Family Reunion July 12,2014

Aunt Jelene ,Aunt Helen, Brad, Me, Rowdy, Rex the dog and Jaxx the dog spent the week at the ranch.

We decided it might be fun to go up and get the ranch house cleaned up and ready for the reunion.
Mother has been gone 2 1/2 years. The ranch house, yard and goats miss her care. The field was dry and looked dead, all the plants around the ranch house were dry and sad looking. The goats ran away because there is no one to talk to them and feed them treats. The fly's were ABSOLUTELY atrocious. There were 3 goats that still hang around and they have the run of the yard, therefor there is fresh goat poop everywhere and the fly's were mating and spreading like fly's do. We watered the grass by the house and by the end of the week it was green again.
We walked in the ranch house and there was a TERRIBLE stench of death.  There were a few dead mice lying around but the smell didn't go away when they were disposed of.  We looked out J's old bedroom window and saw a dead baby goat. With flashlights and shovel in hand, Brad and I went to remove it hoping that that would solve the terrible smell.  Not so.  The baby goat was all dried out and had no more smell. Brad and I slept in that room.  We sprayed essential oils all over hoping to make it bare able to sleep. It helped. When the sun went down, the smell was a little less.
Thank goodness Brad was kind enough to come with us.  We put his skills right to work.  He turned the water on to the house, He fixed the kitchen sink so it would drain, he fixed door handles, he fixed the stove so we could cook. We were told before hand that the toilet wasn't working.  Brad bought a new toilet.  That was the first order of business to fix the toilet. It was scary.  It had old crap in it. Who knows how long it had sat in there.  I helped Brad take out the old toilet and replace it with a brand new one. It was Soooo nice to have a new toilet to use.
Jelene and Helen, cleaned out the back porch. There was goat poop that had to be shoveled out then scraped off the floor. If there were bags that mice could get into they did.  There was mice poop everywhere. They threw away a lot of Moms herbs in bags because the mice had been over everything. There were still cupboards and boxes with things that father kept in the back porch.  It all got moved out in the shed.  It looked so nice and clean when they got done.  Rowdy helped haul trash to the dump on the 4 wheeler.  We were all so hot and sweaty everyday. The pig cooker is still in tacked so we filled it with water and built a fire. It felt so go to bath in it and get clean.


to be continued

Strong Will

It didn't pay to be Red in our family.

I'm not talking about the color of your hair.  I'm talking about your personality type.
 

Red Leader/Promoter Power wielders. The ability to move from point A to point B. Getting things done is what motivates and drives these people.   They bring great gifts and vision and leadership and generally are responsible, decisive, proactive and assertive.

Seek productivity

Want their own way

Workaholics

Like to be right

Want respect more than Love

Resist being forced to do something

Confident

Visionaries

Proactive

"Winning isn't everything...It's the only thing!"

There were more than just one Red in our family. The one closet to my age was my sweet sister Ruth. When I came to her with a problem she would figure it out and fix it. She new how to get things done.
 

Those first years at the ranch were hard on us all.

Jelene hurried and got married just so she could get out of there. Then Kay got married and left. The brothers were off working to pay for the ranch. Father was, God only knows where.  It left Mother 47,Janice, Helen 13, Ruth 10, Beth 9, me 7 and Donna 2, to run the ranch. There was a lot to do. Helen and Ruth milked the cows, Beth fed the horses and cows, Janice fed the pigs and did the 
washing, I fed the chickens, geese, and rabbits. Donna was learning to go potty.

After our chores and breakfast, Mother home schooled us. Recess was jumping roap with my best friends, my sisters, my only friends. After school work was done, it was time to hoe in the garden.  If you wanted to eat you had to work. Dinners were simple like baked squash, split pea soup, baked potatoes. Mother made cheese and butter from our cows milk. We always had home made bread. Bread became our happy food. Hot out of the oven with butter and honey. We could eat a whole loaf. We lived simple and we ate simple.

Father would come home. The quiet and peace turned into stress and fear.

We were instantly his worker bees. I tried hiding several times. I could get diarrhea the moment I saw his car coming up the road. That got me out of a lot of things.
 It never failed that something happen while he was away.  After dinner he would line us all up and ask who did it. If no one fessed up, he would start spanking us with what ever was handy.  His belt, or his boot or a board or a twig.  Then he would tell us to be quiet. If we didn't stop to his satisfaction he would hold our breath with his hand.  Helen Beth and I must have been pretty good at sucking in our sobs, but Ruth was not, or she mouth off at him.  He would grab her, put her body between his legs with one hand on the back of her head and the other hand over her mouth and face and hold her breath until we though he would kill her right before our eyes.  He would let go long enough to give her a short breath of air and then do it again.  She would finally give up the fight. This happened many times.  Ruth was very strong willed. She was a fighter. Father didn't like children that stood up to him.  We were to be seen and not heard. He had to make sure that we new he had control. Ruth pushed his buttons.  He had to break her so she new who was in charge. Who was boss. Who had the power.

We were always so glad when he would leave.
Lilly

Gatherings at the Ranch.-updated

There were a few years in a row that we would have parties at the ranch. One year it was around Halloween because I remember dressing up like a pumpkin, and being so excited to see what my friends came as. This is also the year that my sisters gave me a home perm, so it was like a pumpkin on top of a pumpkin. What was I thinking? I also remember my sisters setting up an elaborate scheme to scare people as they drove through a narrow canyon dressed as characters from Sleepy Hollow. I think it was Beth that rigged her costume so that she actually looked like a headless horseman. If you knew any of the people that were coming,  you knew that some would be early, but most would be unpredictable as to their arrival time, so they sat down there in the narrows on their horses for probably hours in order to give our company a quick thrill by being chased by a headless horseman. Amazing what we had time for without TV.

There were probably 3-4 families that would be invited for various reasons. Father enjoyed having the men out so that someone would listen to him talk about his idea of religion for hours on end. Goodness knows we weren't very good listeners. Helen was feisty and unafraid to have a difference in opinion. Maybe that was a second reason to have these parties - find a man spirited enough to marry Helen. I wish I could have shared in some of her confidence.  

We anticipated these parties so much because it wasn't very often that we had company. Company meant
an escape from our boring lives of chores and home school. It meant good food, which to us was pretty much anything outside of squash, bread and potatoes.  At meal time there would be a whole table full of delicious salads, casseroles, white bread sandwiches, cookies and cakes. This to most people would have been ordinary, but to us ranch kids that only ate what was grown in our garden, it looked like a feast.

At night we would build a big bonfire and socialize and roast marshmallows to our hearts content. Until Mother said, "Now that's enough, you are going to get sick on all that sugar." And of course she was right because later we didn't feel all that great.

These gatherings also meant re-kindling friendships with people besides our sisters, which was exciting for all of us. Helen got to play hard to get for Merlin. He found out later that she wasn't playing. Haha. Ruth got to look beautiful for Dean and a few other beaus. Beth seemed uninterested in any of these Boys although, I'm sure that there were several that were on the prowl. For Lilly it meant lots of flirting with boys that she had no intention of marrying. I remember being mad at her because both of the Ward boys liked her and I thought one of them should have liked me. After all I had that wild curly red hair, poky 10 year old boobs and a big honk'n cold sore on my lip. What's not to like. After all I was probably worried about there being a shortage of men. We only saw a limited amount of them and not very often. 

I do think that I thought I would end up marrying into one of these families because at the time they were the only people from the outside world that came to see us and didn't think we were freaks. It wasn't until we moved to Las Vegas that I realized just how many people were in the world and that they weren't all crazy and that I wasn't really a freak after all.

I can't imagine having a different childhood. There was something to be said for the simplicity of living at the ranch. I really try to teach my kids how to enjoy the quiet afternoons by reading a book or just taking a walk out in the woods and enjoying the peace of nature. In the end I can only lead by example, but I constantly point out to them the wonders of nature and the beauty that God gives us to enjoy, because that is what my Mother did for me.

Donna