Making Family Memories Around a Mill Creek Campfire

BLOG #36, SERIES #6
WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE
MAKING FAMILY MEMORIES
AROUND A MILL CREEK CAMPFIRE
Part One
September 9, 2015

It took close to two years to make the family reunion happen; after all, Mill Creek, California, is relatively unknown to most people. One member of our family came from Idaho, one from Florida, four from Maryland, two from Nevada, two from Colorado, and eight from various places in California–eighteen of us in all.

Miracle of miracles, eventually all eighteen arrived at Mill Creek—in spite of fierce forest fires burning all across Northern California. Especially in the San Joaquin Valley, smoke was thick, and most roads leading to the coast were closed due to the fires—at times it seemed like the entire Golden State was on fire!

The focal center of this gathering of the clan was Marji and Elmer Raymond’s trailer house and fire-pit. My sister Marji had been the main choreographer of the reunion. As we watched one contingent after another make their appearance, I couldn’t help but step backwards in time more than half a century when annual Thanksgiving reunions of the Wheeler and Bond clans were a given. High on Napa Valley’s Howell Mountain at Grandpa Rollo and Grandma Ruby’s Angwin ranch, it was unthinkable to miss Thanksgiving with extended family. The pattern was unvarying: car door after car door being slammed, Grandma Ruby’s singing out her unvarying, “Why you dear souls!” and “Why Papa!,” as each new arrival was hugged—all this while dogs barked excitedly and cats scurried for cover. The women gathered in the kitchen, each bringing food. The crescendo of family gossip and laughter made it a wonderful place to be—and the smaller children played with the well-over-a-hundred-year-old blocks by the fireplace (some of the blocks had crossed the plains in wagon trains a century before). Grandma Ruby (who was deaf, could read lips) ruled over this segment of the reunion. Outside, a little distance off, Grandpa Rollo ruled over the men in their marathon horseshoe tournaments that stopped only for dinner, or darkness. The continuous clinks as horseshoes reached the stake was etched in the soundtracks of my memory forever. The older boys watched in fascination as ringer after ringer rang out. Grandpa’s usually rang out most because rarely did his tosses miss the stake. There was much laughter and bantering and shouts when ringers were capped by other ringers. Since the usual Thanksgiving head-count averaged over eighty, the cumulative hubbub never stopped except to eat. And what meals those were! Only for the blessing was there momentary silence. At night, Grandpa challenged all comers at caroms. Eventually, the carom boards were put away and all gathered around the upright piano to sing. Grandma Ruby “listened” by putting her hand on the piano top and seraphically “feeling” the music. Eventually, the kids were put to bed but the adult socializing continued far into the night. And next day, the slammed car-doors and “you dear souls!” and “Why Papa’s” were heard once more, as the yearly ritual came to an end.

Except for an occasional funeral, once Grandpa and Grandma were moved to Oregon, the Napa Valley reunions stopped, and family members never again gathered together in mass as they had before. So you can imagine the memories that were brought back to Marji, my cousin Steve, and me as once more we heard the continuing ring of horseshoes—with one big difference—the marksmanship being generally so poor that it was a serendipity when a horseshoe actually touched a stake!

But this time, Marji made sure the women weren’t prisoners of the kitchen: breakfast and lunch could be eaten at the Mill Creek Restaurant or in the cabins; only the dinner would be picked up under the tent adjacent to the fire-pit and eaten around it.

Next week, we’ll take you through “the rest of the story.”

LET IT SNOW!

BLOG #4, SERIES #6
WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE
LET IT SNOW!
January 28, 2015

What magic resides in those four letters! Especially since snow appears to be withdrawing from our world. As the global temperature grows hotter and hotter, we see such phenomena as the proverbial “snows of Kilamanjaro” in Africa drying up; even the Iditarod’s thousand-mile sled-dog race was forced to race much of the way on dirt because of so little snow last year; the polar bears in the North struggling to survive as arctic ice-packs melt earlier each year; opening up the long ice-locked Northwest Passage to ships; this melting placing at risk Narwhals–now Killer
Whales can corner them and kill them because there is no longer enough ice to shelter them; even the Himalayas are losing their life-giving snow.

Notice how this week, the entire Northeast all but shut down because an epic blizzard was roaring in. New York City completely shut down (including planes, trains, autos–except for emergency vehicles). 7,000 flights were cancelled. Funny it was to see Matt Lauer and his team walking to work, and he lying down in the middle of Fifth Avenue doing a snow angel in the snow. But instead of two to three feet, the city received only 6.2 inches! All the news people were psyched up for great visuals as their people reported in standing waist-deep in snow; instead, they had to do interviews from so little snow it didn’t even cover their shoe-tops. Of course it was deeper further north.

In Maryland, just the threat of a storm causes school districts to shut down for “snow days” that may or may not be snowy. Here in Colorado’s Front Range, any possibility that there might be a few flakes falling later on in the week is cause for jubilation among weather-forecasters desperate for ratings surges: every so many minutes they tell their listeners that “later on,” they’ll tell them how much snow will fall. Rarely are they right–but listeners like us listen anyway. Especially the kids who love snow days.

As for us, we revel in the sight of falling snow. At night, we’ll sit by the fireplace staring into the flames, offset by staring outside at the floodlight-illumined falling snow. I even enjoy shoveling it–as long as it’s not so deep it all but buries us!

And many people either live here or travel here in order to participate in the annual snowfalls. Interstate 70 out of Denver routinely grinds to a near halt as thousands of skiers head to the mountains.

And what would Christmas stories be without snow? Amazing how many incorporate that element as part of the story-line.

Out our northern windows, we can see the mountains (crowned by Long’s and Meeker peaks) of the Rocky Mountain National Park some eighty miles away. What an incredible difference between late-summer’s brown and winter’s pristine white! Takes one’s breath away just to  at it.

So let’s all treasure snow while we still have it, revel in it whenever we have the chance.

Thank God for snow!