Fine Cherry Trees

Fine Cherry Trees

       By Pugelada

My mother used to tell me that it was wrong to kiss a girl before I was married to her. She also told me that God watched what I did and saw that it was either good or bad. She told me on various occasions that she hoped I would obey Jesus and be a blessing to Him. Father agreed with her, as far as I could tell, though he spoke of these matters infrequently, simply put on his reading glasses over his porridge and read passages to us from Our Daily Bread. Mother would redact from these pithy parabolisms to our daily lives in rural Manitoba. Now, we were raised good. We had food on the table; we had coffee at breakfast; we had meat and potatoes at supper. We never, in my memory, went hungry. We were as lucky as children can get. That was a great blessing, was our full stomachs. I remember coming home from school with more than an adolescent boy’s ravenousness about me, and mother trying to put a stop to my whining by telling me to go eat a few carrots in the garden. An hour later, though, she had soup and potatoes on the table for the six of us. Father did not count in this number for he arrived home at nine or ten in the evening six days out of seven. Father had to spank us when he came home on those occasions when mother said we deserved it. He told me later that he disliked that job. Mother got us weeding beets in Horndeen, Plum Coulee, Gretna, Neubergthal, and Rosenfeld. We weeded all our two-month summer holidays away, did we five kids. Father had me mow the lawn and clip the hedges. We had a large number of hedges on the yard and it was my job to be the grounds keeper. I also rototilled the gardens. We had three gardens--a vegetable garden, a fruit garden and a flower garden. They covered half of our two acres in Old Altona. Mother told me years later that she despised grandfather Reimer for having made my older brother distribute evangelical tracts on various occasions, including on a trip to British Columbia when he was only seven. He was required to approach such people as garage mechanics, hand them a tract and witness to them about Jesus. My father reluctantly gave me a quarter each Saturday when I was sixteen and seventeen. I bought two cigars with the money and smoked them that very evening always. Mother made fruit preserves that I purloined, a few at a time, and made into wine. I did this from the age of fifteen to the age of eighteen. When I was nineteen my friend, an artist, got a fifteen year old student of his (he taught a high school course in painting then) to let him body paint her. She wore panties and a bra and let him paint her from forehead to feet. I didn’t see him do it. He said he still got goosebumps when he thought of it even now forty years later. I think of the relative values that our world places on activities. I never saw my father naked. I saw him in long johns and a t-shirt once but found it exceedingly embarrassing. I never saw my mother naked, either. I did not want to. I never saw my brothers or sisters naked, not even once. Unlike an acquaintance of mine, I did not find a chink in the shower room and watch my sisters taking their baths. My first sexual thoughts came with my cousin who lived thirty miles away. We were swimming in a dugout, surrounded by cows grazing. We were twelve. We swam naked. We pulled our penises back between our legs to make them look like vaginas. We caught frogs and tadpoles that same afternoon in the water there. We sat on a little raft that just held us up. I don’t care for nudity. I abhor nakedness. I wish it would all go away, sex and the erotic body. My mother loved to garden. She planted flowers of a hundred varieties, and later in her forties started a greenhouse business that she ran till she and father moved to British Columbia. My father grew tired of being a travelling rural salesman after twenty years. He decided in the late sixties that he had had enough and they sold and moved west in a blinding snowstorm. There, in Abbotsford, he became a real estate agent and died at the young age of seventy-two of cancer. Mother made and sold perogies in their first five years there because they had no money They went hungry for three years not having enough to feed themselves or their frequent prairie guests vacationing in B.C. Mother grew raspberries and father grew apples. By the time he died, my father had created a fine yard, two acres large, with many fine apple, peach, plum and cherry trees on it. And that is my reflection on the state of human depravity.