Aug 8, 2010

Share an experience about poison ivy or poison weed, a bee sting or bug bite?

I was stung by wasps mostly while growing up and bitten plenty by horse flies. I was stung by Stinging nettle but lucky enough to never encounter poison oaks of ivys. Once when I had gone out to feed the horses I was carrying a pitch fork load of hay to their pen and stumbled on an old tire that I knew was there but had just cut the corner a little too much due to the weight of the hay on the fork. As I got to my feet and regained control of the fork load of hay I was suddenly surrounded by a bunch of yellow jacket wasps. Only one of them stung me but that was enough. I delivered the hay ad then climbed up to the canal where I got some mud from the side of the canal and plastered it onto the sting. It took the pain away rather quickly and I was soo glad about that because I had endured it long enough. I never made that mistake again.

Aug 7, 2010

Did your mom or dad have a favorite remedy for when you were sick or hurt?

Mom had a number of remedies that were from the pioneer days. For a cold we had honey and lemon mixed together and heated to drink to relieve the sore throat and get out the cold symptoms. Then for the chest when it was a real deep cold that had gone into the lungs mom would mix vinegar and mustard powder with water to make a paste that she would then put on a cloth and set the cloth on our chests with the mustard away from the skin. (If it was on the skin we would get a sunburn type burn from it and that hurt pretty bad. We would keep it on for as long as we could stand it and the heat from the remedy would sink deep into our chest and relieve a lot of the congestion. I was lucky to be raised after the cod liver oil days and was plenty glad about it when I learned what it was really like.

Aug 6, 2010

Tell about board games and card games that you played as a youth.

There were basically three games that I remember playing. First off however I will tell you that the only card games we played were “Old Maid” and I don’t think there were any others especially since face cards were strictly forbidden in our home. Grandma and Grandpa Hansen had taught their children well concerning the evils of gambling and tat included even having those cards present that were used in such activities. (It was indeed a huge shock to me when Marie would use them all the time and played games that I never even knew existed and it was never for gambling either.) Anyway the board games we had were “Clue”, “Monopoly”, “Chinese Checkers”, “Checkers”, and “Seek” an LDS scripture game. I mostly played checkers and Seek. I enjoyed Monopoly but was always somewhat frustrated by the amount of time required to play it so I stayed away from it as much as possible. We always played Seek on Sunday evenings when we played it and it was fun to learn the scripture stories by having to answer those questions. However with that all said we really didn’t play a whole lot of games since we always had so many chores to do and by the time they were done we were all pretty tired.

Aug 5, 2010

Tell a memory about having company at your house, or of a family party.

My family had gone to church one Sunday evening in late August. Our Sacrament meetings were always held at 7 pm back then and so we would not get home until after 9 pm usually. Well on this particular Sunday when we arrived home it was dark and there was a car from Arizona in the driveway. We suddenly realized that Pauline’s family had brought her up for the school year and they were most likely waiting inside. When we went in we turned on the proch light and I went over to the front room where they had all fallen asleep on the couches and chairs while waiting for us. I woke up whom I thought was Pauline and gave her a hug only to then realize it was not Pauline but rather her sister. She looked so much like Pauline and apparently they were twins and I hadn’t known. It was a bit embarrassing for a short moment but then quickly saw Pauline and hugged her too.

Aug 4, 2010

Tell of an experience climbing a mountain or a big hill.

When I was very young, and young enough to not remember how young, dad took us to a hill near Starvation Reservoir to find some marble rocks. I have never forgotten though how each time we came to the top of a hill that I thought would be the last hill there appeared another one we still had to climb. It took us forever to get to the top of the hill where we found and picked up a small bucket full of round marble shaped volcanic rocks. I remember seeing them many times during my growing years and never really knowing where that hill is at. I think I know the general vicinity but would be very hard pressed to find it again. I played with those rocks a lot of times and still might even have one in my collection of things from my youth. It was a fun outing after we had finally reached that top knoll.

Aug. 3, 2010

Tell about going to summer camp.

The only summer camps that I went to were because of Scouting. They were all up in the granddaddy lakes area of the Uintah National Forest. I loved the five or six times I went into the Granddaddies as they were know and the different lakes that we camped at each time. We stayed at Palisade he most but also camped at Governor and Betsy lakes. I was always afraid of getting lost so I stuck to the trails unless with the leaders who knew the back country trails. Fishing was fun but I wasn’t good at it so it slowly lost its appeal and gave way to making rafts to cross the lakes and hikes into the closets meadows where we could watch the big fish in the stream and still not catch them.

I did go on one other summer camp just before my senior year. It was a summer biology camp with the class and of course Marie was one of the class members that made it worth being on for those couple of days. We saw the first and only flying squirrel that I have ever seen in the wild and had a great time. It was up in the Yellowstone drainage near Moon Lake.

Other than that it was just the weekend camps with the scouts and I always enjoyed them as well.

Aug. 2, 2010

Describe your childhood home and neighborhood.

I grew up in a home that had been moved from Duchesne onto blue bench and then added onto several times. There was a porch that was added, a basement set of rooms and siding. It was a two story home with a basement. We lived on a dead end road with the nearest neighbor a little over a half mile away and town was about two miles. It was a little more than a 40 acre farm and had plenty of work to always be done. Duchesne was a small town where everyone knew everyone and everything about them. There were several families that were the base of the community and they were all well known with my family as one of them. We were farmer’s for the most part and I loved growing up on the farm despite the lack of shopping malls and McDonalds. We didn’t have them and thus we didn’t miss them.

Aug 1, 2010

If you were to return to your youth what would you do differently?

Take more pictures of the things that I did everyday and the places that I loved and the camping trips I went on and the family outings that we had. I have memories but the way I saw things back then are so different from what they are now and even though I have taken some pictures now I can’t make it look like it did in my memory. Things like the Old Slaughter House will never stand again but thank goodness I do have pictures of it. I would probably do my stories about my youth while living it and keep a better journal.

WAIT that is what I should still be doing now. Maybe that is why I like my blog and the Treasured Photography Blog as well. I need to get on it more now too.

July 31, 2010

Tell a memory about riding on a ferry, bus, train, or plane.

Well having grown up on the farm the only one of the four that I remotely had a chance to ride (and I did it every day almost) and that was to ride a school bus. Ours was the second stop on the route in the morning and second to the last to get off at night. Jon Wagoner and I were best friends and his was the first stop so he was always on the bus when I got on and we always sat in the front of the bus. The only times I didn’t ride it were on the nights we would go to primary and the nights that I would run home instead of riding. We were good kids and didn’t make trouble on the bus and learned to really like Jinks Ivie and Harold Spencer, the two driver’s that we had through the years. I did spend a lot of time on school buses during all of those years.

July 30, 2010

Do you have any other memories about a river, lake, or beach to share?

I suppose that I do have one to share. I was in High School when the Starvation Reservoir was started. I am glad it did since it was actually what brought Behrmann’s to Duchesne. It was a long process watching the bridge being built and the dam being built as well almost on the Brown’s place, part of dad and his brother’s farming land near Duchesne. I spent some fun hours there working with Uncle Mont and dad as we herded cows, sheep and did other chores. It was also a part of my Senior year as I was in the band and we played during the dedication of the bridge where the DOT representative was my Uncle Jack from Bountiful. So there were a lot of things that I remember from that period of time when the dam was built for Starvation Reservoir.