Benjamin Scribner's Blog, page 5

The weeks news. We pause to remember those who gave all.

It’s been a quiet week up here om the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

Our spring rains have arrived, a month late, but we’re happy to see them, and hope we get our normal rainfall this year. Because we haven’t had much rain, fire season, the last few years, has been getting worse. As a result, I have been cutting some of the trees closest to the cabin. I heard the forestry service say that ten feet between trees would help in the event of a forest fire to lesson the risk of losing your home. I have enjoyed the trees around my cabin since I moved here, and I am sure some creatures make their homes in them. However, I enjoy my home more than the flora and fauna, so I have been thinning them out and clearing downed, semi-rotted logs.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, and for most people, it’s the unofficial start of summer. BBQ’s and beach time will happen, many hot dogs, hamburgers, coleslaw’s, and potato salads will be consumed.

But for the veterans, it is a day to remember those we left behind, those who left our shores and never saw their families again. From the trenches in France, to the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, we have fought and died. Many are buried in graves on foreign shores, having given their lives in the service of their country. Others came home, but could not handle everything they saw or felt, and later, took their own lives. We pause to remember them this weekend, we thank the dead, and reach out to those who still suffer the effects of war. PTSD is a killer, and far too many of our young veterans are being lost every year, every bit as much a casualty of war as those lost in combat.

A few years ago, I was asked to write a poem for this day, and read it in front of a crowd at a memorial service for those brave men and women. Here it is.

THE GHOST

Taps last notes have faded,

The mourners moved along.

Yet one young lad still stands there,

Quiet in the dawn.

‘Tis the ghost of him that’s buried,

Standing by his grave.

Will anyone remember me?

Or the sacrifice I gave?

Will anyone come visit here,

Now that I have passed away?

Yes, son, we will remember,

Those of us that live.

Your sacrifice we shan’t forget,

You gave all you had to give.

And those of us that stood here,

Will come back again each year,

To remember all you did for us,

For we hold our freedoms dear.

And those of us that served with you,

Shall remember every day,

Your laughter, love, and kindnesses~

Those things won’t fade away.

So rest in peace my young lad,

You answered freedoms call,

And know that we shall not forget,

Those souls that gave their all.

by Benjamin M Scribner

The weeks news. A sad week it was.

It’s been a sad week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

Death is something we all must face, death of a parent, grandparent, or maybe a distant relative, and hopefully, we are old enough to understand and accept it, even though it leaves a hole in our hearts. Especially difficult is the death of a young one. No parent should have to bury their child. Earlier this past week, we learned of the tragic death of a friend’s young son in a car accident. His twin and older sister were also in the car but, thankfully, escaped serious injury. We have no news on how their grandmother, who was driving, is faring.

The lovely wife had these kids on her bus when she still drove a route, and remembers them all fondly. Even though they could, and often did, get into trouble as kids will do, she still enjoyed them. All three of them were always ready with a hug and often had something to tell her with much animation whenever she saw them. We are also friends with their parents. I have worked with the father, and we have helped each other out over the last few years. Amaroq and Shikoba were from the litter of 12 puppies their chocolate lab gave birth to.

The news of the death devastated us as only the death of a child can, and we went through the week in a kind of haze, hoping it was all a bad dream. Our grandsons are around the same age, so it hit us especially close to home. The funeral was Friday, and we both attended. The lovely wife had to leave before the graveside service because there was no one who could take her activity run. Her boss was understanding, and offered to load up the team and bring them close to where the service was held so we didn’t have to leave early. I stayed for the wake afterwards to offer support to our friends. Funerals are for the living, to give some sort of closure to those left behind, to remember the one who has passed, to help in the grieving process. But, how does one find closure for the loss of one so young?

Time, it is said, heals all wounds, but the loss of one so young will never fully heal. How does one recover from such a loss? How do you move on? The family will move on, in a disjointed sort of way, until it feels close to normal once again. However, the pain will still be there: the brother missing his twin, the sister missing her younger brother, the parents trying their best to function without a son. We all morn the death of one so young. They are our future, and we hope they carry on our legacy. We take great joy in their hopes and dreams, and love them all the more as they test our limits, as well as our patience, in their journey toward adulthood. We see our immortality in their eyes and spirit. When they are taken from us too soon, the wound never truly heals. The lovely wife and I will be there for the family as time moves forward, and we will do what we can to support them, as we would for anyone who has suffered such a loss.

That’s all the sad news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. UTV trouble, the first hummingbird, and a short trucking tale.

It’s been a quiet week up here om the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

The snow is melting, but not fast enough for me. It takes more time on the north facing side of the mountain for things to dry out, and this year is no exception. Riding a snowmobile is becoming difficult, since you can’t be sure the machine will take off or bury itself. Our UTV has tracks now, and my son and I started putting them on yesterday. We got the rear ones on, then went to turn the machine around to do the front, only to find out that the drive belt, and/or the clutch can’t handle the drag caused by the tracks. This is a problem because I can’t get it home right now, nor can I make the repairs where it sits. So, as soon as we can drive a pickup all the way in, we will tow it up and make the repairs this summer. To get access to the drive belt and clutches, it means taking a good portion of the interior out to access it, and then, taking the protective covers off the motor to get at the clutches; not something I want to do where it’s currently parked. I decided that since I will have it apart anyway, I would also rebuild the wet clutch while I was right there, since I don’t know what shape it’s in. After the fiasco that occurred with the last UTV I owned, it’s safer to do it right while it’s already opened up. A UTV has three clutches, a wet clutch inside the motor with a shaft that supplies power to the primary clutch which, through a rubber drive belt, turns a secondary clutch that drives the machine. Sound complicated? It can be for someone who isn’t familiar with these machines. Since I have already had to dig into them before, it should only take a couple hours.

I saw the first butterfly today, and while putting tools away, was buzzed by the first hummingbird. I am currently making hummingbird food and will hang the feeder up shortly. Snowshoe hares are now almost all brown once again, even though we still have a bit of snow up here. Just a few days ago, they were a mix of white and brown. Down in the valley, farmers are now planting crops, while winter wheat, sleeping peacefully under the snow for the long winter, is now a few inches high.

Here’s a short tale from my early trucking days. I was a green driver, working for Yarmouth Lumber out of Freeport, Maine. I was asking one of the older drivers why our trucks (R model, and Superliner Mack trucks) were under powered, with 300 horse power diesel motors and only a 5-speed transmission (most big rigs have many more gears, and larger motors). The old timer looked at me for a moment, shook his head, and said, “Son, they all get there. Some five minutes later than others, but they all get there.” He then walked away. I have never forgotten that, and when I went into business for myself as an owner operator of my own rig, I never let big horsepower influence my thinking about my rigs. As another driver said once when we were talking about trucking, “More horses, more hay. The person that understands that, will make money.” It fits life in so many ways. When we’re busy trying to “keep up with the Jones’s,” we should remember, “We all get there. Some five minutes later than others, but we all get there.” Everything comes in it’s own time, no sense forcing it.

Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. Easter Sunday, a mini vacation, and a new tattoo

It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

It’s Easter Sunday, and up here, a beautiful day. It’s starting to warm up, yet we still have a few feet of snow. The days are getting longer as the earth tilts the northern hemisphere closer to the sun. I had to go into town a few nights ago, around 6:30, and it was a bit surreal driving through town in daylight, but with everything closed for the night. After the long winter, it’s nice to see longer days again.

We had a couple of late March snowstorms blow through which left us with a fresh eight inches of snow, pretty much the same amount that had already melted off. The storms left the road a slick mess for a few days, causing us to leave our pickups at the bottom once again, and use our 4 wheelers. Since our UTV has been down, we had to use my son’s 4 wheeler. It wasn’t until last weekend that we got the correct axle to fix the UTV. It still took us a few hours to get the axle in place, and I went down the following day to finish bolting everything back together. We ordered three more axles, since the shop recommends the 8-ball CV joints because we intend to put tracks on. I won’t be replacing the rest until we can get it all the way into our yard because hauling tools and the generator down to where it’s parked is a pain. Now, if only the tracks would come in. Snowmobiles are having beginning to have some difficulty with the melting snow while trying to pull a dogsled full of supplies. My son and I screwed up and left the key on on my snowmobile when we worked on it last, so when I received the new belt, its battery was dead. It would no longer take a charge, after being dead while the temperatures drooped down below freezing for a few days, killing a couple of cells. I decided not to mess with it any further this late in the season, a new battery is expensive, and I really don’t want to waste time on it right now. It will get put aside until next fall, when I start servicing all of our machines.

This time of the year, I start to get a bit of cabin fever; add into that the covid restrictions over the last year, and I’ve been ready to climb the walls. I can’t work outside yet because there’s too much snow, and I really can’t work inside unless I want to drag my table saw into the cabin, making a big mess. I am getting things together to start a model railroad once again, but it is a slow process as things can get expensive, and therefore, acquisitions need to be spread out over time. I haven’t had a layout since I joined the Navy back in 1979.

Consequently, because I was getting a bit depressed doing the same thing every day, the lovely wife and I decided we needed a mini vacation. We reserved a suite at a hotel up in the city, and spent a couple days wandering around the downtown area and waterfront. I also gave myself an early birthday present, a new tattoo. This one is my fifth and is the Navy Seabee holding a torpedo instead of the customary sub machine gun. It gives a nod to my ten years on active duty as a torpedoman, serving onboard two destroyer tenders, the USS Yosemite AD 19 and the USS Yellowstone AD 41; at Navel Weapons Station Yorktown; and one destroyer, the Farragut DDG 37. The Seabee is a nod to my time in the second gulf war as an Equipment Operator serving with the MIUWU 102 (Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Unit).

The lovely wife also got a tattoo, her first. It is a phoenix grasping a semicolon in its talon. The phoenix is a symbol of renewal and rebirth, and the semicolon is a symbol of perseverance and the ongoing struggle with mental illness. The semicolon is the symbol used by Project Semicolon, founded in 2013 by Amy Bleuel in memory of her father who died by suicide. It is an organization focused on mental health awareness and achieving lower suicide rates around the world. This particular symbol was chosen because it is used where an author could have ended a sentence but chose not to.

We are both happy with how our tattoos turned out, and I’m already thinking of one to commemorate my father’s time in the Marine Corps. Some people like fine art on their walls, and some of us like it on our skin.

Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. A mountain man looks at 60. (Sorry Jimmy Buffett, had to steal.)

It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest. We have moved the pickups up to our road, and are hoping that the tracks come in soon for the UTV. Shipping issues due to the ongoing pandemic are, it seems, delaying everything these days.

Yes, in a couple of short weeks, I turn 60. It’s hard to believe at times, since I never should have lived past the age of 3, when a kidney issue that I can’t remember the name of, almost did me in. It was so bad that the doctors told my parents that they should choose a coffin sooner rather than later.

I beat the odds, as I have done many times throughout my life, often going as far as acting as if I’m immortal. I walked away from two bad wrecks while driving semi, I deal with a debilitating disability in the form of nerve and muscle disease, and most recently, I survived narcotizing pneumonia, leaving half of my right lung mostly scare tissue. Such has been my life to date. I have challenged life, and it has not killed me yet (though the lovely wife wishes sometimes I would not tempt it so much). With all that, you might be able to see how making it to this age has been a surprise to me, I’m not sure what to make of it. I will continue to live life to the fullest, since I have no idea when it will end.

I watched Neil Armstrong take his first step on the moon, and years later, I was building a fuel tank for a torpedo when the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. In less than fifty years, my phone has gone from a party line to one I can hold in one hand and carry with me. Personal computers weren’t even thought of when I was a kid. Now, I hold one in my hand that gives me access to the world. Reel-to-reel tape was new when I was a kid, now my music is online. I no longer need a vast collection of 8-tracks, cassettes, or CD’s. Humanity has come a long way in a relatively short time, technologically speaking, In other things, we still have a long way to go.

I served in the Navy twice. Once, during the cold war, as a torpedo man on three different ships and at the Navel base in Yorktown, Virginia, and then, again, after 9-11, as a Seebee, sitting on a gun mount in the heat of the desert in the Persian gulf. I regret none of it, though, coming back with a crippling disability is something I definitely could have done without.

One regret I do have, watching people working to find a way to fly to Mars, is that I will miss out on space travel. I look back at where we have come from: the invention of the wheel, the first flight, men on the moon; and I wish I could be around to fly into space as an explorer, discovering new worlds, finding others like us, or ones very different from ourselves. Yes, I wish I would be around to see it, or even experience it first hand. I’m sure there were some in the past who felt the same way, as technology sped past. Such is life; we make ours what we can, we hope, and we leave the future to our young.

In other news, it seems spring has come early. Temperatures are rising fast during the day, melting off the snow a little more every day. I will be happy once I can putter around outside once again, even if I have to putter much slower these days. I rely on my son more and more lately, and this summer will be no exception.

Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. Logging, a roof leak,and a new floor

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

It seems one of the local lumber companies in town is in need of logs. So the week before last, they sent a dozer up our “main” road, plowing it all the way onto the ridge to the west of us. They then sent in a grader to finish the job, leaving us with a road that is nearly dirt from the bottom to past our turnoff. By the end of this week, we were able to bring our pickups up to the end of our road, making life a bit easier for us up here. From what we can gather from the loggers and equipment operators traversing the road, logging trucks will be coming up sometime in April or May, since most roads around here now have breakup limits on them, meaning trucks can’t haul on some, or they have to go 35 miles an hour on others We have started setting up our handheld radios in the pickups and the UTV so we will be able to know when a truck is coming up or down so as to not run into one going the opposite direction.

We’ve had warmer temperatures and sunny days this past week, making me more than ready for spring. It’s right around the corner, and in town ,everything will start blooming soon. Up here, we will likely still have snow until mid-May, and even though the main road is plowed now, we still won’t be able to get into our driveways until then. Tracks for the UTV have been on back order, and are due in this month. I’m hoping they come in soon, because once the snow starts warming up, it will be hard getting a snowmobile up or down without burying it, making hauling in supplies difficult.

We were given some flooring a couple of years ago, and have been so busy with other projects, we hadn’t yet gotten around to putting it down. It didn’t help that we also hadn’t decided which room to put it in. Well, yesterday, we laid it in the living room. It took me and the lovely wife until noon today to finish it, but it’s done now. We still need to put a floor down in the bedroom, which we will be doing this summer. We found 6 boxes of flooring at Habitat for Humanity the last time we went in, but before we can lay it down, I need to finish the walls.

During the last snow storm, we discovered snow melt leaking into the bathroom from the roof, meaning there was too much weight on it. The snow had not slid off the roof, in part, due to a large ice dam on the edge. While breaking up this ice, I managed to break a chunk off that went through the bathroom window. We cleared away the broken glass and stapled a doubled up tarp across it to close it up until the snow is gone. So, now, this summer, I have to take the window out and take it up to the city for new glass. I am, then, going to build shutters for that window, since the snow builds up to the point where we can’t look out of it anyway. That way, if we need to break ice off the roof, we won’t worry about breaking it again.

Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. Catching up, a new snowmobile, and a young driver.

It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

My old laptop decided to die on me, and though we were able to revive it, I really needed a new one, which is why I haven’t written anything in a couple of weeks. Much has gone on here since I last wrote, so I will give a quick summery.

Ah, to be young and stupid again. A teenage girl, driving her parents pickup, thought she would go exploring up here on the mountain, on unmaintained roads. She only got about ¾ of a mile before realizing she was on a solid sheet of ice, covered only by a couple of inches of snow. She tried backing down, only to slide off the bank. Luckily for her, she wasn’t going that fast, and once the rear wheels left the road, the frame hit the ground, holding her in place. Sheriff’s deputies were called, and a wrecker was dispatched. The wrecker needed to put on tire chains to reach her. I’m sure she had a stern talking to, and was probably banned from using the family pickup in the future.

The lovely wife’s snowmobile, an ’87 Arctic Cat JAG has been having trouble, and though it’s a really good machine, easy for her to start and move around if she can’t turn, it’s showing its age. I had had to repair a broken tie rod, using one from an older Skidoo. After this, it started to bog down on inclines. So, I started looking for something that would work for her. What I found was a ’97 Polaris Indy Ultra Touring, with seating for two. It has a back rest and heated grips on both the steering handlebars and passenger hand holds. It is electric start, has reverse, and only has 1400 original miles on it.. The price was a bit more than I really wanted to spend, but the machine could be considered new because of its low miles. It needs all three of the carburetors cleaned, and the drive belt was stretched out, so not grabbing as it should. The last owner, I believe, may not have realized that drive belts tend to stretch over time and should be replaced every couple of years. I will have the carburetors cleaned this summer, and have already ordered new belts for it. Since it hasn’t been used that much, or even that hard, I think we will have this machine around for quite a few years. I did figure out what is wrong with the JAG, and will be making the necessary repairs soon because I like it, and it is always a good idea to have a spare around up here. However, with the addition of the UTV, as soon as we have tracks on it, the snowmobiles will be regulated to secondary uses only.

We’ve had a few snow storms blow through the last couple of weeks, bringing our snow level closer to normal depths, but we’re still lacking what we used to get a few years ago. The weather service is calling for temperatures to climb up into the 40’s before the end of this month, with rain instead of snow. We will see what happens.

The puppies are enjoying the fresh snow. Shikoba runs around sticking her whole head into it where ever she can, coming back in covered in snow. Amaroq isn’t as enthusiastic as his sister, but he does like to grab a mouth full before coming inside, only to have it leak all over the floor.

Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. A couple new machines, and an old one breaks down.

      It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

      Much has gone on here since last I wrote. First, we got a new “brain” for my old Arctic Cat, and it’s running fine once again. I hope to hang on to it for a few more years before retiring it to our ever-growing parts pile. Having gotten that one running, our smaller machine, a 1987 Arctic Cat JAG, decided to breakdown, a tie rod snapped as I started off from the spring. Luckily, I wasn’t going that fast, and the lovely wife wasn’t riding it. Things could have gotten messy. As with most things that break down far from home, we currently have no way to get it home, so it will stay off the trail, out of the way, until we can figure out how to tow back or are able to tow it home in the spring. Then, I will decide what I want to do with it. It’s a nice little machine for its age, light enough for the lovely wife to pick up the rear end and move it around when the trail doesn’t allow for turning, and it’s easy for her to start. So, chances are, I will make the repairs and keep it.

     Some of you might know that at one time I had a UTV with tracks that we used up here instead of snowmobiles. It was really too small for regular use up here and became a bigger headache than it was worth, so we got rid of it. I have since found out that the newer ones are built with tracks in mind, and have better axles and axle bearings to handle the strain of tracks.  We have been talking about getting another, newer, UTV to use up here.  While looking at a snowmobile at a local shop in town, in hopes of replacing the broken-down JAG, we managed to find one that’s only four years old, has four seats, a winch on the front, and has a more powerful motor. It also has a roof, windshield, and back window; all we need is sides. The price was also a plus. We decided that it was a deal we couldn’t pass up and made the purchase.  We want tracks, but they are currently back ordered until sometime in March, which is fine as we have been able to use four-wheelers from the spring to the bottom anyway.  So now, we’ll use the UTV instead, regulating our four-wheeler to emergency use only.

     Since we have a hard-packed trail, we have been bringing the four-wheelers all the way home. Because of that, my son and I tried bringing the UTV up to at least the turn off to our road, since our road is only packed the width of one snowmobile, and a four-wheeler barely gets through. We made it to just below the turn off before the wheels started digging in.  We backed it off the road, a mistake, and walked down for our snowmobiles. The next morning, I went down, hoping to drive it out and take it down to the spring, thinking that the snow would have firmed up enough overnight to get it turned around without much issue. However, it took a couple of hours, my son, a shovel, and the wench (moved three times by my son in waist deep snow) before we had the machine pointed downhill again. It won’t be coming back up until we have tracks on it.

     My son’s snowmobile is older that my JAG, and has really been showing its age. This past week, I found him one built in this century, and picked it up. It’s having a bit of an overheating issue, but I think it’s an easy fix. I expect issues with older machines up here, as that’s life off grid; also, I buy them cheap, run them for a few years, then get rid of them, or part them out.

      Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. A new year, Snowmobile trouble again, and old dogs

     It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

     It’s January, a new year, with most of the same issues as the last year, though we are hoping for a different ending as time goes on.

     We’ve had some snow, though not as much as we would normally have this time of year, nor have we had the bitter cold that comes with January. We had around two feet of snow, before we got a hard rain that damped the snow down to around 16 inches and froze the trails so hard that I was able to drive a 4-wheeler all the way from the spring, a mile below us, into the driveway.

     Our big snowmobile has had the problem ever since we bought it of suddenly deciding not to start. The first time, we left it until we could get a truck and trailer near it (we bought it in the early spring) and hauled it to the local shop, where it sat for three months before they could get to it. It fired right up for them, and they couldn’t fix something not broken. So, we brought it home, only for it to do it again in the middle of that winter. I left it, and went looking for a solution online.  I thought I found one, and after making the adjustments, the machine started and ran for the rest of the winter. Well, it did it again last week.  It is sitting at my son’s driveway, dead, and we have started troubleshooting it again.  After going down a couple of unsuccessful paths, we think we may have found the issue. The computer, the brain of the machine, has a very small light that is supposed to light briefly when the key is turned, and then go out; unless there’s a problem, in which case, it flashes a code. Once we located the light, we discovered that the light isn’t coming on at all, and we found out that others have had this trouble as these snowmobiles get older.  Some people online have referred to it as the computer having a “senior moment,” where it will, after a month or so, remember that it’s part of the machine and start working again. It’s a sign that the computer is going bad. We have located a replacement for it, though it is also used, since the manufacturer no longer makes parts for machines this old. Our only other option, should this happen again, would be to turn it into a carbureted machine, instead of fuel injected. This is expensive and a last resort. I will more than likely buy a newer snowmobile, instead, at that point, though I really like this one.

     The pups have been enjoying the snow, as is Jade. She’s getting old, and we think she has arthritis now, as sometimes she will limp. If we could get her off the mountain this time of the year, we would take her to the vets and see if they could help. As it is, we try and let her take her time. She also likes the colder weather; St. Bernard’s are like that. This spring, when we can drive in with the pickup again, we will take Jade in for a checkup, getting her any medication she needs to make her life easier.

     We had purchased two top-of-the-line handheld CB radios for use when the logging started up here, as it was supposed to do after Thanksgiving, The only issue we have had with them was we couldn’t reach each other when one of us was down at the pickup (without the antenna for the truck), two miles away, nor at the spring, a mile away. Maybe you think, “Well that’s probably because of all the trees and no radio has that kind of range.” Well, yesterday, while the lovely wife was up in the city with a sports team, she went to a big box store while she was waiting for the team to finish their game.  She found small walkie talkies for $10 apiece, and thought she would grab two so we could talk to my son from our cabin to his instead of relying on the phones, which often times have bad service up here. Not only do those little radios work, my son took one down with him to his pickup when he went to pick up his wife, and we could talk, clearly, from there. It’s amazing that two cheap walkie talkies work better than the expensive radios.

Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.

The weeks news. Christmas past.

     It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

     This is Christmas week, and kids are out of school, dreaming about what the fat man in the red suit might bring them.  Some people are thinking about traveling to relatives for the holiday. Though, this year, due to the raging pandemic, many are opting to stay home with close family members instead. 

     Christmas is supposed to be a joyful time, peace on earth good will towards men and all that.  However, for many, it is a time of anything but, myself included. I stopped celebrating soon after coming back from the Persian Gulf. I was flown out on Christmas day, and I will not relate here anything I saw on the plane that day, but I have lived with those memories ever since (a chapter of my book, Escaping a Life of Quiet Desperation, has the details of that flight, for those who are curious).  I will, though, talk about Christmases past; those wonderful days of youth, when you dream of nothing more than what you might get on that big day.

     It was told to my sister and me, that Santa came four times a year. The first time was to put up the tree, which somehow managed to happen when we were either sleeping or gone from the house to look at Christmas lights. He would then return the night of the 23rd to fill our stockings for the next morning. He would visit again on Christmas eve, bringing and setting up our gifts while my sister and I waited in a bedroom with our grandmother, who would read us The Night Before Christmas or some other book for the season.  His final visit would be New Year’s Eve, to check to see if we were taking care of the gifts. If he found that we were not, he would add us to his naughty list and we would be assured of getting coal the following year. My sister and I made sure all gifts were well taken care of, at least until after New Year’s Eve. After that, all bets were off. In my family’s case, we celebrated on Christmas eve, having received our stockings that morning, and waited with anticipation for darkness to fall, fidgeting all through an agonizing Christmas meal, then the washing, drying, and putting away of the dishes.

     As we got older, even though we knew that it wasn’t real, we didn’t want the magic to end.  So, mom and dad humored us, in our last vestiges of our childhood, until I joined the Navy, and my sister went into high school. One year, when we were in our teens, dad was working in Boston, while mom ran her gift shop in the Newington mall, an hour’s drive away. Mom knew she would be late, and dreaded putting up the tree. Unknown to her, we had gathered the neighborhood friends, procured a tree (the less said about from where, the better for all involved as I don’t know what the statute of limitations is for tree theft), put on some Christmas music, pulled out the decorations from the attic, and set to work. At one point, mom called to check on us, I hushed our friends while lying to her about how things were going.

     When we finished, it was late and mom and dad were on their way home.  We sent our friends home, turned out the lights and waited. As soon as they drove into the driveway, which was right in front of the living room window, we turned on the tree. It was the best gift we could have given to our bedraggled parents that year. It often, to this day, gets talked about in the family, part of our Christmas lore of bygone days.

     Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.