Jardo

During my early to mid teens, my family lived three doors down from the Stallions family where my best friend, Bill lived. In those days I went everywhere on bicycle but occasionally I walked across the other two lawns to get to his house.
The edge of the Stallions property ran along a small ditch dotted with several locust trees. Parallel to the ditch, for much of the length of the property, was a steel wire running along the ground. At one end of the wire was the gable roofed, shingled white dog house, in the middle of a bare spot where grass dare not grow; home of the dreaded Jardo.
Jardo was a large sporting dog generally not known to be dangerous but in my mind’s eye he was a brown and white, red eyed velociraptor on a tether. A degree of nerve and timing was required to make it safely across the wire.
Sometimes Jardo’s chain was tangled around the stake preventing him from running the length of wire. After several days of relative safety, I fell into what would soon turn out to be a false sense of security.
One particular day as I jumped across the ditch I failed to survey the doghouse. I took a few steps and froze. The wire was bouncing on the ground and ringing the approach of snarling teeth. With no time to turn I was backpedaling towards the ditch with a carnivore lunging at my face. I believe that if I had had to go, I would have went right then.
I fell across the ditch into the grass on the other side just as Jardo ran out of slack in his chain.
I jumped to my feet, feeling foolish, and quickly scanned the area in hopes that no one had seen how really scared I was. Unfortunately, one of Bill’s older sisters who had been sunbathing at the edge of their carport, called out to Jardo. Jardo instantly became a tail wagging, tongue-slobbering puppy.
I was humiliated, but alive.
She assured me that it was safe but I turned and went home to get my bicycle. I looked back at Jardo as he happily trotted back down the length of the wire. Sometimes that which appears as a grin on a dogs face, actually is.

A Veil of Darkness

I heard only the distant cry of coyotes as I turned the door latch, and stepped inside the house with my lantern held out before me. Shadows on the walls and ceiling danced from the light of a candle, a small beacon atop the cupboard.
I placed my lantern on the broad oak table and settled into the wooden chair. Laying open my journal, I affixed the date and began to tell of this night, as my pen scratched away like a mouse in a paper bag.
It was the eve of the Sabbath, on the 8th day of December and the village was bathed in a deep darkness. The night offered neither moon nor stars as an eerie silence filled the air. A spell had apparently come over the village, as a hush had fallen on the music and voices of the night.
The oil lamps flickered behind closed windows as neighbors huddled closely and pondered the passing of the cloak. Law keepers were hurrying to the schoolhouse where alarms had gone out and all of the night sentinels had abandoned their posts. The dying of the light had left open the door to night dwellers and mischief makers.
The tall clock in the corner of the room chimed the count of six, and then seven, as it’s pendulum lazily counted off the hours. Still, the night dragged on as I closed my journal and leaned back in my chair. I wondered what the morning would bring, and if the night chill would overtake the house.
Suddenly, the room was filled with light and the chirps and beeps of appliances resetting themselves. The voices of familiar strangers once again poured from behind glowing video screens.
Yes, power had returned to the city of Princeton, and the lantern which had kept me company now seemed woefully inadequate. I turned down the wick and blew out the flame and mused that while the lights had returned, I would soon turn them out again and go to bed.
It was an otherwise normal evening, made special by the temporary absence of more that just light, but of convenience. It was a night welcomed as “something different”, to stir the imagination, a thing that’s sometimes hard to find, even for those of us living on the edge…of town.

Hoboes and White Laundry

In my preschool years of the late fifties, my family lived in a large stucco house beside the National Guard Armory in Marion, Kentucky. The street in front of our house passed the armory and came to a dead end at the foot of a railroad loading ramp.
The ramp looked to have been used years earlier when Marion was shipping spar by rail. I remember how the roadway sparkled with blue and purple. I picked up many a flashy piece believing that I had surely found a priceless jewel. I would drop them into my pocket with whatever other collectables I might be carrying, only to be lost somewhere in the laundry. I suppose that such foolishness was typical of that age, for if Mama ever found any of my lost treasures, she never let on.
A Train whistle from a mile away would bring my older brother Jerry, and I running to watch the train from the ramp. There were two sets of tracks then with at least one sidetrack under the ramp. Jerry would sometimes creep down to the sidetrack and lay a stick or a penny on the sidetrack rail. I was always relieved to see the train coming on one of the other rails for I was sure Jerry would derail the train. But the engineers never saw our sabotage and always waved as did the brakemen in the caboose, and that was a delight for this five-year-old.
Mama would always warn us to “watch for hoboes” who might be camped under or near the ramp. To me, a hobo was a cigar smoking, coal dust covered troll who would demand payment from two brothers caught standing on his ramp.
I never saw a hobo but I saw a lot of tired old men in bib overalls sometimes carrying lunch buckets. I saw sad looking men walking the ties with their coat thrown over their shoulder, not waving or even looking up. I remember older boys with fishing poles hiking to some hidden pond. They would all melt into the distant rail mirage as Mama called us home.
Like the last echoes of the steam age, a few coal-fired locomotives would pass, hissing and roaring like Mama’s pressure cooker gone mad. The noise made it seem like they were going faster than the newer trains.
With a large wicker basket and an apron pouch full of clothespins, Mama would fill the clothesline with white sheets and cloth diapers. I remember playing under billowing sheets trying to keep in the shade with my ‘57 Mercury peddle car, as the black smoke from a locomotive drifted overhead.
“I don’t know why I bother”, Mama would say, “Between the trains and you kids, I might as well not wash clothes at all.” Relatively clean diesel engines were a Godsend, but for Mama there would always be kids. Only six years later Mama passed away leaving six children, the youngest being only four months old.
These days have long gone and life is less of a wonder now, but on some days when the wind is right and a whistle sounds in the distance, I can still reach into the pockets of my memories and pull out a glittering piece of spar that Mama saved for me.