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The elderly couple still laughed with the easy manner of giddy young newlyweds, teasing each other most likely for our benefit, but also in what appeared to me to be a genuine and playful manner.

Old John, a tallish man of average build, always pretended to be deathly afraid when we appeared on their doorstop each year on Halloween night – shaking with fright at the specter of the six of us with our dime store plastic masks, Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble or Casper the Ghost – odd choices for young girls now that I think of it – bound to our faces with a thin, flimsy cord that more times than not broke before our brief night of Trick or Treating too quickly came to an end.

We lived a few miles outside of our small northern Iowa community and my parents were never inclined (or willing – but that’s another story) to drive us into town to knock on doors in search of Halloween bootie. Instead, we girls had to content ourselves with a trip to Grandma’s house – actually a further drive than what venturing into town would have been! – and across the road to the old, run down house where John and Lorna Smith lived.

Like the exterior of this seemingly abandoned home that my husband and I drove past on a road trip earlier this summer, the Smith house exhibited peeling paint, lacy curtains in the windows, and a crumbling, dilapidated covered porch held up with wooden columns leaning askew and creaky floorboards under foot. Stacks of lumber and old newspapers lined the path on the way to the screen door that led into the kitchen.

But once you were inside! Well. The old Smith place was full of wonders for us young Clark girls. I can still picture the kewpie doll attached to a stick – a county fair prize, as I recall – propped up inside a window frame. The kitchen, with no modern amenities, employed a hand-pump driven well to supply them with water. Cooking was done on an old wood stove. I can’t be certain as to whether there was no indoor bathroom but I’m inclined to think so as it was here that I was shocked and astonished to learn, for the first time, just what a ‘thunder mug’ was used for. An old fashioned ‘weather forecaster’ sat on the counter: if the rock was wet, it’s raining, if hot, there’s a heat wave, if gone, a tornado. Something like that anyway. I remember thinking then how funny and clever that was.

An old stiff (leather?) sofa was propped up on the east side of the living room and doors led to other areas of the house, presumably bedrooms. It was a spare yet cluttered home and I don’t ever think of it without recalling John’s feigned terror at our Halloween approach or the way Lorna, a little bit of a thing, would tease him for being ‘afraid’. As for our treats, there were usually apples and popcorn balls, maybe a candy bar or two. Nothing fancy and it occurs to me now what an effort they had to have made in anticipation of our annual October arrival. And most certainly only for us girls as there were few houses with young children living nearby. This makes me smile.

When I was nearing my twenties, I heard one day that Lorna had died. Within days, John followed her in kind. It seemed fitting that this elderly couple, who to this young girl’s mind seemed still very much in love, would submit to death in such close alignment with one another. And that too, makes me smile.

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Cee’s asked us this week to present our take on her Indoor Seating Fun Foto Challenge. This is from my Sawmill collection, photos taken after my dad died in 2007. He owned and operated Clark’s Sawmill for fifty years. It was his pride, his joy and largely defined who he was and how he felt about himself as a man, a father, a husband and a provider. He told me once that when he went to bed at night he could hardly wait to get up in the morning to go back to work.

This was his ‘throne’, the place where he sat to make it all happen – loading logs from the ramp to run through the big blade. It was my dad’s favorite seat in the house – or pretty much anywhere for that matter.

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Today we’re asked to regroup and check out other’s post via our earlier Prompt assignment: read at least six posts that used the same prompt and leave comments on at least two of them.

The first one I pulled up was Evil Queens and Coffee Beans. I must say, I laughed aloud when I read it. It was ever so brief yet elegantly stated. It is, in it’s entirety, reprinted below:

growing up i worshipped at Madonna’s altar.

still do.

Love it! In tit-for-tat measure, I responded accordingly:

Short, sweet and to the point. Succinctly defined. I like it.

Another post, Musings & Rants, lists no less than six of her teen idols, two of which are no longer with us (I admit to having glanced too quickly at her list and looked again to see if another of mine, Davy Jones, was included. He was not and that alone made me sad to consider how these objects of teenage angst -ack! I’m getting older! – are no longer living). One who did make her list was David Cassidy. Ah yes. I remember crushing on him back in the day. And while not (yet) dead, life got a little ugly for our little Partridge Family lead singer. A quick Google search revealed an ugly mugshot for a fairly recent DWI arrest. Sigh. Still, he did make my pulse race when I was just fourteen.

Assignment: Blogging 101: Increase Your Commenting Confidence

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Dark Shadows was must-see summer TV when I was in middle school. It was a daytime soap opera of gothic proportions and was groundbreaking in a way, set in the spooky Collinwood Mansion, home to any number of ghosts, vampires, witches and werewolves. Many a time, too scared to watch but spellbound nonetheless, we girls would position ourselves to the side of the television cabinetry and sneak a peak (but with our eyes covered).

Most girls (and, I suspect, many women) crushed on the star of the show, Jonathan Frid, who played sexy vampire Barnabas Collins. However, I was smitten by Quentin Collins, played by David Selby. I laugh now to recall the massive sideburns he wore but, still, he was undeniably attractive. I used to fantasize that perhaps the producers and actors might be driving past our house along Highway 69 (it was, after all, as my parents told us once, a major highway that cut across several states in the Midwest) and that their car would breakdown. After knocking on our door for some roadside assistance, the producer would steal a glance my way and proclaim ‘Hey, sweetheart. You’d be perfect for Dark Shadows. Whataya say?’ Yeah, silly. I know. But such was the stuff of my teenage hormone-driven imagination.

My dad surprised me once – funny how some things are just etched in your memory – as I sat on the kitchen counter drying dishes and putting them away in the cupboard. Dad wasn’t much for chit chat. I recall very few conversations with him growing up which is probably why I remember, so vividly, him asking me if I was in love. Was he able to read my mind? Did he know that I thought constantly about David Selby or that I scribbled his name on paper? Had my father seen the hearts I’d drawn with my initials intertwined with those of the one that I daydreamed about? I was embarrassed and somehow ashamed, guilty that I’d been found out. Of course, I denied the allegation but always wondered how he’d known.

It occurs to me, just now, that this would have been a delightful topic to have asked Dad about before we lost him to cancer a few years ago. How I wonder if he would have remembered the day he once asked me, his eldest daughter, if I was in love!

Assignment: Make a Prompt Personal
Prompt: Teen Idol

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Right now – in the middle of November – thanks to the polar vortex or whatever the heck it is that’s wreaking havoc on not just our beloved Midwest but throughout all of the country, there is snow on the ground.

Granted, there isn’t as much here where I live in central Iowa as what they are experiencing elsewhere in the state or farther north but the white stuff is here and with frigid temps like this, it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

Snow is, however, a vital ingredient if one wishes to enjoy riding snowmobiles. That and warm attire, a full tank of gas, a smoothly operating machine and, ideally, sunny skies, no wind and winter temperatures in the 20s. At least, that’s the recollection of my teenage years when Dad, for a few years, became first a Sno Prince and then a Mercury snowmobile dealer.

On a trip to visit our cousins north of Minneapolis, most likely during the Christmas holidays, I saw the bright headlights, zipping through the roadside ditches, of several of these newfangled contraptions that I’d only just recently heard of – a moment that I can still vividly recall. I was intrigued so when Dad announced some time later that he was going to start selling snowmobiles, I was wild with anticipation.

The night Dad pulled into the driveway with the long trailer loaded with new sleds, we girls were already in our jammies. Snow was lightly falling and despite the hour, the air was still and relatively warm. Sensing our excitement, Dad unloaded one of the sleds and prepped it for take-off. Wearing only my PJs and slippers on my feet, I took it for a spin in the field north of our house. ‘Yee-HAW!’ I squealed with delight at the speed, the smooth ride and the exhilaration of motion in play. This was FUN and I wanted more!

Over the next couple of winters, I rode the school bus along country roads and pictured myself riding on imaginary snowmobile trails through the ditches and corn fields as we stopped to pick up and deliver students before and after the school day. I bought my first (red!) snowmobile suit, boots and gloves at the local Big Bear farm store and sewed on patches that I bought from a vendor catalog: Don’t Eat Yellow Snow and I [Heart] Sno Prince. We were always pestering Dad to take us snowmobiling at night and I remember one particular evening he said he would if the local weather forecast showed the temperature was above zero. It was and we went!

My sisters Kelly and Lorie were my primary partners in crime although all of us six girls enjoyed the sport. Kelly, especially, shared my enthusiasm – so much so that she gushed about it in a diary entry. Kelly has a fantastic sense of humor, is very creative and has always been quite good at tinkering with things and figuring out how they work. She is, however, a terrible speller. ‘We had so much fun today on the snomoblees!’ she wrote. Being the dutiful older sister, I teased her mercilessly about her error but today her choice of spelling still makes me smile.

I enjoyed pulling my sisters behind our trusty Sno Prince on those slick plastic, saucer sleds. As my sister Nanette righted herself after falling off (following a sharp turn on my part!), she pulled on her stocking cap and just as she attempted to rotate it so she could see out of the eye holes, I gunned it. She had no choice but to grab onto the sled with both hands, hanging on for dear life, and it still makes me laugh to recall looking back and watching her trying to stay on the sled but not able to see! As she would say, funneling her best SNL voiceover, ‘good times, good times’.

Our neighbors down the road, the Robbins, also had snowmobiles and we sometimes got together to ride. One particularly boring Saturday, I sat at the window yearning to see their sled coming up over the hill. The wind was blowing drifts across the road and suddenly – I couldn’t believe it! – there was Brad riding his sled. And he was headed for our place for an afternoon of snowmobile fun. Dad sometimes took us riding to their house as well and I remember one warm and pleasurable evening there when they served us toast and hot cocoa.

Today, if we owned an acreage I would not hesitate to reenter the world of snowmobiling. The sleds these days are pretty slick, streamlined, equipped with plenty of storage and heated seats, steering bars and runners for your feet. They come, I’m sure, with a pretty hefty price tag and some winters see little snow, making these expensive beasts unusable for much of the season. No matter. If we had the space and the time (always the time, isn’t it?), I’d have one again in a heartbeat. Because, for this gal, it’s hard to beat winter fun on a snomoblee!