The Call of the 4 Wheeler

            

         In the summer that I was 10 years old my mother had us 3 kids staying with her in the small cottage on her parents huge orchard farm. We filled the cottage with sleeping bags and suit cases, with lawn chairs and pillows. It was a really fun place to find a small frig in keeping our milk cold and cooking every night over the fire pit. The 3 of us kids took turns doing the dishes and once in awhile we would go back to our home in Meridian Idaho to do our laundry but mostly we lived out on our Grandparents farm for that wonderful magical summer!
...and my mother was the happiest I had ever seen her to be.
    
    For it was the summer of 1989, My sister Dana and my brother Derek had their corners of the big bedroom setup like their own bedrooms as we moved in. I liked piling up pillows all around me as we slept on the brown carpeted big bedroom floor. We kept our clothes bags in the closet and our shoes by the back door. Our mother setup her bedroom in the living room next to the kitchen and that door went out into our fire pit eating area. Mom took a twin size bed and made it into a couch by the front door yet we weren't inside all that much. We usually sat around the fire pit every night before bed, after roasting some marshmallows of course!
      Since I was 10 years old I decided it was time I kept a journal, because I noticed that we were having so many adventures every single day and everything was brilliantly exciting on the farm, I knew my record keeping was important and that notebook filled up with drawings of my stories, with misspelled words in telling my excitement and in pressed wild flowers among the pages, by the end of that summer it was completely full with one last drawing of me and my dog Savannah walking down through the old apple orchard. She had become my very own dog by the end of that magical time in my life she lived another 8 years with me, so in many ways the summer of 1989 changed my whole life, made me very much the person I am today, a happy pet loving person who still gets excited to roast marshmallows over the fire pit after being outside all day!

That summer of 1989 had my Uncle Dan my mother's only brother coming out to work on his parents farm every morning, he would drive up the hill to the big blue work shop and jump on the 4-wheeler. It was understood if he saw us 3 kids come running to the gravel road he would swing in to let us pile on and head on out in to the orchards to collect his gophers. Uncle Dan had a great system in trapping gophers, he had a bucket attached to the 4-wheeler for all those rodents he caught in his many traps, He always carried a shovel and sometimes when he would pull the trap out of the ground between the fruit trees then the gopher would hiss and I would squeal as he would try to not get bit! He made all kinds of jokes, took on all kinds of pathways through the trees, short-cuts on the farms, as we kids learned to hang on tightly through every morning's trap check list, he would re-set them in freshly seen dirt piles that the gopher just made. It was a crazy mess of damage that one single gopher could do to the irrigation ditches and to the root systems of an orchard. Uncle Dan trapped hundreds in that summer alone, it was a welcomed sight to the ditch riders to see his collection of tails and they paid him for it too. I was in awe of learning so much while riding along side of Uncle Dan, he made it all look so easy zipping in and off of the 4-wheeler. I would grab the handle brake if we began to slide down the row after he jumped off to capture a gopher and I would lean as far away from those ugly creatures whose front teeth stuck out like a shiny knife! Uncle Dan sure loved what he did, showing us the inside guts or how they clawed around under ground with their long fingernails. He only had to tell me once that they can bite my finger off with snap so I should never put my hands on their head! Of course holding them by the tale seemed just as scary to me so I only ever just watched on and sat as far away from the bouncing bucket on the 4-wheeler. I would look down it saying "I sure hope they are all dead!?!?"
Sometimes in the evenings before Uncle Dan headed home we would jump back on the 4 wheeler with him to see if he had caught anything during the day, but it was mostly in the mornings that we were the most excited waiting to be picked up, the fun adventures of riding on the 4-wheeler through out the 3 farmlands and just being apart of Uncle Dan's world was great motivation for us to be ready at the curb! His fast driving, strong digging and catching those ugly things through out the morning would come to an end with his loud whistle out towards his dogs wherever they were as we started driving back home, he would drop us off at the cottage again where our mother was in relaxing in the heat of the day just as we were getting thirsty, for we had sun kissed heads and we told Mom all about our morning's journey as we ran through the sprinklers, we were in such wonder by all the new things we discovered on the farm!

And so that summer came back to me on the day Derek died.
As I drove in tears down the freeway, as my heart pounded to see my family right after this tragic news. The summer of 1989 will always be far better then the winter of 2017.
The year I was 10 will always be apart of me, it will always be the best kind of joy from my past!
So in that very same cottage on February 25, 2017 as I rushed in to find it was full of extended family as my mother sat in her wheeler chair surrounded by hugs and tears, she exclaimed happily "Oh look Debby is here, that's good! I knew you should come." Maybe she was in shock, but I hugged her quickly trying to take it all in, then her brother my Uncle Dan embraced me with "Hey, Little girl." as we sobbed over Derek's sudden death, as I said sadly "I sure wish you could just be zooming down the hill on your 4-wheeler once again to pick us kids up for a new adventure instead of going through this." I suddenly realized that there is such a thing as "The Good Old Days." after all.

The early summer morning had the clock reading 5:30 am as the wild rooster crowed loudly by our cottage window, Dana shot up from her bedding exclaiming "I'm going to kill it!" Derek and I shot up right behind her from our 3 beds on the floor, we shot out after her saying "No, you can't kill it!" Derek shouted out after Dana "It's MY rooster, you can't touch it!" Dana charged the rooster away from the bedroom window and we all chased it out into the near by peach orchard, laughing by the end of it all. Our mother wasn't getting up yet so we entertained ourselves among the cotton wood trees and the pathways around the farm as the sun rise was so beautiful and the wide open sky greeted us with the endless possibilities ahead for our new day!
Then shortly after breakfast as I was washing the dishes I heard the sound of Uncle Dan coming down the hill and I yelled out "Hey Mom I'll finish these when we get back!" Derek shot up from reading his book and Dana came running down the small hill from the above us, THIS was the call of the 4-wheeler, the sound of the motor roaring out towards us. We came out from all directions to hop on those thick strong wheels shooting us out into a new summer day, into the farm land, into the horizon of the clear blue sky, into our soon to be wonderful memories!