if it meant helping out loading and unloading big metal cans of milk, wooden boxes of vegetables or what have you-- was more fun than milking the cow, picking the vegetables, mending somethin’ or paintin’ it. Being the oldest girl in the family it just made sense to momma for her to send one of the bigger stronger kids out to make deliveries and pick things up. And she chose me instead of Floyd because Franklin and I never fought or argued.

Well, by the new year, I’d been pretty much been assigned “permanent shotgun” duty. Then Franklin’s girlfriend started playing some silly teenage-girl game with him. Trying to get him all jealous by cozyin’ up to our brother Floyd, creating false dichotomies to get him to choose her over one of his friends, or his chores, or school assignments. Stuff like that. I just got to thinking about how well our family ran the farm and the house together so that dad could just go out and bring in cash without drama. How we were a team that looked after each other.

Too bad we had to grow up, move out, and move on. I mean it was just weird the sort of things that strangers did. Especially the way they wanted you to change to suit them. There wasn’t any reason for Frank to change. I had fun just tooling around the county with him, talking, trying to get the radio to work, and then making fun of the staticy reception or the sappy songs if’n it did.