Crazy Childhood Memories

Crazy Childhood Memories

As a child I used to spend several weeks every summer in Casey County, Kentucky with both sets of grandparents.  Time at the Choate farm was spent helping my grandpa build things in his woodworking shop, fishing with him, or just roaming the surrounding forested hills.  Time at the Miller farm was spent playing with my uncles, Mike and Terry, or tormenting my aunt Kay. 

Terry was only six months older; Mike two years; and Kay three years, so we were more like cousins growing up.  We shouldn’t have given her so much grief, but when Kay got mad, she went berserk.  She was a pretty, small girl, with a heart of gold, but when angry, look out.  I remember we got her mad and kept her locked outside until she calmed down.

In the early seventies my grandfather’s brother, John Miller, lost both of his legs to frostbite.  My grandmother was a poor widow, with four children, but she still took him into her home after the amputation, until he could care for himself.  I realize now that it had to have been a great burden, but she took it on, without complaint.  It was a time when family and honor meant something, and that’s what families did, whether convenient or not.

Uncle John started off with a red wagon, in which he sat, and we pulled him around the house in it.  Later he was able to get a wheelchair, and eventually he received prosthetic legs.  When he received the chair and legs, he gave the wagon to my uncles.

We would take the wagon to a pastured area, at the top of the hill, in back of the house.  We would take the wagon down the steep path that led to the woods.  That wagon would fly!  There was an area where the path jogged across a natural ditch.  The only way to make the job was to lean very far to the side when making the turn.  The wagon would go up on the two side wheels, then you lurched to the other side so that the wagon would slam back down and continue to gain speed. 

At the end of the pasture, before entering the woods, we would jump out of the wagon.  It would crash into a tree, then we would take it back up for the next kid to ride down.  Looking back it is amazing we didn’t hit our head on a rock, or break a bone.  I guess it is as they say, “God looks after fools and children.”  It was dangerous and stupid, but man was it fun!