mud

Mother May and Mud were married when I was 7.

I do not remember the wedding, and, of course, the courtship story was told to me. But after they married they moved to Washington State, to the TriCity area, home of the first full scale nuclear reactor in the world, and lived there a good while.

When I was a kid I remember going to visit them, and mom and dad going on and leaving us, sister and I, for a while. It was good. Their house was not finished and we would sit on the decking and hang our feet into the crawl space and spit watermelon seeds!

In the 60’s Mud decided that there was too many people too close so he moved about as straight east as you could go into Idaho, on the Clearwater river. There he built a couple of houses.

The first house finished was for the son and x wife, while Mother May spent a couple years living in a military tent. I think she fumed a bit. The pictures I remember were of a tent 16 or 20 feet square with a conical roof. We did not visit them while they lived in the tent.

But when the house was built we would gather up the kids and travel the 150 miles to their house. They were my closest relatives.

When Mud was 80 he decided once again, that the neighbors were too close, so he bought some land another 20 miles deeper into Idaho and was planning on building a house there.

But on a side trip one Saturday afternoon, with my cousin, her husband, their oldest boy and their new baby (Mother May stayed home), the brakes on his Nash went out coming down a steep hill.

He thought he could ride it out, but the car went airborne, threw my cousin and her children from the car and slammed the car into a tree. Cousin would have died instantly if she had still been there.

Mud and husband rolled down the bank toward the railroad tracks and the river. Husband came out with fairly minor injuries, but the coroner said that every bone was broken in Mud’s body.

The extra sad part was that the baby, just a few months old, died too.

That was a huge tragedy for our family.

Mud was a good guy. Cousin had a new baby the next year, but nothing would take that one’s place.

At the funeral, I was Mother May’s escort. I was glad to be with her, but it was sad for all of us.