The Old Neighborhood

     The recent death of Lorena Felzien marked the passing of another milestone of sorts.  Lorena was the daughter of Billie and Minnie Paul.  Billie was an old guy when I was a kid.

     I only remember being around him once.  It was a Sunday afternoon when we kids were looking forward to calling on the neighbors and riding their horses.  Billie and Minnie showed up and spent the afternoon visiting and we didn’t get to go horseback riding.

     Billie figured in a couple of our family stories.  One “story” is the house they lived in, and Lorena lived in most of her life.  It originally sat in our farmyard.  I don’t remember the house being there.  My earliest memories are of the place where it used to sit.  It was a hole in the ground where the basement once was.

     A set of concrete steps went down into the weeds that grew rank and wild in the crater.  On the west bank, there was an open sewer of sorts that didn’t end there but served as a collection pond before the effluent passed on to an old well converted to a cesspool.  That sewer was a source of some entertainment. 

      A loose ball, baseball or basketball, could always find its way through the weeds and into the water.  It was an unpleasant task to fight your way through the six foot high horseweeds to the muddy edge, use a rake or hoe to pull the ball out, then actually grab the now-soaked ball, and return the it to the playing field.

      The ball had to be dried and cleansed before play could resume.  That process usually consisted of rolling the ball by kicking it through the dirt and smaller weeds around the yard.  Perhaps an old rag would finish the cleansing, if we weren’t in too big of a hurry.  The retriever had to wash his hands to try to remove the smell.  A basketball could be suitably cleaned that way, but somehow a baseball never came clean.  It was stained forevermore.  The first crack of the bat with the sewer-soaked ball left a stain on the bat and set a fine mist flying.  Keep your mouth shut, batter, and don’t breathe for a second or two after that hit!

     Forever associated with that sewer was our dog Snip or Snippy.  I’m not sure what breed Snip was, shepherd of some kind I think.  He was longhaired.  He loved the sewer.  In the driest and hottest time of summer, it afforded him a bathing spa where he could cool off and get a drink.  He would follow a path through the weeds down to the water, step in, lie down, take a few laps of the stinky stuff.  After a few moments in the pond, up out of the old basement he would come.  When he had cleared the underbrush and was sufficiently in the open, he would shake vigorously.  We knew to give him plenty of clearance. 

     Needless to say, Snip wasn’t a housedog, only being allowed into the back porch during the cold winter. Then he didn’t have such an air about him.  His bathing and cologne choice led a family friend, Don Covalt, to rechristen Snip as Sewer Dog.

      When old Snip died, he just disappeared.  A few days after he failed to show up, Dad discovered his remains where else?  Down by the sewer.  Dad said he had tried to dig himself a grave by his favorite water hole.  Snip was that kind of dog.  Dad finished the job for poor old Snip.

    Sometime after Snip’s demise, the basement got filled.  It must have happened during the school year, as I have no recollection of it happening.  The sewer was piped directly to the old well-turned cesspool.  Occasionally, it is has been necessary over the years to haul in a load of dirt to fill a depression where the ground has settled at the site of the old basement.

      So I don’t remember the old house ever being there.  When the present house was moved to its location and our family occupied it, the old house was sold to Billie Paul and was moved to his place three or four miles south of us.  Billie and Minnie lived there until he retired from the farm and moved to town.  Lorena and husband George took over the farm and raised their family there.  Eventually Lorena left the farm for town and her son Dale now lives in the “old house.”

      Some ten or fifteen years ago, Dale and Cleta added on to the house, probably more than doubling its size, but the old house is still there.  It’s the two-story north “half” of their home.

      The second story involving Billie Paul took place before I was born.  It was a harvest story.  It seems Dad and Uncle Walter were cutting wheat for Billie with the old John Deere Number 3.   As customary during wheat harvest time, a big ugly thunderstorm brewed up in the west and moved eastward over the western horizon, blotting out everything.

     Dad and Uncle Walter, caught out in the middle of the field, took refuge beneath the Number 3’s feeder house. A friend (Art Johnson? Can’t remember for sure) watched the storm from what is now County Road 26.  He drove out into Billie’s field in his “ragtop” to rescue Dad and Uncle Walter.  He pulled up beside the combine and yelled, “Hop in.”

     Then the hail started to fall.  Soon Art was under the combine with Dad and Uncle Walter.  His ragtop was shredded.  I can only imagine what happened to the car’s interior, or how they got it out of the soaked wheat field.  Needless to say, harvest was over for Billie after that storm.

      With Lorena’s passing, there are no more “old neighbors”.  Even she was the daughter of an old neighbor, a generation removed from the ones who were old when I was young.  All the neighbors now are “new”, from the 1950’s or later.  Gone are the Pratts, Ratliffs, Whites, Greens, McSkimmons, Moldenhauers. . . .

     Now I am the oldest of the old.  Neighborly is older, but he is new, coming to the neighborhood in the fifties.  Ratliffs followed by Hills once lived where he now lives.

     I guess Groucho was right.  Time does fly like a bird.  Fruit flies still like a banana.