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. 

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. 

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.