Slight Detour: Odds, Ends and Memories

I ran across this photo earlier today, and, of course, my nostalgia meter went off the charts.

It's our Brown-Tibbs family home on North Boyer. It was also known as Ponderay Hereford Ranch. Hereford cattle, horses, dogs and cats lived there with us on the surrounding acres.

We don't have too many pictures of that home, but it and its memories remained etched in my mind.

We moved there in 1950, after living in a little house on Euclid Street, just down from the junior high, now known as the Sandpoint Events Center.

This farm, with its original 40 acres (later 95 extending west across Great Northern Road, provided the setting for the formative years of my five siblings and me.

I've mentioned before that absolutely no sign that we ever lived there, 'cept for geographc location, remains.

Part of it (the hay field) is occupied by big airplane hangars. The rest is open fields, no trees, plotted in lots with paved roads for lots going for hefty prices.

North Boyer no longer runs in a straight line to the Bronx Road. Instead, part of it runs east through the old Best Farm.

My mother paid $7,500 when she purchased the farm in 1950.

It was pretty rundown, and when my mother and stepfather Harold were married in 1954, the place started improving with reconstructed fences, barnyard corrals and a hay shed. I think in the later years of their ownership, they even added another barn.

The house also grew in size over the years, as did the family.

One of my most vivid memories is the narrow stairway on the porch near the fruit room which folded up into the ceiling.

The stairs were down most of the time because some of us lived up in the bedroom above the kitchen at different times.

Twas a one-bathroom house, and we always wondered who designed its arrangement, RIGHT next to the kitchen table where we spent a lot of time, eating or visiting.

Not a great plan.

That bathroom did serve as a refuge for me one day when Mother was out in the barn, and nobody else was in the house.

So, like I'd learned from older brothers, that was a prime time to get into the food. On this particular gluttony session (believe me, Mother saw to it that we didn't starve for three meals a day), I chose to make a peanut butter sandwich with two slices of Wonder Bread.

So, I spread plenty of margarine and even more peanut butter on the slices, packed them together and then began to feast.

The door to the house was on the back porch, and another door opened into the kitchen.

I could hear Mother coming up the steps about three bites into the sandwich.

Where to go! Where to go, especially with a mouthful of sticky sandwich.

The bathroom seemed like the best option, so I raced there, shut the door and bit off more bites of the sandwich. To shield my activities, I flushed the toilet and then stuffed more sandwich into my mouth.

By the time the toilet had quit running from flushing and I had not come out yet, Mother stood outside the door and asked, "What are you doing in there?"

At this point a huge glob of peanut butter, margarine and bread decided to lodge itself in my throat.

If you've ever tried to swallow peanut butter quickly, you can imagine my situation.

I could not have answered if you'd paid me. The glob would not move in the back of my throat. So, as I stood there trying with every mouth muscle possible to swallow the big lump, Mother asked again what I was doing in the bathroom.

Finally, the lump took on some momentum and started slowly sliding down my throat, allowing me to manage a very garbled but apparently convincing, "Nothing."

Saved by a swallow, thankfully.

She caught us at our food theft in that house on other occasions, albeit after the fact.

Christmas cookies kept disappearing from the freezer on the back porch.

Mother was mystified as to how that could happen cuz she knew she had three pigs for older kids, so she locked the freezer. The cookies still disappeared.

Somehow, later she learned that one could slip a knife between the lid and the freezer and work that lock loose.

BTW: she also locked the fruit room after quarts of peaches would disappear and later be found by my dad in stump hallows out in the woods.

The fruit room had a padlock, but it seems to me that someone among siblings with ingenuity even figured out how to get it off the latch.

Mother did enjoy a sense of maternal triumph once when she had made chocolate no-bake cookies, storing them in the adorable cookie house on top of the hot water heater next to the kitchen counter.

When she checked her inventory later, she found that only one cookie was missing. After all, when the top cookies are sprinkled with cayenne pepper to catch of cookie thief, the supply is safe.

So many memories are locked in our respective brains from that home and its surrounding property.

"Progress" can erase all the tangibles, but fortunately, as long as we're still walking around, that home will continue to live "rent free" in all our minds.

Enough nostalgia.

There's gonna be goose hunting at City Beach. You can read all about it in today's issue of the Sandpoint Reader.

For those who worry that the beach has been the age-old home to a bunch of Canada geese, I do not remember walking in goose poop during all my childhood years of riding my bike with the pedal that always fell off to the beach.

Maybe I did occasionally pick up some green sticky stuff on my tennis shoes or thongs, but it was a time of less-than-stellar sophistication on the part of Sandpoint kids, especially those who came to the beach from their farms.

Anyway, I'm thinking the goose-poop problem is more of a "modern-day" phenomenon, possibly with all their other habitat being replaced by human inhabitants.

Maybe leaving their feces at the beach is a means of goose revenge.

https://sandpointreader.com/council-oks-goose-hunt-at-city-beach/

Also, anyone who follows golf is reminded that today is the day Gracie McGovern who has a lot of Sandpoint roots is on the Golf Channel, winning the high school national championship by four strokes.

Check your listings.

Happy Thursday.