The Blackfoot Valley's News Source Since 1980
The Blackfoot Valley's News Source Since 1980
Sorted by date Results 76 - 82 of 82
Chris was a "pensioner," as they called retired people back in the 1950's. He lived in a little cabin at our place, and died when I was eight or ten years old. I spent a lot of time with Chris, sitting at his creaky table while he sat in his easy chair. He had taken a liking to me, or maybe he was just lonesome, as he lived a solitary life. When his pension check arrived he would walk the half mile to Helmville, always in a well ironed, immaculate suit, and go to one of the...
The old Helmville school house was an imposing structure. It was two stories high, with a bell tower, and sat on the highest point in town. It was probably built in the late 1800's, and still serves as the county shop, having been moved in the last part of the 1950's, when the new one was built in its place. It had two classrooms – an upstairs and a downstairs. When I started school in 1953, only the lower room was used. World War Two had caused a drop in the birth rate, a...
When I was in Brazil this last time I was reminded of what our mothers, grandmothers, and those before them must have gone through before running water and electricity. I don't know how they did it. Their work load was immense and never lessened. The men had somewhat regular hours – either because of darkness or a need to rest the horses. The women worked from the time their feet hit the floor in the morning until they got the last child to sleep at night. Many of them s...
The trip from Sao Paulo to Orlando, Fla. was the ultimate misery. My feet were swollen and wept and burned the entire ten hours of the trip. Every seat on the plane had a TV screen where the passengers could watch a small icon of the plane as it traveled over the entirety of Brazil and the Caribbean. The icon didn't seem to move and I avoided looking at because I didn't need any more frustration. But a lady in front of me watched it constantly. Every time I came out of my...
For most of my life I've considered myself to be a misanthrope, harboring a soft contempt for my fellow humans. I think that philosophy was a contrivance to protect my own fragile and shallow ego. The events of these last two months proved me wrong in my sour opinion of the human race. I lived in Brazil for the last two-and-a-half years, and about a month ago became quite ill with pneumonia and a few other things. To complicate the situation, I found that a fellow I trusted...
It's like this. I'm now bankrupt in one country and stone broke in another. That takes some work. I've written about Beré. She works in the restaurant on the weekends and occasionally other holidays. When I first arrived here, I took note of the horrendous tasks she faced, almost always alone. When she arrived on Saturday mornings, she walked into a four-foot-high stack of dirty sauce pans which had to be cleaned with cold water and steel wool. After two or three hours of...
Looking back, it’s surprising to realize how hazardous our ranch childhoods were. We had scores of attractive dangers to lure us into difficult situations. We had horses, defensive cows with new calves, our pond, plus myriad things our urban friends didn’t. We were unsupervised most of the time, our fathers being at work and our mothers tending other children in those days of large families. Most of us were driving, or at least steering, tractors by the time we were seven or...
