More Reimers Loose

 

More Reimers Loose
     By Leigh, the Lassoo Kid

Father sold Raleigh goods around the countryside. Mother was the only parent at home 96% of the time. She raised us and towards the end of my stay in the village of Altona, let’s say the last three years, she operated a little greenhouse that grandpa built in the backyard. Heated by an oil burner, with a chair right next to it, the place invited lazy reading and in this spot, so delicious close to the stove, I loved to sit and wile away a Saturday. The smell of the warming earth, the wet growing green leaves, the sound of rubber boots on the sand path in between the three rows of plantings, brought me as close to heaven as I thought then it was possible to get. Where outside still insisted on the presence of winter, on the tyranny of cold, inside—in my chair with the peaceful little sputtering of flame in the hot stove and just behind this a plastic barrier—proclaimed the possibilities of spring and summer. While father stepped from his warm station wagon into the cold prairie air, carrying his sample case, and knocked on another windswept door in Lowe Farm, Plum Coulee, Horndean, Letellier, Dominion city, Saint Jean or Greta, I sat in my comfy hidy-hole besotted with Warren Neale and his girlfriend, Allie Lee, in The UP Trail as they set about helping to build the Union Pacific railroad through Wyoming and into the dangerous desert canyons of the Black Hills. But….! Already I have broken my own narrative rule, that I would not dwell on any one event in the years I spent with my parents but honour them in a modest way, devoting a sentence or two to each thing so as not to make to much of it. Yet, I’ve gotten caught up in the ambience of mother’s greenhouse in late Winter. New resolve: I’ll rein in the lingering horse of my unbridled enthusiasm and chuckchuck to the sleepy one of disciplined authoring and, with any luck, I’ll speed at full gallop through the 18 years of mommy-daddy-me. Maybe in a number of segments each ending with (to be continued).
      In 1950 (two years old) I got a burn the size of a nickel right  through my hand when I stepped out of the tepid tub water in our Rosenort basement to warm myself on a glowing space heater. Wet, I stuck to it, my frightened brother Jim (seven), scared by my terror, also drenched from the tub, stuck to my shoulders with two hands and mother, hearing screams and running up, only to grab Jim and get one hand stuck, too, had the presence of mind with her free hand to pull on the long electric cord running up the stairs until it came out of the socket. And we all were released and healthy, outside of a wounded hand and, well, a lingering general limiting effect on our powers of thought and observation. The pictures of that whole hour are burned into my memory!
     1960. Dad bought 50 evergreens and planted them along the south side of our one acre yard. 1957 dad bought a half acre of pastureland just at the eastern edge of our yard. Mom made that into another garden with hundreds of tomato plants and everything else you could think of. One year, after first frost, four of us threw the thousand unripened watermelons and musk melons wherever we felt like it, loving how they shattered. Of course, we had a war.
      Speaking of war, half a dozen of my teen cousins, on a visit from Steinbach, made slingshots from lilac branches and gathered lots of stones from the road gravel. When evening came, in its moonless darkness, we warred with a half dozen local neighbours, them invisible on the opposite side of a high hedge. We fired a hundred stones in the general direction of the enemy. One rock from their war party went through my hair just as I bent to pick up ammo. 
    1959, BC.  Rudy climbed high into a bing cherry tree to postpone picking raspberries. I threw green damsons at him where he sat in a fork twenty feet up. I eventually connected, just above the eye, and he teetered, lost rigidity and fell unconscious, limp as a blanket, through the branches to the ground. 
(To be continued)