Growing Up Me

1.Where I Come From

I am the great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of an Ottawa chief. I never knew him, of course, but he’s one of the people I want to meet when I get to the other side. I don't remember his name. I wish I could find it.

I’m also the great-great grandniece of another Ottawa chief—Chief Agosa, who has a whole town named after him (Ahgosatown). He was one of 22 Ottawa and Chippewa chiefs to travel to Washington to sign the Treaty of 1836.

I am the daughter of Steve and Maridine Blakeslee, the granddaughter of Ron (Pappy) and Bev Blakeslee and James and Erma Newstead.

Grandma Erma died before I was born, but Grandpa had remarried, and my Grandma Eva was the sweetest woman in the world. She was loved by just about everyone who ever met her. I remember, you were not allowed to leave her house hungry. She always had somebody in her lap, little arms around her neck, and sticky-jelly-colored lip-prints on her cheeks from baby kisses.

Grandpa Newstead was a storyteller. He always had a story for the four or five kids always sitting at his feet. No one told better stories than Grandpa.

Grandma Blakeslee taught me to do bead work, and she told stories, too, but they were different. They were stories about The Great Turtle, and how North America came to be. And Granddad would let us play with the wood shavings when he was working on a gunstock or anything he was making in his shop.

My mother was amazing. I remember her braiding my hair and fixing me oatmeal for breakfast before school. She made most of my clothes until about 5th grade. I wish I still had this one sweater she knitted for me. It was dark blue and white, and it was the prettiest sweater I ever saw. She taught me to cook and sew and crochet, starting when I was 9 years old. By the time she died, I knew enough to go on with, but I still miss her.

Dad is a storyteller, too, but he doesn't write anymore. I read some short stories he wrote, though, and I wish I could find them again. He taught me to play the guitar, shoot, hunt, fish, ride horses and motorcycles and snowmobiles, drive a tractor, build a barn, and work on cars.

He should have had a son, but he had all girls, so we all learned everything he would have taught his sons. I don’t regret that at all…even though I still have a scar on my lip from when he and I were trying to free up a flywheel on a 1948 Dodge pickup truck.

No one ever in the entire world had better parents or grandparents than mine. And yes, we did get that old truck running, and yes, I did drive it. :)

2. Electrocution (In Which Tawn Gets Grounded…Sort Of)

My father built the house I grew up in, in the Northern reaches of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We lived about 2 miles off 16 Mile Lake Road, and that 7 acres was full of horses, goats, chickens, pigs, ducks, and rabbits. We also had a goose, but I'll save that story for another time.

Anyway, Dad had just got finished putting up the shell of the house, and we moved in. I was 5 years old, and I remember sleeping in a room with no walls. Just the studs were there. There was no water, but there was electricity, because Dad wired the house before we moved in.

When Dad got some paneling up, so we could have some sort of privacy, he went to work and put in a pitcher pump, so we wouldn't have to haul water. That pump was the bane of my existence for years.

So we got the house pretty much squared away, although it wasn't finished for quite a few more years. It wasn't even finished when I graduated from high school, bought my own house and moved out (and that's another story for another time).

Alright, no more digression! Let's get this story told, already. So we had this pitcher pump, and we had a wringer washer. Yeah, this was the 80s, but we were stuck in 1948 or so.

The problem with having a pitcher pump and wringer washer (and several other outdated or antique appliances and accoutrements), as far as us kids were concerned, was that we had to pump big tubs full of water, to put on the (wood) stove to heat up for laundry, for bathing, or anything we needed hot water for.

But...there was another problem with the pump, only nobody had found it out just yet.
Until one day, as I was pumping water into the big washtub to go on the stove, I found it.

There I was, about 9 years old, moving that pump handle up and down, and watching about a cup of water at a time (it seemed like it to me), going into a 20-gallon tub. While I was doing this, I also had ahold of that wringer washer, for some reason. Don't ask me why. I was only 9.

Suddenly, I couldn't move. I stopped pumping water, and just stood there, holding onto the pump handle and the washer, and screaming for all I was worth. I had 120 volts of electricity running through the washer, through me, through the pump, and into the ground.

See, Dad hadn't grounded the house, so the pitcher pump had been doing that job right up until it found out I was the perfect conduit between it and that wringer washer that was also made of metal. So then I became the ground. No, I don't mean I fell to the ground or anything like that...remember, I couldn't move. No, I was grounding the electric current. Me, and the pump.

Mom was yelling at me to let go, but I couldn't let go, it had me right where it wanted me.

"IIIIIIIII ccaaaaaaaaaaan't!" I yelled.

So she grabbed something, I can't remember what, and she threw it over my arm, and then yanked my hand off the pump handle. The current stopped running through me, but I was still shaking, and I still couldn't let go of the washer. So she pried my hand off the washer, and told me to go lie down.

I didn't lie down very long, because I was all of a sudden thirstier than I'd ever been in my life. I thought I was going to die of thirst. I bet I drank a gallon of water (from that frick-a-fracking pump).

When Dad got home, Mom told him what happened. And my Dad (AKA: Superman) fixed it so that would never happen again (AKA: He ran a wire from the fuse box, outside, and into the ground).

So why do I miss that blasted old pitcher pump? I don't know.

3.My Favorite Color (In Which Tawn Loves a Horse)

My favorite color is orange because I had a buckskin mare when I was a kid.

Her name was Lightfoot, and I got her when she was 7 years old. The girls who owned her before me couldn't make her do anything for them. She was a really spooky horse, but Lightfoot and I got along very well. You could say we fell in love with each other.

When the horse trailer came driving up in the yard, Dad said, “Well, your present is here. Let’s see what you can do with her.”

She was my best friend. I used to get up at 4 AM on Saturday mornings, and go get her out of the corral.

Have you ever seen a horse smile? I have. It's kinda creepy. But she'd always smile when she saw me coming. She knew what Saturday mornings were for. I'd saddle her up, and we'd go to the lake and watch the sun come up.

The sky was always all orange and gold and purple, and it was so quiet, except for the waves coming into shore, and the frogs singing. Spring peepers don't exactly croak... they sing, and even though I'm afraid of them (that's another story I'll have to write for WP), I love hearing them sing.

Sadly, Lightfoot got sold when I was around 15. I felt like a traitor, because when it came to loading into the trailer, she’d only go in for me, and the new owner couldn't make her step up onto the ramp.

So she handed the lead to me, and I said, “Come on, girl. One more time.” And she followed me up into the trailer, and I just stood there for a minute, after I fastened the lead to the trough, and hugged her neck and cried.

A year later, Lightfoot was dead. The new owner kept her in a single-strand electric fence near a highway, and Lightfoot broke the fence, got onto the highway, and got hit by a semi-truck.

But that's why orange is my favorite color... because it reminds me of Lightfoot and all those Saturday morning rides.

4. The White Rabbit (In Which Fuzzy Cuddles Happen)

I was about 7 or 8 when my sister and I were playing one day, near the spruce woods on the hill behind our house. I can't remember what we were playing, but it was probably something to do with horses, cowboys and Indians, or some kind of pioneer thing. That's what we normally played pretend at.

Right in the middle of our play, a rabbit came hopping out of the woods. So I sat on the ground facing it, and my little sister, Tiffany, sat with me. Terri was 2, and too little to play outside with us, I remember that.

Tiffany wanted to know, "Why are we being quiet, Tawny?"

I whispered, "Shhhh...look over there."

So she looked, and saw the rabbit. It was a white rabbit...an albino, in fact, which we didn't usually see just hopping around in the woods.

Later, looking back, I realized it must have been someone's pet that they took out in the woods and let go. It had gone feral. Bad idea, by the way. If you don't want your albino rabbit anymore, please, please don't just turn it loose in the wild it doesn't know how to live in!

Matter of fact, I'll take it. And I'll pay for shipping, even. Just to keep it from suffering. But there I go again, digressing.

Anyway, that rabbit was hopping around in our back yard, and it came closer and closer to where we were sitting.

Tiffany said, "Can we pet it?"

"I don't know, but I want to. It's so cute," I answered.

Well, the closer that rabbit got, the more we stayed still, hoping it would come close enough to us that we could touch it.

Unbeknownst to us, Dad and Mom were watching us from the back bedroom window, and Dad was taking pictures when we finally did get to pet that rabbit. And when I picked it up and cuddled it.

I think it ended up in the rabbit hutch next to the chicken coop. And I think I ended up eating part of it, eventually, but it's a good memory I have from my childhood. Petting and cuddling that albino rabbit that went wild and got tamed again by a couple of little girls in their back yard.

5. Wrong Time, Stupid Chicken (In Which Tawn Makes a Decision)

We had chickens when I was a kid, and those hens were so stupid. Every stinkin' winter, we'd have a mess of chicks to make a decision about. Either we'd try and get them through the winter, or we'd have mercy and spare them the misery.

One year, I remember in particular, one of the Leghorn hens stole her nest, and hatched 8 chicks in October. They were 2 months old when a bad blizzard came through. There was ice 2 inches thick over the entire dirt floor of the chicken coop.

The morning after the blizzard stopped, I went into the coop to get the eggs, and there was one of the chicks, sitting on the ground, with its lower half frozen solid in ice.

Mom was in the house, but I didn't want to bother her, because she was in her sewing room, working on stuff she didn't want us kids to see. Dad was at work, so I did it. I went and got the axe and chopped its head off. Then I got some salt to melt it out of the ice, so it wouldn't be left in there rotting in the chicken shit all winter.

I told my parents about it when I could. They said I did right, but it didn't feel good to do it.
Sometimes it ain't pretty, living on a farm.