I con Jack out of some of his beer...

Springtime in Wenatchee is cool and pleasant. Momma and Daddy got jobs at the hop orchard where Billy, Gladys, Charlie and Velma already worked. Daddy dug postholes and put together climbing frames for the vines. Momma trained the vines and weeded and sorted strawberries, grapes and vegetables for the truck farm next door.

I sat on a pallet next to the field with Johnny Blankenship while our mothers worked. Sometimes they left us with a teenage babysitter, Betty, back in one of the cabins.

The cabins were small, just one room each with metal doors on the cabinets in the tiny kitchenette. One day, Johnny suddenly opened a cabinet door, hitting me in the head with the sharp corner.

The terrified babysitter ran all the way to the hop orchard carrying me while I screamed and bled all over her. Poor Johnny on his fat little two-year-old legs ran behind us, crying, too, because he had hurt me. I still have the scar in the edge of my hair after almost sixty years.

Later, Betty got in trouble with our parents for trying to make us wear diapers so she could practice changing them since she planned to get married when she turned sixteen in the summer. We were potty trained and didn't like being treated like babies so we told on her.

Momma and Velma said that the next time Betty suggested Johnny wear a diaper that he take his peepee out and wet on her. Gladys didn't think that was such a good idea but they talked her into telling him to do it.

He couldn't wait to try it and the next day, before Betty even mentioned diapers or anything, he did it and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Betty laughed too and laughed even more when I told her that if she tried to put a diaper on me I would poop on her.

Charlie's brother Jack, Betty's boyfriend, would sometimes come and hide beer in our icebox since Velma would not let him keep it at Charlie's place. Once I talked Jack into sharing a sip of the beer with me because I told him that Momma and Daddy gave me beer all the time. I meant root beer and when I tasted what Jack gave me I told him it was the worst beer I had ever tasted and that he should take it back to the store because it had turned to buttermilk.

Betty and Jack got into trouble again when I told my dad about how bad the beer was that Jack had hid behind the ice, milk, lettuce and grapes. They ended up running away to get married, even though neither of them was old enough to do so without their parents saying it was okay.

So we didn't have a babysitter anymore and Johnny and I played under the trees while our mothers worked in the hop orchard and in the long sorting sheds beside the truck farm. It got hot in the summer and we would pull off our clothes and run through the tall sourgrass and get little red marks on our arms and legs where the sharp edges almost cut us.

We would try to hide when our mothers chased us but they always found us and made us put our clothes back on. Somebody took pictures of us playing in the grass wearing nothing but our shirts. They used one of those old black box cameras and all you can see is two little kids in white t-shirts far away on a huge field of grass.

Most of the summer had passed and so had my third birthday when Momma and Daddy decided to go back to Arkansas. I don't know why. Maybe they had a letter from someone there needing them to come back.

We loaded up the Packard the same way again and started back toward Arkansas. But something happened. They played my favorite song on the radio.