Family Friday Tales

 Hopefully I have not already shared this story.  I am sure I have not shared all of it.

When I was three years old our family moved from Riverbow Farm on Route 110 to Jigger Hill Farm as, you may have guessed, was on Jigger Hill.  It was an idyllic place to be raised the rest of my growing up years.  I had wonderful parents and the best siblings ever. Yes, we did have our squabbles from time to time but I cannot tell you any of them at this moment.  Only the best things remain in my mind at this moment.  Others may pop up as I am writing but for now, only happy memories.

Anyway, our house was VERY old. It was so old that the foundation was created from field stone.  It was beautiful in some ways.  It was not so great in other ways.  Those ways included easy access for spiders to enter the cellar.  There were steep stairs into the cellar.  There were cobwebs overhead as you went down the stairs.  Why they were not swept down is a mystery to me at this point because our mother was a good housekeeper.  At the bottom of the stairs was a cement wall where some of the stones had been covered.  There was very little room between the bottom step and the wall.

To get to the story, one summer our mother was making applesauce.  When she had it completed and put into freezer containers it was my job to take the containers down cellar and put them into the giant deep freeze down there.  As it happens there may have been activity in the cobwebs overhead, or I may have just imagined it, so, instead of taking the applesauce all the way to the deep freeze, I set the containers on the edges of the stairs.  This was not a problem until about the third, or possibly fourth, trip when I stumbled over the applesauce, fell down the stairs, slammed into the cement/stone wall, then came crying back up the stairs.  I was about ten years old at the time.  

When I got back up into the kitchen, our father was there.  He asked me what had happened.  I told him I had fallen down the cellar stairs.  He nodded his head, led me back to the cellar door, opened the door, and looked down the stairs.  There on the stairs was a terrible mess of smashed containers and applesauce spread everywhere.  

Then he spanked me.  Not much, but enough to get my attention. I thought it was unjustified until he explained, rather forcefully,  that our mother had worked hard over a hot stove for hours to make the applesauce so we could have a sweet treat during the winter.  I still thought it was unnecessary to spank me when I had fallen down the stairs, crashed into the wall, and possibly been run over by big gray barn spiders.  Well, it happened.

For a long time I wondered how my father could have known about the applesauce debacle. Even with the crying.  One day, probably before I was eleven years old, I realized that seeing my clothes covered in applesauce may have been a dead giveaway about what had actually happened.

Well, I never held that against our father.  He was wonderful in every way.  The few times I was reprimanded or spanked were, looking back, totally justified.  

The other story I was going to tell shall wait for another time.