Jan 20, 2010

Relate an experience or memory of a cousin. I believe I have told about Jackie and the well ( I hadn't told about the well so I added it later in another blog) so I will tell a story about Lynn and my cousin Charles, Jack’s younger step-brother who often stayed with us during the summers for a week. I think that the Skewes brother’s must have had it in for me or I was just young enough to have fun teasing. This is how I have recorded the incident in my life’s stories. The picture of the barn kind of shows where the incident was played out in my dream. The sheds are right directly behind the barn and the trees were to the left up on the canal bank which you cannot see. Due to the canal being put into a pipe all of those trees have died since my youth.

Alive or dead dream tied to bed When growing up I lived on a farm in Duchesne, Utah. Our home was the last one at the end of the road on blue bench about two miles from town. It seemed like a long way when I was young and now it is hard to believe it is really quite close to town. My cousins from the city (Bountiful) would come to visit us each summer. (The city meant they were from the Wasatch front where houses didn’t seem to end from one end of Davis County to the other end of Utah County.) They always enjoyed coming to Grandma’s place in Duchesne for the summer and often staying with us during a good share of that time as well. However they were full of pranks and I as the younger and probably bothersome part of the equation would often end up on the wrong end of the pranks. One summer morning prior to awakening to the activities of the day I remember dreaming about playing Cowboys and Indians. That is something now that I hardly dare to even talk about considering political correctness and lawsuits but was a very real part of my childhood. Later in my teen years I came to love the Indian people very much as we had with us during the school months a foster sister from the Navajo nation. This dream however had me high above the sheds behind the barn in the old cottonwood trees that stood so tall there along the canal bank. I was one of the unfortunate ones that got hit by one of the arrows and lost my balance falling from the tree onto the top of the straw covered shed. You see the shed was made of large logs laid next to each other on a wooden log structure then covered with one to two layers of baled and loose straw. The top of the shed was quite bouncy and soft so landing on it didn’t hurt but I remember laying there trying to determine if I was dead or alive. I just couldn’t figure out why I knew about everything that was still raging around me in this war but I couldn’t move either and so I was somewhat perplexed. The roof of the shed seemed to be moving also lightly tossing me back and forth as lay there mortally wounded. Well my dream ended and I awoke to still being very much alive but unable to move in my bed as my cousin Charlie Skewes and brother Lynn had tied me into my bed with bailing twine and were in the process of moving my bed and I into the clothes closet. No wonder I was not only unable to move from where I lay but the shed was moving also since the real world and my dreams had crossed paths that morning. I still don’t remember how I got out of the bed but I suppose if nothing else my mother probably persuaded a couple of pranksters to release their prey. This is the barn that stands in the yard and the shed is behind it. You can see the trees, barely over the roof, that are still alive that would have been near the ones that I dreamed I was climbing.

In this image taken in July of 2009 you can get a little better idea of where things played out in my dream. The old tree stumps in the foregrond bottom left of picture are the stumps of the trees that I dreamed I was in before being shot. If you then look to the left end of the barn you can see where the sheds started and then were probably 30 feet or so in length. That is the shed that I dreamed I fell onto the straw covering the shed after I was shot. (The landing would have been as soft as landing on a mattress.)