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I grew up in a place called Beans Cove. Literally, it was a cove with Evitts and Tussey, solid, real-deal Appalachian Mountains, curving around the end of the valley and Martins Mountain, short but essential, running up the middle. It was sawmill country, home to loggers and sawmills, some abandoned and some alive and buzzing. To describe it would be to romanticize it. The folks of the cove would scoff at any grand descriptions of it, but secretly they are so proud of Beans Cove, that they would read said description over again and say, “You know whut… It ain’t half bad.”

My dad was the oldest of nine children, and he and several of his six younger brothers owned one of the sawmills. My grandfather, referred to by children and grandchildren as Pop, owned a dairy farm and my grandma helped them all survive. My brother and I were the oldest grandchildren, born right in a row after my youngest uncle, and for lack of cousins being born immediately after us, we grew up playing with our youngest uncles and aunts.

I must have been a poor sport about being left behind. At least, I can’t imagine what else would have induced them to include me on a biking trip when I was a preschooler. I couldn’t ride bike, at least not well enough to keep up, and my aunt Lorraine took a sofa pillow and belted it on the bar of the bike so that I could ride in front of her. The idea was great, but the pillow didn’t cinch properly and frequently inverted so that the padding swung abruptly under the bar and I on the ground. No matter. She hauled me that way for over two miles, and Richard and Clark even put up with the delay involved in scooping me up every so often and replacing me in the saddle.

Truly, I must have been a poor sport about being left out because I also remember one afternoon when I invited Lorraine and Richard to come back to my house for a party of my very own creation with Clark and I. Tash was too little too count. They brought their roller skates, and everyone skated on the new concrete in our basement… except me. I didn’t know how to skate, and I cried because I thought my party was ruined forever. They were annoyed, of course. We all went up stairs to eat the party food, and it wasn’t ruined forever.

We spent hours at Pop’s farmhouse… huddling on the porch of the pig barn, watching our uncles help our grandpa load the pigs onto trucks and the terrible sound of discombobulated swine… helping Richard feed the “hummys” which Richard said was German for calves. We took his word for it although neither he nor anyone else in our family knew any German.

There were early mornings in the “office” off Grandma’s kitchen listening to the weather radio, waiting for the milking to be finished, and being amazed that the world could be so busy while it was still dark. There was also an amazing box called a computer. We watched the looping screen saver for hours, and there was a little teapot on one that danced and sang.

There were the tea picking jaunts down by the creek, the summit of summer morning activities, and wagon rides down the hill from the pig barn. There were stacks of tractor tires to play in, and lofts to be built in the shed. “The world is a wonderful place to be when you’re young.” (Name the author.)

Our aunts and uncles were the most important people in the world to Clark and me, and we lived in more fear of their opinions than the rules of our parents. This bondage had its perks, and we were little suckers of slaves… but there were wages.

At the age of perhaps eleven, my youngest uncle Richard exegeted a verse to us from the apostle Peter wherein we were instructed to obey our elders. It was obvious to him to whom that was referring and obvious to us as well. My older brother Clark lived under the shadow of that for many months and held me to it as well, although I found the whole idea a bit more suspect. It looked like a setup; it sounded like a setup; but how can you tell?

Richard was a schedule fanatic, waking himself up at five-thirty and singing to keep himself from going back to sleep in case it should make him late for school. Our mom and grandma carpooled, and my mom was not a morning person. Clark feared making Richard late to the extent the it endangered school morning relations with his mother.

I loved my aunt’s books. I also loved the stacks of Family Life and Young Companion that I read from cover to cover. I borrowed nine copies once which contained a harrowing nine sequels about two Amish girls who dated best friends and one of whom was unfaithful and English. I lost the magazines before I was sufficiently tired of reading them to return them, and I am ashamed of that to this day.

I was frequently in trouble this way. When we borrowed books from them, they usually got ruined, especially Richard’s books. Clark would get the brunt of the fuss, and I, in turn, got it from him. I remember a treasured Lewis B. Miller story called The Cruise of the Blunderbuss with an impossible plot and which met a horrible end from the combined issues of poor binding and poor handling. It was reflected upon ever afterward by Richard as “my nice Blunderbuss book”, obviously in the same category as “the dear departed.” Clark blamed me, and I blamed whatever was left to blame… the bookshelf or the floor under my bed.

I remember another book which shall remain unnamed and which I dropped in the toilet. I fished it out and replaced it on the shelf and held my tongue. What else was there to be done?

My other sins usually lay in the vicinity of my tongue. I was expected to keep the family secrets, but too young to be entirely trusted. The trouble was that I usually was in on them anyway. One of these high-profile classifieds was the in-ground swimming pool on an old Girl Scout property that my grandpa crop-farmed. We loved to swim in it, but for various reasons, were not supposed to mention it at school. I loved swimming, and it was the hardest thing in the world not to mention.

I distinctly recall Richard’s annoyed tones as he said one day, “Hey… have you guys been talking about our swimming pool at school?”

Clark denied it immediately and loudly, and I knew who was left. The silence in the car swelled in my ears, and I looked out of the window at the newly mown hay and wished to be on the moon or at the bottom of the ocean. Eventually there was nothing left to do.

“…I might have…” I said. My voice felt very quiet, and I hoped no one would hear me.

After a moment, Lorraine, who was growing old enough to have a sense of humor, laughed, and I breathed again. Richard, who was growing up too, left me off with a mild reminder, in the administration of which Clark joined.

I never thought this day would come, but now we are scattered from Texas to Ontario, we four. In our midst, there is a doctor, a self-employed logger, a mom of three and a half, and a newlywed jack-of-all-trades. What happened?