As I look back it does not seem to me that the playing of funerals involved any disrespect or lack of love for our mother, but was, rather, a transference into our daily activities of a strange experience that had come to us.
We had another play that was connected with a death, but at the time I did not recognize the relationship. Just before we came south for the long visit, Harry’s five year old sister Margaret had died of diphtheria and was buried in the ranch garden. Soon after our arrival a mason came and set up a gravestone for her. Beside her grave were those of an older sister, and of a little unnamed baby. The ranch had been robbed of its children and the heart of the young mother sorrowed. Harry had been devoted to Maggie and was disconsolate without her, so that I must have been a most welcome visitor for the lonely small boy. Taking our cue from the mason we spent many hours in the making of mud tombstones for our bird and animal burial plot over near the graves of the children. I modelled them and he polished them and put on the inscriptions.
We wandered about day after day, in the cool summer sunshine,—so near the ocean that oppressive heat was rare. As soon as breakfast was over, away we went. I was clad in a daily clean blue-and-white checked gingham apron, Harry, although but seven, in long trousers, “like the men.” We romped in barn or garden, visited the corrals or gathered the eggs; we played in the old stage left in the weeds outside the fence, or worked with the tools in the blacksmith shop. When the long tin horn sounded at noon the call for the men’s dinner we returned to the house to be scrubbed. I was put into a white apron for meal time, but back into my regimentals as soon as it was over. A second whitening occurred for supper and lasted until bedtime.
Sometimes we went down to the orchard, where all summer long we could pick ripe apples and pears; and occasionally, as a rare treat, we were allowed to go barefoot and play in the river, reduced to its summer safe level. One day, after having built elaborate sand houses and laid out rival gardens, planted with bits of every shrub and water weed we could find, we went to a place deep enough for us to sit down in water up to our necks, where, grinning over the top of the water, we enjoyed an impromptu bath. We hung our clothes on a willow until they were dry and then wondered what uncanny power made our mothers know that we had been wet.
A half mile or so beyond this ford lived Uncle Marcellus and Aunt Adelaide, and their boys, Edward and Herbert, who used to come over to help at shearing time. Just inside their front door they had a barometer shaped like a little house where a woman came out and stood most of the time, but if it were going to rain the gallant husband sent her inside and stood guard himself.
The largest and loveliest hyacinths I have ever known grew for this aunt, and she had tame fish in her pond that would come and eat breadcrumbs which we gave them. Aunt Adelaide was a very short woman with the shiniest, smooth, dark hair that never turned gray. It went in big waves down the side of her face. Once she showed mother a number of large new books and told her about a way to study at home and learn just as if you were going to college, and a long time afterwards she showed us a big piece of paper that she said was a Chautauqua diploma and meant that she had studied all those books.
Every time we went over to the station on the railroad, or came back, or went to Compton to church or camp meeting, or came back, we always saw the old house that had been the first ranch house, belonging to the Cotas, but which had now only pigeons, many, many shining lovely pigeons living in it,—and so many fleas that we called it the “Flea House” and knew better than ever to go into it.
But we were not afraid to go into the deserted coyote hole that we found in a bank down on the side of the hill below the house. Luckily we did not find a rattlesnake sharing it with us.
The sum of child happiness cannot be told. How good it is to wander in the sun, smelling wild celery, or the cottonwood leaves, nibbling yellow, pungent mustard blossoms while pushing through the tangle; how good to feel a pulled tule give as the crisp, white end comes up from the mud and water, or to bury one’s face in the flowing sulphur well for a queer tasting drink, or to cut un-numbered jack-o-lanterns while sitting high on a great pile of pumpkins of every pretty shape and color, and singing in the salty air; how good to wander in the sun, to be young and tireless, to have cousins and ranches!