Family Stories
These are the things a spouse must go through to become part of a family. You have to hear the family stories enough that they become your stories—so that your family stories become so mixed together that you sometimes get them confused. “Was that my aunt of yours that scared off the bear?”
Sunday my husband and I escaped, without kids, to Trout Creek, a small stream that empties into Strawberry Reservoir. My gosh, the feelings of guilt that swept over us, taking off in the middle of a day to spend six hours alone. It was pretty dang delicious. We’ve been working way too hard this summer. Too much responsibility was making this Jack and Jill embittered old cronies.
But this is our annual trek. Sometimes we don’t make it until late into autumn but we struggle to be there, to go over the history. This is where “our family” moved in the thirties and cut timber and milled lumber. In the early years of our marriage, I hated this trip to Trout Creek because of the stories: his mother making 6 loaves of bread everyday on a wood-burning stove, up every morning at 4 to make biscuits and gravy to feed twelve hungry men and umpteen odd children; the day-old lamb he found and fed who followed he and his little sister; the homemade wooden wagon his dad made with the little round wooden wheels. It seemed impossible to compete with these stories the, not so impossible now that we have our own memories.
My husband has the most amazing memory for “yesterday” and absolutely no recall for today. “Did you remember that today was garbage day? How ‘bout that wedding reception tonight? Me? The kids? Lawn care?” Nope, nothing rings a bell. However, he can remember chapter and verse about everything he ate and thought and did from June 1939 to September 1948.
Their story is a story of a Utah family trying to make it during the Depression and World War II. Probably pretty common, maybe like your family’s. Finances veered from poor to comfortable and back again. There were times they were taken for a ride by shiftless people. The time a guy from Mapleton hired them to cut and mill his lumber way up on top. “Here’s where our cabin stood. Here’s our old bedstead and this here’s part of our old mill. We had a whole pile of lumber here and the night before we finished, we went into town and the guy came and loaded it all up and took it down and sold it. We never got paid. He even milled the rest of the logs we had with our own mill. We never could get any money from him—he didn’t have it. Dad had to take out a loan that winter for us to live.”
Sunday, the spot where they lived then lay in bright sunlight, a beautiful meadow by the side of the road. A tiny, shiny stream ran through the grass.
Those were the hard times. Other times were more successful. “We sold so much lumber the next year, Dad said we paid off our house without hardly even knowing it. We cut timber all summer and took it to town and sold it all winter farmers.”
But the war took all the men, all the big brothers. “Those were hard years. You couldn’t hire anybody, there was just nobody to hire. I was ten and I could just hold up the end of the bow saw, a six-foot bow saw, and Dad would saw down the tree. It would take about 20 minutes, a half-hour, to saw down a tree.” They’d skid the logs down the mountainsides counting the tree stumps, looking for the old paths the logs cut coming down the hills.
“Right here was a huge saw dust pile, the biggest thing. We used to take a slab of wood and make a diving board on the side of the mountain and jump in and roll down.”
And there are our stories too. The summer we first camped there, our son’s name carved in the aspen “Billy Elder, August 6, 1980.” And the last summer with his dad. “Barlow Elder, August 12, 1991.”
We ride up and up the old dirt road and around each corner we see faces of people we love. Parents, siblings, and our own little boys who are gone now, grown up and telling their own versions of our family stories.
Sunday my husband and I escaped, without kids, to Trout Creek, a small stream that empties into Strawberry Reservoir. My gosh, the feelings of guilt that swept over us, taking off in the middle of a day to spend six hours alone. It was pretty dang delicious. We’ve been working way too hard this summer. Too much responsibility was making this Jack and Jill embittered old cronies.
But this is our annual trek. Sometimes we don’t make it until late into autumn but we struggle to be there, to go over the history. This is where “our family” moved in the thirties and cut timber and milled lumber. In the early years of our marriage, I hated this trip to Trout Creek because of the stories: his mother making 6 loaves of bread everyday on a wood-burning stove, up every morning at 4 to make biscuits and gravy to feed twelve hungry men and umpteen odd children; the day-old lamb he found and fed who followed he and his little sister; the homemade wooden wagon his dad made with the little round wooden wheels. It seemed impossible to compete with these stories the, not so impossible now that we have our own memories.
My husband has the most amazing memory for “yesterday” and absolutely no recall for today. “Did you remember that today was garbage day? How ‘bout that wedding reception tonight? Me? The kids? Lawn care?” Nope, nothing rings a bell. However, he can remember chapter and verse about everything he ate and thought and did from June 1939 to September 1948.
Their story is a story of a Utah family trying to make it during the Depression and World War II. Probably pretty common, maybe like your family’s. Finances veered from poor to comfortable and back again. There were times they were taken for a ride by shiftless people. The time a guy from Mapleton hired them to cut and mill his lumber way up on top. “Here’s where our cabin stood. Here’s our old bedstead and this here’s part of our old mill. We had a whole pile of lumber here and the night before we finished, we went into town and the guy came and loaded it all up and took it down and sold it. We never got paid. He even milled the rest of the logs we had with our own mill. We never could get any money from him—he didn’t have it. Dad had to take out a loan that winter for us to live.”
Sunday, the spot where they lived then lay in bright sunlight, a beautiful meadow by the side of the road. A tiny, shiny stream ran through the grass.
Those were the hard times. Other times were more successful. “We sold so much lumber the next year, Dad said we paid off our house without hardly even knowing it. We cut timber all summer and took it to town and sold it all winter farmers.”
But the war took all the men, all the big brothers. “Those were hard years. You couldn’t hire anybody, there was just nobody to hire. I was ten and I could just hold up the end of the bow saw, a six-foot bow saw, and Dad would saw down the tree. It would take about 20 minutes, a half-hour, to saw down a tree.” They’d skid the logs down the mountainsides counting the tree stumps, looking for the old paths the logs cut coming down the hills.
“Right here was a huge saw dust pile, the biggest thing. We used to take a slab of wood and make a diving board on the side of the mountain and jump in and roll down.”
And there are our stories too. The summer we first camped there, our son’s name carved in the aspen “Billy Elder, August 6, 1980.” And the last summer with his dad. “Barlow Elder, August 12, 1991.”
We ride up and up the old dirt road and around each corner we see faces of people we love. Parents, siblings, and our own little boys who are gone now, grown up and telling their own versions of our family stories.
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