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| Faye Dosha and Pearl (Lee) Fowler, my grandparents |
This is a true story about my crazy mother and her family. She grew up
in the West on a Colorado ranch and this tale has been family legend since
I was little myself. I have merely written it down the way it might have happened.
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My mother's best friend Helen, her sister
Darlene and my mother Dorothy in 1929, winter in Denver |
Dorothy Fowler turned ten in 1930. That world was a very
different place than this one, refrigerators ran on blocks of ice and
radios were big enough to be special furniture in the parlor- if you were
lucky enough to have both a radio and electricity.
There were no freeways and not very many paved roads and lots of folks
still had horses and buggies instead of cars. Clothes dryers were ropes strung
between two poles and cooking stoves cooked with wood.
Denver, Colorado is a mile high and it's a place where winter comes early
and leaves late, Dorothy loved it up there. She could see about half of forever from
the front porch and the air was always as ringing clear as her mother's best glasses.
Every spring the ranch hands ran the cattle up from the low valleys where
they had wintered and pastured them in the lush upper meadows for the
summer. Life got more lively in the summer when all the hands were in the
bunkhouse and her mother was steering the family and the hands like they were
her own personal ship’s crew. Everyone had chores from the youngest child
up to my grandfather, Lee; who became Pop as my granddad.
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| Pop's first truck, 1929 |
Each week wound down to Saturday afternoon when everyone to
go to town to shop and visit; and in the case of the hands hit the tavern
and let off steam. Dorothy being a somewhat dreamy child, was
usually the first started and last finished with her week’s work. This
particular week she had not finished the last of her chores and so was
forbidden the treat of going to town. She watched sadly as all the cowboys
packed themselves into the back of the truck for the ride; laughing and
singing, happy to escape cows, blisters, running fence, and all the myriad
jobs it took to run the ranch.
Her brother and sister, Wayne and Darlene, were stuffed in the front seat
between her parents. They made horrible faces at her through the window of
the truck when their other wasn’t looking, sly and pleased as cats at her
punishment.
As the loaded truck careened down the hillside and out of sight, she moped her
way back to the kitchen. It was time to finish the baking that had deprived
of her of an afternoon gawking at things in the shops; things she fully intended
to have someday.
She got out the flour, the salt and sugar, the crock of yeast starter, the heavy
mixing bowl, wooden spoons and bread pans, all accompanied with sighs and
sniffles as she prepared to put together the week’s bread. Fourteen loaves
had to be baked for just one week, a full day’s worth of work. Boring, hard and
monotonous work it was too. Measure, mix, knead, stir, only two loaves
could be made up at a time in the enormous blue stoneware bowl.
Dorothy Imogene was bored. She imagined all the wonderful things she would
prefer to cook if she only knew the recipes; taffy, Turkish delight,
round loaves of bread studded with raisins, nuts and saffron, and all the
delights of the mysterious East she read about in school books. Yet here
she was making wheat bread; boring, bland and plain. Her eyes roamed
over the open kitchen shelves as she kneaded the bread and she saw her
mother’s little glass vials of precious food coloring. In two shakes
she had the top off the blue jar and was dripping blue onto the mass
of bread dough. “Robin’s egg blue bread, oh how lovely,” she sang
to herself as she kneaded the lumpy dough mass to smoothness and she
still sang as she put it with the first two blue loaves to rise in the second best wash tub.
She even sang as she started on the third batch of blue bread, but at some point
reality returned and she turned around to look at the blue mound of dough
rising on the hearth. Her mother would not look happily upon blue bread,
pragmatist that she was, and visits to town might easily be outlawed forever
for a transgression of this magnitude. How to get rid of the evidence? She
wasn’t singing anymore, she was huffing and puffing as she pulled the
dough-filled tub out the door and dragged it uphill to the pigpen. She
heaved the sticky mass of dough over the fence into the far end of the
pigpen, knowing when the pigs woke from their morning naps they made short
work of anything edible.
Dorothy headed back to the kitchen, anxious now to make up for lost time
and clean up the evidence of her blue sin. The warm sunny day made
the huge lump of dough left in the pigpen rise quickly, hissing
occasionally as blue gas bubbles deep in the dough escaped. It sat
growing in the corner in all it’s blue gassy glory while the same lovely sunshine
kept the pigs sound asleep longer than usual. When they finally woke
they heard something hissing in the corner and they didn’t
like that sound at all.
Dorothy didn’t think anymore about the blue bread, she thought only of the
job at hand, making the good plain wheat bread. She finished it with a
will and the scent of fresh baked bread wafted from the house as the truck
returned from town.
The sun was just slipping behind the peaks leaving everything bathed in
the soft purple shadows that marked the day’s end.
The pickup stopped at the edge of the porch and her father got out and
handed her mother and siblings down from the cab. “Zeke, you take the boys
to the bunkhouse and the truck back to the barn and then you all wash for
dinner and come on back,”
Zeke obligingly folded his long legs into the cab of the truck
and disappeared around the corner as the family went into the house with
their packages, busy with getting dinner on the table. Suddenly,
gunshots rang out loud in the evening quiet. The sound came from north
of the barn and her mother roared off like her skirts were on fire with her
father in hot pursuit. Everyone followed as fast as they could run, including
Dorothy Imogene. They all came to a screeching halt at the pig pen.
Three fat pigs were cowering in the far corner of the pen while a huge
blue mass slowly deflated in the opposite corner. A shaken Zeke said,
“Lordy, Mrs. Faye, I come around the corner of the barn and I seen the
pigs a-looking scared in the corner there and I seen that blue thing just
swelling up and hissing and I didn’t think, I just shot it! I don’t know
if I killed it or not.”
Mama looked at Zeke and then she looked at the hissing blue pile. She
walked to the pig pen fence, leaned over and stuck two fingers into the
sticky blue mess. “Bread.” she said quietly to no one in particular. She
looked at Dorothy Imogene’s scared face and at Zeke’s scared face and her
family and the circle of cowhands clustered around the pen. She sat down
quietly on the ground, just folded in half right there in the dirt wearing
her second best dress, her town shoes and her best jet earrings. She was
bent over and her shoulders were shaking. Then she did something unheard
of, she laughed so hard she fell over backwards.
My grandad and the hands were paralyzed, just staring at my grandma Faye. After a
little bit, one got brave enough to stick his hand out and touch the mess
and he fell down too, laughing till the tears came. Soon the yard was
littered with grown ups rolling around in the dirt and laughing to beat
the band and all hollering, “Bread!”
The children never did understand what was so funny, and it was deemed
the responsible thing to never leave Dorothy Imogene home on town day
again.
