Lizzie's Carefree Years

by Linda Byler

  “They’re cute!” Mandy said.

  “Yeah,” Edna agreed.

  The brush was getting thinner and easier to travel through. Suddenly they stood at the edge of the pines. The weeds were only small here, almost as if someone mowed the grass in the summertime. And the smell! It was the most wonderful scent, almost spicy—it was so pungent with the odor of pine needles. Lizzie could see the sticky pine tar covering the outside of the trees, shining on the grooves of the bark. She reached out to touch it, to see if it was sticky.

  “Don’t get pine tar all over your hands. It’s hard to get off,” Edna offered.

  But Lizzie could not resist touching it. It felt cold and slippery, but sticky at the same time. She smelled it, but all she could smell was pine scent everywhere, so she couldn’t tell if it was the pine tar or the needles.

  Suddenly they burst through the grass and the first row of trees. Lizzie was absolutely stunned. She had never seen anything like this. All her senses tried to absorb it all at once, but it was too much to comprehend. Her mouth dropped open, and her eyes widened, but not one sound came out. As far as she could see, there were pine trees. The lower branches had no pine needles on them, so the bare branches looked like little ladders; they were so close together. The whole floor of this wonderful pine forest was covered with a thick layer of rust-colored pine needles. It was so soft, it felt like she was walking on a mattress of some sort.

  The part that was best of all was the wind tossing the tops of these trees, gently but powerfully, back and forth. Lizzie’s ears were filled with a soft, gentle sound, almost like a sigh, as the wind sifted through the pine needles. It was a sound unlike anything she had ever heard. It was almost mournful, but so steady and sweet that it stirred her soul. Her heart swelled to hear this sweet sound, smell the wonderful scent, and see this unbelievable pine forest stretching out in front of her.

  “This is great!” Danny declared, every vein in his thin neck protruding as he spoke at the top of his voice.

  “Imagine what all we can play here!” Mandy’s voice squeaked with excitement.

  “Indians!”

  “We’ll be Indians!”

  “We’ll build teepees, make feathered headdresses . . .!

  “First, we have to clean up the vines.”

  “We need a rake.”

  “We need a hammer.”

  “We need to tell Debbie!”

  Everyone was talking at once, and Danny was racing in circles, grabbing pine branches, and scooting up trees. They were quite beside themselves with joy and excitement.

  Lizzie plopped down in the middle of the soft pine needles and opened her lunchbox. The climbing and this outdoor atmosphere made her hungry. So they all ate their supper in a circle on the soft floor of the pine forest. They planned who would live with whom and talked about Indian names. Danny said Ivan could make a neat bow and arrow, and Lizzie said she would make headbands out of construction paper at school.

  “We need a name for our forest of pines,” Edna said.

  “Lovely Acres,” Mandy said shyly.

  “Of course! That’s exactly what we’ll call it. We can be the Glick-Miller tribe, living in Lovely Acres!” Edna said.

  “That’s not very original,” Lizzie said.

  “What can we call our tribe?” Mandy asked.

  “Pine Indians!” Danny shouted.

  “Pine?” Lizzie wrinkled her nose. “Just plain ‘Pine?’”

  “Pine Cone?”

  “Pine Cone Indians!”

  “That sounds stupid.”

  “What then?”

  “Pine Needle Indians?”

  “No!”

  “Pocahontas Indians?”

  “Pocahontas was just one girl—not a whole tribe.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s in the history book. I remember. She saved John Smith’s life, then she married him, went to England with him, and died. I pity her. That’s sad.”

  “No use being sad now. She’s long dead,” Danny snorted.

  “Stop talking about Pocahontas. That’s too sad,” Mandy said.

  “Well, we still don’t have an Indian name.”

  Everyone sat in a circle and thought. Lizzie picked up a pine needle and examined it closely. She chewed her fingernail and thought. There were Shawnee and Sioux and Dakota Indians, but they were all out West. She wondered what kind of Indians lived in Pennsylvania ridges.

  “We could be the Monkey Vine Indians!” Danny said.

  “Monkey Vine?”

  “No!”

  “Not Monkey Vine! We’re not monkeys!”

  Lizzie noticed the sunlight slanting through the pines and expressed her fear about darkness overtaking them. Mandy’s eyes were big and scared, but Edna assured them they would easily be able to follow their trail home.

  After they had cleaned up the paper from their lunchboxes, they easily found the trail, as Edna had said. The whole way home, Lizzie tagged behind, her thoughts filled with Indian names and the sweet smell of the pine needles. She thought she had never heard anything quite as lovely as the sound of the wind in the pine branches. Except—just maybe—her Aunt Becca when she played the harmonica.

  chapter 7

  Playing on the Ridge

  As early spring turned into warmer days of early summer, Lizzie knew without a doubt that this was the very best time of her life. Everything was fun—everything! Even working at home was fun, because they did everything as fast as they could so they could run down to Uncle Eli’s and play Indian on the ridge with Edna and Danny.

  The pine forest was cleaned with rakes; dead branches were cleared away and put on a huge pile. They were not allowed to burn anything, Uncle Eli said, so they just carried all the debris to the very edge of the pines, and that is where it had to stay.

  They begged Uncle Eli for slabs of lumber or leftover pieces of pallet lumber to build teepees. They had tried for about a week, using different sizes of lumber, even tying them to trees. The whole pine needle-covered hill was on a slope, so it didn’t matter how hard they tried—the teepees leaned downhill. Finally they were successful; they actually built a fairly good teepee, using black plastic as an outer covering.

  Lizzie was so proud of that teepee, she could hardly believe they had actually done it. Her heart was so light when they were coming off the ridge that evening that she ran ahead of everyone else, tumbling down the steep slope at the bottom and waiting on an old stump for the rest to catch up.

  The next evening, after a windy day, they raced to Lovely Acres to the teepee.

  “Awww, no!” Lizzie wailed, covering her eyes in despair.

  “Awww!” Danny wailed.

  “It was the wind.”

  “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “Not have a teepee, evidently!”

  “We could rebuild.”

  “No!”

  Lizzie walked slowly through the pines where the “perfect teepee” lay in shambles. She could see it was just too weak with those thin poles, and with the uneven terrain, teepees just didn’t work.

  “We have to do something different,” she announced.

  “What?” Edna asked.

  “We have to build cabins, instead of teepees, and be pioneers instead of Indians,” she said, surveying the damage.

  “How can we build cabins?” Mandy asked.

  “Slabs!” shouted Danny.

  “Slabs! That’s it! There are hundreds of slabs on the burn pile!” Everyone started talking at once, all excited about the prospect of building cabins with slabs. Slabs were the outer slices of logs, mostly covered with bark. That was really the most exciting part—the cabins would resemble actual log cabins!

  “Let’s just nail the slabs to trees, for cornerposts, because we aren’t strong enough to dig the poles for the corners,” Edna said.

  “Let’s ask Ivan and Ray to show us how,” Lizzie suggested. “Do you suppose they would?” />
  “We can do it ourselves,” Danny said emphatically.

  “Where are we going to get our nails?”

  “From the pallet shop!”

  “Dat isn’t going to let us,” Mandy warned.

  “We can ask. Let’s all go down to the sawmill and ask Uncle Eli and Dat for whatever we need,” Lizzie decided.

  So they all marched down the trail, through the weed patch, and down the steep slope. It was so noisy at the sawmill, with the huge diesels chugging and the saws grinding through the logs that there was no chance for them to talk to anyone.

  Uncle Eli stood at the saw, his blue shirt opened at the neck, his stomach stretching the buttons in the front. He was whistling and singing, as he always did at his job. When he spied the children, he threw up his hand and waved, a broad grin spreading across his face.

  Lizzie knew what he would say: “Here come the babies!” because that’s what he always said. He loved the children, and they loved him, because he always had a twinkle in his eye and a big smile.

  He pointed to the clock on the office wall, meaning they should wait till five o’clock, the time when the sawmill shut down.

  So they all sat on a log, away from the men working, until Uncle Eli had time to talk to them. The saw whirred, sawdust flying out the huge pipe and down over the sawdust pile. The rough lumber was put on rollers, carrying it away from the saw, until a worker picked it up and stacked it. Sometimes another smaller saw cut the boards into exact lengths for pallet lumber.

  Uncle Eli finished the last log, flipped a lever, and everything slowly ground to a halt. The saw blade went slower and slower until it stopped, so he went to the diesel room to shut it down, too.

  Quickly Danny leaped up, following his dad. “Daddy, Daddy!” he yelled.

  “Can you wait till the diesel stops?” Uncle Eli said with a laugh, rumpling Danny’s hair.

  “Daddy! We need slabs! A whole bunch of slabs, to build cabins up on the ridge. Please, Daddy?”

  “Oh, now, why would you need cabins?” Uncle Eli teased.

  “Teepees don’t work,” Edna said.

  “They fall over,” Lizzie finished.

  “So you need a bunch of slabs, do you? And how are you going to get them up to your ridge?” he asked, tilting his hat to the back of his head and running his hand across his brow.

  “We’ll get them up somehow,” Danny assured his dad.

  “If you can get them up, you can have the whole pile,” Uncle Eli said, smiling.

  They all jumped, clapping their hands and shouting in unison, then raced off to find Dat.

  “Bunch of Indians, no doubt,” muttered Uncle Eli, shaking his head, but his eyes were twinkling, the crows’ feet at the corner crinkling as usual. He loved his children, always chuckling at their antics, never being harsh or strictly admonishing them. It just wasn’t his way.

  Dat was not quite as easy to get along with. He was a good Dat, but stricter than Uncle Eli, taking life more seriously. So Lizzie’s heart fluttered a bit nervously, because she was afraid Dat would not let them have all the pallet nails they needed. She ran along with the others, though her fears were kept to herself.

  Dat had also shut down his diesel, and was sweeping shavings when they burst through the door.

  “Dat! Can we have a bunch of nails to make cabins?” Mandy shouted.

  Danny and Edna didn’t say anything, because it wasn’t their Dat. Dat didn’t stop sweeping right away, but when he turned to look at them, he didn’t look tired or grouchy, which was a big relief to Lizzie.

  “Why?”

  “To make cabins!” Mandy said.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, then he turned and pointed to the nailing machine. “You can have all the nails you find scattered under the nailer. But don’t you ever try to get any while the nailer is working,” he warned.

  “We won’t, Uncle Melvin—don’t you worry,” Danny said, almost reverently, because he was so relieved to find a source of materials for building the cabins.

  Lizzie found an empty box, and they dropped on all fours, crawling under the nailer and producing fistfuls of nails. This was so exciting that Lizzie could hardly stand it. She could only imagine the neat cabins they would build.

  And so the work began in earnest. Every evening that they were allowed to, they painstakingly dragged slabs of lumber up over the steep trail, and through the narrow paths between the pine trees, before dropping, exhausted, on the soft pine needle-carpeted forest floor. It was a labor of love, though, especially for Lizzie. She learned that spring and summer that if you persevered, or worked as hard as you could and kept trying even if things went wrong, you could do almost anything. And work she did, dragging slabs and pounding nails until her hands were blistered and her back hurt in the evening.

  They had one rule, and that was to be home before dark. As soon as the sunlight slanted in long, dust-filled shafts through the pines, they instinctively knew it was time to pack up for the evening and return to their homes.

  The quiet slope was now dotted with crude-looking little huts. They were three-cornered or sometimes five-cornered, depending how the pine trees were situated. The bark was on the outside, and it really did resemble a log cabin. The roofs were made of black plastic tarp, which was often pinned together to make the ends meet from one tattered piece to the next. It was too hard to make real doors, so pieces of black plastic suited them just fine.

  They scrounged every old piece of furniture from their homes, begging for little tables, old chairs, blankets, and dishes.

  Debbie and her little sister, Jeanie, joined them on Saturdays, contributing lots of good food. Often they brought bottles of Pepsi, which was a rare treat for the rest of the children, because their parents didn’t buy soda, like English people did. So Lizzie always tried to have Debbie or Jeanie live with her, so she could have Pepsi.

  They brought lots of sandwiches, cupcakes, cookies, and little containers of pudding or peaches. Plastic jugs of water to drink or wash dishes with were kept in each little hut.

  One warm day, after they had worked exceptionally hard, they were so hungry when lunchtime came that they could hardly wait until all the food was ready. They were having a picnic that day, spreading everything on a clean cloth in the middle of the community.

  Debbie’s mother had packed seven sandwiches for the two girls, which they were to share with the rest of the group if they wanted any. Jeanie was little and round, as was Debbie, and she was hungry, not wanting to share any of the seven sandwiches. It caused great concern, because they never had any serious disagreements. They hardly knew a moment’s anger among themselves, so no one really knew how to resolve this serious matter.

  Jeanie sat cross-legged on the blanket, her mouth pinched in a firm line, resolution written all over her little round features. Her hair was straight and lighter in color than Debbie’s, but her skin was tanned to a nutbrown color, too. Her eyes were small and a bit slanted, giving her a unique look all her own.

  “Debbie, Mom said. Five for me and two for you,” she said, her eyes flashing indignantly.

  “Jeanie! It’s embarrassing! Why would you even need five sandwiches? It’s just ridiculous—you can’t eat five,” Debbie pleaded.

  “Two for dinner, one for snack, and two for supper,” Jeanie insisted.

  Edna rolled her eyes and sighed. Mandy blinked her big green eyes, saying nothing. Lizzie was mad at Jeanie, because she felt she was being greedy. She knew Marlene had packed three sandwiches for each girl, and one extra, which she was hoping Debbie would offer her. Debbie’s sandwiches were always much better, because her mother bought expensive bologna that was so delicious.

  The argument continued, Debbie pleading and Jeanie refusing to budge. Everyone was becoming irritable and hungry. Finally Edna said, “Jeanie, give three to Debbie and you can have four.”

  Jeanie shook her head.

  Then Debbie lost her temper, saying she had had enough. “I’m taking you home, Jea
nie, and I’m telling on you!” This caused Jeanie to open her mouth and howl with indignation, the sound disrupting the usually peaceful atmosphere of Lovely Acres.

  Danny had grabbed his sandwich earlier and perched on a low branch of a pine tree. He was so thin, and like many thin children, food was not one of his top priorities. He just ate to keep going; nothing ever really tempted him or interested him too much, as far as food went. So he was quite puzzled at this disruption, especially since it was only about sandwiches.

  So, like a wise little owl he kept quiet, watching the exchange between the two girls become more heated. Suddenly he could take it no longer, so he burst out, “Ach, ‘Deppie,’ all because of a stupid sandwich!” His English was not very good, because he was only seven.

  But the way he said it, knowing a sandwich to him was nothing to argue about, just struck Lizzie and Mandy as funny. They looked at each other, knowing how hilarious Danny was, on his perch in the pine tree, and burst out laughing.

  Soon the little pine forest echoed with the sound of the girls’ mirth, Edna joining in, and finally even Jeanie had to smile in spite of herself. Danny only looked bewildered, shrugging his shoulders.

  The whole thing was soon resolved by cutting all the sandwiches in half, putting them all together on a plate in the middle of the blanket, and they could all share.

  It turned out to be a wonderful day. One family became sick, with the “fever and ague,” like in the Laura Ingalls book, and the other family had to help take care of them. They mixed all kinds of bitter berries and weeds to make medicine, like real pioneers.

  Then they needed to make some repairs, and discovered they were out of nails. Everywhere they looked, there were no nails to be found. They remembered the last amount they got from under the nailer didn’t last very long, so they all debated about what they should do.

  Edna was busy cleaning up, scraping the foul potion that had been their medicine out of a bowl. “Well, I’m not going for nails. It’s not my dad,” she said.

  “Me, neither.”

  “Or me.”