When I was just a slip of a girl living with my grandparents on their Iowa farm, like many an only child I was possessed of a very active imagination. One particular fantasy, though, remains clear in my mind.
Down in the cow pasture there was a very large pile of rocks that had been stacked there after they’d been pulled out of the fields. Judging from the size of it, the fungus and plant life and rodent holes, that rock pile had been there for a long, long time. On and around it I practiced how I would elude the Indians who were surely to come and kidnap me and take me away, never to see my home again. After all, this was their rock pile.....
The rock pile wasn’t the only place where I fantasized about Indians. I actively planned where in the house I would hide if I knew the Indians were finally arriving. I worked it out that the big storage space above the closet in the bathroom, behind the clothes and such that were stored there, would be ideal. I literally played this fantasy out over and over again and spent many more than a few hours in that storage space. It was, in fact, the place I went to get away from my fears and to lick my wounds.
I’ve never been quite sure where a six year old child born in 1945 would encounter such ideas of Indian capture. Perhaps at the picture show on Saturday afternoons, although I don't think I was allowed to go there until I was older. We didn't have a television when I was six, and neither did anybody I knew. Maybe a picture book or any number of unrelated stories and events wove themselves into my Indian narrative.
There were still bands of gypsies roaming around the countryside in their caravans back then. I remember being scared of them. There were tramps wandering down the back roads, leaving a rock or two on farmhouse mailboxes. I know what that means now but I didn't then. That was scary, too. Then there was the story of my grandma tricking my grandpa into eating turtle soup, the recipe of which she had gotten from an Indian woman who lived nearby, down along the Buffalo Crick. My grandfather blew his stack when she answered his question: “Ma, this is really good soup. What is it?” It must have created quite the family ruckus as my Dad and Uncle remembered it into their 70s, at least. Of course I didn't hear that story until I was well into adulthood but could it be that my grandpa didn’t like Indians or want anything to do with them and he told me stories that I just don’t remember but that deeply effected me at the time?
Then I grew up........
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