We were trying to teach Gamma the days of the week last night and it was beginning to piss us off. I mean, you’re nearly five, man, time to start learning shit. All three of us were frustrated. Gamma had this stupid grin she puts on when her feelings are being hurt and she is embarrassed. She is so sensitive. So we both calmed down for once, Alpha and I. And put aside worries of learning disabilities etc. Because – she is only four and three-quarters. And she has never had to explicitly learn anything before.

So we tried other approaches. I tried writing down the names of the days, to give her a visual clue (she knows letters). Alpha had already tried that. Didn’t help much. I tried using her hand. Luckily Gamma has seven fingers on each hand.

Eh, okay, she has only five fingers on each hand like most kids. So we did just the weekdays yesterday, we’ll do the weekend on her other hand another time. I went through the days, pinching her fingertips lightly and repeating the names of the days. Thursday was the ring finger, visual clue – Thursday has a ring (at least on my hand).

She had the days down by bedtime, yay. And still remembered at breakfast. And even suggested using the other hand for the weekend. Hopefully we’ll think of this kind of gimmick sooner next time.

Another thing the Peasant habitually did was take care of the old folks throughout the county, the ones who’d been around since he was a boy. Mr. Sales, who lived next door, carved horses and put together halters and all the rest of their tack out of leather and metal scraps, and it was all accurate and to scale. The Peasant would hang out with him, just talk. He had draft horses and work horses and horses pulling carriages, accomplished naive folk art, dunno if it ever went beyond making stuff to give as presents to friends and neighbors and the waitresses at a local restaurant he flirted with well into his 90s. The Peasant visited Bessie often, and a couple more over in Portland, and the rest of them, and there seemed to be a lot.

Including Uncle Bill. He lived in a trailer across the field. He’d always lived there. When my mother and the Peasant and the rest of their siblings were kids, there’d been a house and a family there. Now there was just this filthy old guy and his dogs living in a rusty trailer in front of the house, which was falling down and no longer inhabitable, and several mangy ponies living in the barn next door.

The Peasant liked to take us along on our visits to Uncle Bill. He encouraged us to call the guy Uncle Bill although he was no relation because that made mother crazy. I mean, he was dirty. Mom seemed, in retrospect, to believe he was morally dirty as well, which he may well have been, this strange old hermit. But maybe not, who knows. It is true that the dogs slept in his bed, especially on cold nights. And it is true that my father came home once from having conversed with Uncle Bill, and said, “As I was talking to him, a mouse ran out of one of his pocket and around his neck and ducked back into his sweater up at his collar, and he didn’t even act as if it were anything unusual.”

Developers have bought that whole section of land and tore everything down a long time ago. Now they are fighting with the county over zoning, they want to build a mall, and put a Target right where our old house was. Uncle Bill, he’s dead now but I don’t know when he died or whether he was still living at home when he did, I suppose so. As far as I know he had no redeeming qualities, but you can never be sure about that either.

Nice design, Melanie.

Jessica has Shiva beetles.

Bessie was born in 1865, I’m not sure where. There are Mohawk ancestors on my mother’s side of the family, so I guess the Great Lakes region someplace but I have no idea.

Bessie married at some point and went with her new husband to Alaska. This would still be well before the turn of the century, sometime between 1885 and 1895. They arrived at their destination, he showed her his house – a dirt-floored cabin and she said, “You expect me to live here?” He said, “Yes, you’re my wife.” Bessie never saw him again after that day. She returned to the continental United States, but she also traveled to Hawaii by sailing ship. By the time they reached Hawaii, which back then was still a kingdom, they had run out of anything to eat on board except for lemon meringue pies. So she arrived in Hawaii eating lemon meringue pie.

Bessie was a painter. In Hawaii, she painted the king of Hawaii. Her pictures hang in some Hawaiian museum. This is all family legend, you understand. Bessie was a great storyteller.

She was the spinster aunt the girls in the family loved to see arrive on a visit. She had wild stories to tell about world travel and adventure, something that surely brightened the days of girls growing up under strict parents in the cultural desert of Southwest Washington State. My mother often quotes Bessie, who said that girls should absolutely wear bright, flowery clothes, since they’ll have time enough to wear black when they get old. My mother still buys my daughters flowery duds, I’m guessing because of Bessie.

Bessie, as she got older, moved in with her younger brother and took care of him until she was 97. At that time, she went to the doctor for a checkup. She was 100% healthy, but she fell off the examination table and broke her hip. She spent the next 10 years in a nursing home, since the hip never healed right.

She died in 1972, Oregon State’s oldest registered voter, at 107. I don’t remember much about her, since I was 12 when she died and old people scared me. I remember that she was sweet and always knew what to say – how big you were getting, how much you looked like your dad, and so on. But she was over 100 when I met her, and getting that monkey-man look ancient people get, and the rest home had that unfortunate smell.

So I was too stupid to get much out of her magic as a kid. But others weren’t. She brightened the lives, permanently, of generations of kids into whose lives she brought color and Hawaii and standing up to your husband and lemon meringue pie and painting. Relatives like this are national treasures. Slowly this dawns on me, better late than never. Not all old people are old people, at least not in their souls. I’m relieved to see that my kids aren’t afraid of old people.

Alpha! Alpha, get a load of this search! Feral Living comes in first at google for this search!
Alpha, put down that spork.