Eureka Springs memories

My sister just sent me this old family photo--Top, Uncle Raymond is surrounded by three of his five sisters. My mom is on his right, Aunt Doe is on his left, and Aunt Mary is over his head. Grandma is to the far right. Aunt Marie is in the middle. We kids are on the bottom row--Elaine, Tommy. Billy, and me. My ornery cousin Bob is behind us to the left. The farm house is typical Arkansas Country!

I visit my Arkansas relatives: circa 1948-1950

A recent visit to the northeast Arkansas town of Hardy has me thinking about my experiences in that state, when I was a kid. I've written about my Arkansas relatives in recent columns, so maybe readers will bear with me, as I wander through the maze of memory to recapture those golden days of my youth.

My aunt and uncle's Eureka Springs, Arkansas hill farm was a magical place in the late forties or early fifties, when my parents would leave me there to visit for a week or so during the summer.

Even the presence of my three rowdy older cousins, all mischievous boys, didn't dampen my enthusiasm for roaming those rocky hills, playing with tadpoles in the creek and collecting pretty rocks.

In my memory, I see an old whitened cow skull, sitting at the base of a tree. What wonders awaited curious city kids who went to visit there.

Uncle Raymond plowed the rocky ground behind a big rangy mule, and Aunt Marie (the chatterer), was a constant whirl of activity around the house, doing laundry in a galvanized tub with a washboard and hanging the clothes on the line and canning vegetables from the garden.

My cousin Elaine and I would always go there together. This had its drawbacks, for, though she was my favorite cousin at the time, she was also three years older, so she and cousin Tommy would often gang up against me and make me cry.

One time, we were playing happily in the creek, when they began to pick on me, perhaps because I was in possession of the absolute best creek toy in existence--a large chrome greyhound hood ornament that one of the adults must have given me.

I was totally adsorbed in the way the greyhound looked in the rushing creek water, when I realized that Tommy and Elaine were bad-mouthing me.

"You're a pet!" they screeched, maliciously.

I took as much as I could, but then I gave up and went back up the hill to the house, where Aunt Marie was snapping green beans on the back porch.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?" my aunt asked.

"They're picking on me," I said. "They say I'm your pet!"

"Well, you are," my aunt answered. "Here, come help me snap beans."

I was amazed! Suddenly, it didn't matter that I was a social outcast among my peers.

The Arkansas visit was like that--moments of glorious happiness were interspersed with other moments of sheer terror--especially when it came to visits to the horrible outhouse up the hill!

The outhouse was definitely the down side of the visit. It was creepy and smelly, and I was afraid of the spiders and snakes who hung around the old unpainted building.

To make matters even more terrifying, this outdated country facility was the scene of a terrible accident that is forever branded on my memory. Elaine and I would always go up the hill together, and one day--to my horror--I accidently dropped her DOLL down the outhouse hole!!

Oh, horrors! Oh, unmitigated tragedy! The screams! The threats! The humiliation!!

I stood, transfixed, staring down with wide eyes at the sight of my cousin's lily white doll, lying on a bed of filth, her blue eyes looking up at me accusingly.

There was nothing that could be done. The doll was lost, doomed to suffer the indignities of future trips up the hill.

Looking back on the incident, I wonder if the outhouse incident happened before the creek incident. Perhaps that was the reason my cousins had picked on me. They were punishing me for being such a klutz and knocking Elaine's doll down the outhouse hole.

Needless to say, Elaine never forgave me for this transgression, and I have no doubt that the rest of our Arkansas visit was shrouded in darkness and humiliation.

Elaine is gone now, but even if she were alive, I would never ask her to give her version of the story. I heard it enough at the time, and now my memory is getting blessedly cloudy. It's only a matter of time before I forget it completely.

Still, when I see the rocky hills of Arkansas, I find myself back on my aunt's farm, with my fingers in the cool waters of memory, catching little black tadpoles, completely content.

One day, I'll go visit Eureka Springs, which has become another quaint tourist town. All my Arkansas relatives live in Alaska now, and from what I hear, they have no nostalgic desire to return to the hard, glorious life of Arkansas dirt farmers.