She jumped into her car and headed down the hill. On her left the glistening Pacific Ocean beckoned. On her right she was avoiding the pitfalls of ditches and gullies carved out of the winding dirt road.
She smiled when she saw some of Marianna’s long horned cattle, and she frowned when she saw the pile of broken down washing machines, wrecked cars, old farm equipment, an old couch, and some lawn chairs stacked and arranged in a circle around a fire pit used for burning trash.
“What a dump!” she laughed to herself in her best Bette Davis impression. On the other side of the family dump, there was a garage and a workshop for repairing tractors and equipment. It wasn’t like you could drive into town with a loader to get repaired at the local mechanic’s shop. She supposed this was more like a salvage yard they used to pull a part off of one thing to fix another.
She remembered the days she and her cousins ran that old VW Bug up and over the humps and ditches… laughing and crashing the Old Beetle time after time until exhausted and hungry, they went up the hill for the spread of food the aunts always prepared for weekend dinners.
Meat was always the feature – pork, beef, chicken, sometimes salmon or abalone, if the guys had been lucky. There were sides of beans, potato dishes, rolls, and always a fresh green salad with plenty of ranch dressing.
Sometime between the ages of six and nine they each developed a taste for beer. By the time they were in their teens, they could just help themselves to a long neck or even a shot of the hard stuff if they so inclined. No one ever raised an eyebrow or issued a reprimand. For the most part, by the time they reached their twenties, they were well on the way to becoming alcoholics.
(First published 2/2/12)
