Then...

by Jen King

            Every summer when I was young, I would visit Uncle Harry and Aunt Dosie.  He was one of Granddaddy’s seven brothers and lived around on the dairy road in a huge old farm house with a wrought iron fence.  Every summer, I was greeted by the screams of peacocks on the chimney and the yips of the little pug dog and chihuahua whose names are lost in my memory.

            Uncle Harry was a was like a summertime Santa; round, smelling of cherry pipe tobacco with a nine year olds twinkle in his eye.  He would sit in his big leather recliner in the hallway-cum-library, surrounded by windows on three sides, with the 10 inch TV where you could watch the 5:00 news in shades of snowy grey.  He called me “Shugga”.

            Aunt Dosie was a sleight woman with salt and pepper grey hair bobbie pinned  up in a twist. You could almost always find Aunt Dosie in the kitchen or in the big back yard. She always got the first hug. On rainy days, we would visit the attic through the tiny, child sized door behind her dresses in the closet where she would open great leather bound trunks and tell the stories of her childhood. 

            It was Aunt Dosie who got me hooked on toasted marshmallows on saltines and it was she who took me fishing.

             We would park out back on the road by the barn where the dust would rise up between your toes like silty brown silk.  By seven in the morning, the air was already heavy and hot.  It always smelled like milk.   As a child, my husband swore by worms or slim jims.  Our bait of choice was crickets.  Every year Aunt Dosie and I would search the ponds with baited hooks to find the magic spot.  The spot where the red and white bobber would no more than hit the water when it was drug down. Where I could lift my rod and the fish would still be trying to swallow a bite of cricket.  

            I was never as good at removing the fish as I was at baiting the cricket.  Mine usually flopped in the dust and raised a little cloud in their escape back to the pond before I could catch them in my mud-caked hands and get them onto the stringer. It was the only place I ever caught a stringer of fish half as tall as I was. 

            When we were good and hot and dirty, we would head back to the house, crickets and fish in hand, to clean our catch.  I would get to scale my fish with the knife on the big wooden chopping block by the spigot.  When they were scaled and I was covered, I would hand the fish to Aunt Dosie.  She would cut off the head at the gills, scoop out the guts into a bucket, wash the little fish under the spigot and throw it into the dishpan.  We could fill up the dishpan long before we ran out of crickets.  I can still taste the sugar sweet iced tea and the crunchy tails of the pan fried little brim.

            Aunt Dosie has been gone for over thirteen years now and Uncle Harry joined her not long after.  The peacocks have long flown away and the ponds have been filled in. The house is silent, but unchanged.   When I visit nowadays, I only need to grasp the brass knob on the crooked iron gate and I can still see the chihuahua and the little pug dog coming to greet me.