Road Trip To Kansas

Kansas, The Sunflower State, and the land from which Dorothy blew to Oz. 

Kansas, a dream vacation spot. . . 

. . . or at least, it was, when I was 14 years old.

Usually, our summer vacations consisted of spending a week at my my Aunt Mary Edna's house in Ohio doing 842 batches of sweet corn. Imagine husking corn every single day for a week, for hours and hours. They planted a field of sweet corn that they would sell; the rest we did for our families. Every morning would find Uncle Emanuel in this misty field, stripping the ripe ears from the stalk. Dumping them on a pile in the side yard under a big tree, my aunt would sort through them, setting aside any ears with worms or any kind of damage. These were the ears of corn my cousins, Joyce and Janice, and my sisters and I would have the distinct joy of husking. More than one ear would get tossed back in the pile with a worm exposed, hoping someone else would husk it. 

Not that I ever did that, of course. 

We husked, my mom and my aunt would sit at a bench and cut the corn off with sharp knives that would send little showers of sticky corn juice everywhere. Then when enough corn was ready, someone would go into the hot kitchen and cook it in a huge kettle. Once cooked, and cooled, it was placed in containers and frozen. It was a process, a long, hot, boring process, but eating the homegrown corn the rest of the year made it all worth it. 

And it really wasn't all that bad. We got to play with our cousins for a week and usually afternoons and evenings were free for us to go play, read, swing, and watch "The Love Boat", or "The Sound of Music". They had an actual library in their house and I was in my glory. I think that is why I have a library in my house today. Food fights, involving bologna sandwiches, late at night with the Amish boys across the road was fun too until our mother's saw us and we got in a ton of trouble.

So, back to Kansas. . . 

One year, my Aunt Mary Edna, my mother, me and my sisters, Kimmy, Roxie, and Valerie, along with my cousins Joyce and Janice, loaded up the back of their pickup truck and we took a road trip to visit another sister, Miriam, in Kansas.The mothers got to sit up front with Valerie in her booster seat between them. The rest of us piled in the back of the enclosed, carpeted truck bed with pillows, blankets, suitcases and snacks. Kimmy and Joyce, being the oldest, took the coveted positions by the tailgate. We would let the window up and they got the best breeze. For miles, we traveled this way, always on the lookout for cops. If we saw one, the window would come down and we felt sneaky. 

First stop: Illinois at my Uncle Freeman's house. We spent the night there and my memories there consist of a game of basketball, a broken finger, an off-limits formal living room, and neighbor boys checking out my cousin. 

We continued on to Kansas and I never knew land could be so flat. Or that the sun could be so hot. I remember Janice singing "Purple Rain" while listening to Price on her Walkman through her headphones. I thought I was getting delirious as a mirage appeared. It looked like my mother coming towards me. 

Oh, wait, that was Aunt Miriam, my mom's identical twin sister. We had arrived in Kansas. 

After the weirdness wore off of not seeing cousins for so many years, Janet, Norma, Penny, Joyce, Janice and my sisters and I all became the best of friends for that week. I remember having a jam session in the basement with a set of drums and a marimba. 

Going to the water slide was fun too, except for the extreme sunburn, Kimmy nearly having a heat stroke, and a large Kansas bug flying down my swimsuit causing me to expose my entire front to the group of teenage boys behind us in line. But hey, it was a BIG bug. 

And that was our Kansas Vacation/Roadtrip with Cousins. 

Really, does it get any better than this? 

Love,

Dianne