What kids do during summer vacation these days is mind-boggling. They go everywhere from Disneyland, to Paris to Rome. I have a much different remembrance of my summer vacation. I do recall a summer when we traveled from Cavanaugh, Arkansas, to Liberty Hill, Oklahoma.That was about thirty-five miles. My parents left me and two older sisters there at my grandmother's house. She was a widow, and one of her daughters and her family lived across the road.They were Charlie and Flora Buttress and their four children. Uncle Charlie was a truck farmer. He had some acres and a team of mules. He raised potatoes and watermelons mainly. Our arrival for "summer vacation" was timed with the big event of "pickin' up taters". We were the pickers up. It meant we would take a metal basket and get in the rows plowed up by the team, and pick up the potatoes that had been uncovered.We did this by simply crawling along on our knees behind the mules. The dirt would be cool and the potatoes were easily found in the red, sandy-like soil. Once a basket was full it would be carried to a shed where there was a machine that graded them by size. Those of the right size were put in a tow sack and sewed up at the top. They were ready to sell. I would get a cardboard "token" for each basket I brought in. Those tokens were like money. At the end of the pickin' we turned in our tokens and would be paid. I imagine it would be .25 to.50 cents for me. I was about ten or eleven.
That was summer vacation. I didn't mind it at all. We didn't work all day. Afternoon meant the boys would go to the swimming hole up behind the Baptist Church, where they baptized. It was a nice deep hole and a real treat after crawling through dirt all morning. My cousin, Oren Ray, would be with me. Some other boys I didn't know would also go to the swimming hole.
I have recalled this today because my cousin, Oren Ray Buttress, passed away yesterday in Oklahoma. I haven't seen him since those long-ago days. Distance and interests never brought us back together. We didn't do much of families getting together. It wasn't really very easy to do it. My father worked five and a half days a week at the glass plant and Sundays were for church. I don't even know what Oren Ray did for a living. I don't think it was truck farming like his dad. I do recall fondly, riding in the back of the wagon as we went in to Cameron, the nearest town. We were bare-footed, of course, and when the wagon crossed a creek we dragged our feet and legs in the cool water of cedar creek. That was a summer vacation memory for me. The only souvenir I brought home was an arrowhead I found one day. It is gone, like those days, and most of the memories.
