What better date to start my story again? This segment won't be as exciting as the others but shows once again how dysfunctional the family was. My gran had 13 brothers and sisters. Johnny was her baby brother and one of my favorites. The thing I remember the most about him was he was nearly 7 feet tall, and skin and bones, it was odd to me because he was the only one that tall. When he came in the room he always had to bend to get under the doorway. I never saw him angry, he was always smiling and joking and to me as a child, he was a giant. Right out of Jack and The Beanstalk, he towered over everyone but especially over all of us kids. For years he worked for Wells and Wade, a TV and appliance store in Wenatchee. I remember him coming to grans with this huge suitcase that was full of all these gadgets and glass tubes to fix the TV. The woman he married was 20 years older than him and about 5'5", her nickname was Torch. I was in my twenties before I found out why they called her that, she smoked and she was a 'B' girl (A woman employed by a bar to encourage customers to spend money freely). As the story was told to me, he met her in a bar and when he brought her home the whole family was up in arms over that 'trash'. But he loved her and he married her and they were together more than 30 years. She passed away on Halloween 2001 I believe, and he fell apart for some years after. She, being a 'black sheep' was the only one that treated me as if I was special instead of an outcast. On Christmas I always waited to open her gift to me last because I knew what it was, a box of chocolate covered cherries. I love those still to this day and sure miss getting them from her. I made that box each year last me clear up to Thanksgiving. Now I rarely get them but when I see them I see her smile, her gentle loving eyes and sadly I see a bit of sadness in her because she was never accepted. The family tolerated her for his sake but never accepted her. I don't recall whether she had any family living or not, if so I never met them. She had two children that my uncle adopted and later they adopted my other sister. I did not know she was my sister until I was 20 years old. More on her later. The next brother, HJ, was 6 feet tall and skin and bones, just like Johnny. A quiet, handsome, and devoted family man. His middle name is my middle name. He was my mothers favorite uncle and so she named me for him.He was very soft spoken and was a carpenter, I have forgotten the name of the building but the hotel and conference center in Wenatchee was one of his projects. He did a lot of work for family members and also helped in the building of the Nazerene Church, our family church. He also was always smiling and laughing and paid more attention to the children than the other adults did. He was a devout Christian and was a Sunday School teacher sometimes. He passed away December 31, 2002. He had married a woman who we all considered to be a snob...My aunt B, she had to have the best of everything. Her clothes, her home, her hair, you name it, it looked as if she had stepped right out of Vogue and Good Housekeeping magazines. I never met any of her relatives, apparently she put them out of her life when she married my uncle. Her attitude was cold and I never understood why. I was in my late thirties before I found out that she was Indian, that explained a whole lot to me, she had to hide who she was to be accepted in our family. Funny how that was, she ignored her blood and culture while I craved mine. She is still that same person today and all my cousins by her are snobs just like her. I still see no reason to hiding the truth of who you are but she continues to do so. They had three girls and one boy. Mikey and Robi are both married with children, Mari and Weni are both gay and in relationships. There were a couple other brothers but to my knowledge I never met them or if I did, I didn't know who they were. My aunt Maxi was my mothers favorite, they hung out together through their teen years and still were close as adults. Maxi was the total opposite of my mother, outgoing, happy, smiling and very loving. They were the odd couple for sure, sometimes I think Maxi hung with my mom in an effort to keep my mom from drifting into that dark place. Maxi was married to a man that I detested...he was cruel to the kids, a big man whose voice boomed, a joker whose idea of a joke was to hurt someones feelings, to embarrass them. When they came to visit I exited quickly because I just could not stand being near him Later in life I learned he was a drunk and physically and verbally abusive, that made me question why Maxi stayed with him. She too was a devout Christian and so that may have been why she stayed. They had two girls, one married the preachers son and the other married a womanizer. The one who married the preachers son was Apple Blossom Queen one year and because she was so popular in school she had no time for the rest of us. I remember her bedroom was wall to wall Elvis, she had every record, every magazine, every poster of him. To this day she still treats me and the others as less than human, but I just consider it her loss. She expected us to treat her like royalty, sorry, I'm not made like that, I treat her the same as I treat anyone. I don't know much about her sister, after she married that womanizer she sort of disappeared into the woodwork. My aunt Lo was another favorite of mine, I found it quite interesting that she and my uncle HJ both had very nasal voices that had an accent from Missouri. She was a Christian woman who raised her two very young children on her own after her husband passed away. Prior to her marraiage to him, she had nearly married a very well known Country and Western singer. Somehow I think that didn't happen because the family probably stepped in and stopped it...after all, a celebrity was not acceptable in my family. I don't know much about her husband because I was only about 8 years old when he passed away. The only thing that I remember for certain is that one day she came to gran's house wearing all black, as the other women did that day, and she changed in personality. For the longest time she wore nothing but black and was sad and quiet except with her children. She developed a very sharp tongue regarding them, yet you knew that she loved them and they were all she lived for. She was a most excellent cook and so many family dinners were held at her home. I use some of her recipes tho I have added to or changed the recipe in some way. She was an extremely huge woman, eating was her other passion aside from the kids and it was the thing that killed her. Funny but her kids were very slim, maybe by choice, maybe not. I think aunt Lo was in part why I started wearing black all the time. The other reason was because of my mother and how she dressed me. Parents need to think about how their children will look to other children in school. She dressed me in things like a print blouse and a checkered skirt and those awful saddle shoes that I so detested! She made me the object of every bully at school because of that. So the black became my way of blending into the background tho I didn't recognize that then, I just liked black. I didn't have anything black of my own so I took a blouse and skirt out of her closet and hid it so I could change before I got to school. Later I did the same with a pair of feminine shoes. I don't know what she thought happened to them but it was the one wrong doing that I got away with, in the name of self preservation. I didn't know the other sisters, they all lived in Kansas and came for some of the family reunions but again, because of 'children are to be seen and not heard' I didn't know who they were. It was only after my gran's cousin started researching our family's history that I took a great interest in who the others were. The family history went back to the twelfth century and was full of rich and royal personage. Those parts interested me very much. It was quite funny to read that a dowery would include livestock and wills included things like farm tools. Such a much simpler time and I am sure that whatever was given was far more appreciated than things today. Sure is a lot different today! I see all these fights about who gets what, greed seems to run rampant. Had I fought for the property in Washington, I would have done so only because my grandfather worked himself to death to be able to leave something in terms of land for all of my immediate family. My sister that was adopted to my uncle Johnny and his wife is a really strange tale. She was born the year after my other sister, making us 7 years apart. My gran was adament that if my mother continued to live in the cabin on her property, then she had to give the baby up for adoption. Thats where my uncle Johnny and his wife came in, they wanted her so it was agreed that none of us were to know that Dee was our sister. When I found out I made the mistake of confiding that to my younger sister. She immediately went to Dee and told her. When Dee went to my aunt and uncle and confronted them with that news they lied to her. Dee became confused and the family arguments that followed sent her over the edge. She renounced her religion and became a devil worshiper. She made an alter in her room where she sacrificed small animals and she planned to murder my aunt and uncle, she wrote it in blood on their pictures. The family became convinced that she was posessed and put her in counciling with our then preacher. They performed an exorcism on her but it didn't work and when she threatened the preachers life the counseling ended. It was odd how she was extremely dangerous one minute and sweet and loving the next. We have never been close but she is my sister and I do love her, its just difficult to be around her. To some degree I feel like what happened was my fault but then there is the fact that if people would have stopped the lies way back then...maybe things would have been different. In her sane moments she is a Christian and does work for the church but when the other part takes over everyone runs for the hills. The picture above is Grandpa cranking the old ice cream machine at one of the family reunions. To be continued...