But the job in Alexander ended Dad and Mother decided to move back down and we moved to Wellsville where we lived in the same house with my grandmother who was a widow: Elizabeth Owen. She was a neat lady. She was in her 70's, I think at that time or late 60's I guess when we started living with her. We lived with her for a while and then eventually she moved to Logan and lived with us for a while and then she moved into her own apartment for a while before she died, so we were very close to her for several years.
This house in Wellsville was the one that my grandparents had built I guess after they were married and it was 2 floors. We had a kitchen and living room downstairs and some bedrooms upstairs. It was a big eight room house and it had one bathroom. The rooms were huge. In the original house when they first built it, my grandfather had been quite well to do at one time and so he had gold-leaf paintings done in the ceiling and on part of the walls, and it was just beautiful. But of course by 1919, this was around 1919 or 1920, that was considered very out of style and very dated so grandmother eventually had it painted over so we couldn't see it anymore. And oh, it seemed such a shame, especially now when I think back on it.
Then when we were in Wellsville I got sick and got rheumatism and arthritis really bad and was out of school at least half the year. But because Idaho schools had been further ahead than Utah schools and I'd been repeating a lot of material I'd had in Idaho, I passed on anyway to the next year. I think I went to the Wellsville school through the fourth grade and the fifth grade we moved to Logan and I was in the sixth grade. So it didn't slow me down in school that badly. Then I remember getting some kind of itchy stuff on the bottoms of my feet and they would itch so terribly. I remember getting up at night and rubbing salt on my feet so I could scratch them harder. It’s a wonder I didn't wreck them, but I didn't. Oh, they itched.
Then my sister, Helen and John Rentmeister got married while we were in Wellsville. He was working for a company named McKeek Construction (sp?) in Texas. We had all gone in the car to take her to the train in Ogden, I guess, and somebody saw me leave and I was out of school the next few days sick and when I went back to school and to Primary the day after I got better, my name had been removed from both rolls. They figured because they had seen me in the care when my parents left and nobody had seen me come back and hadn't seen me for several days, that I had gone to California with my sister! (giggles) So they took a lot for granted in Wellsville! That was a shock!
In all the in-between times of being in and out of Logan and Wellsville, I had kept track of a girlhood friend named Opal White. In all my trips from Juniper to Wellsville to Logan I had always gone back to visit her and almost every summer I would go out to Juniper for two or three weeks. Opal and I would ride horses, and one year I went out and her brother Harvey offered me to use his brand new saddle that had never been used. So Opal and I said, "Sure!" We rode from her place to Black Vine which was probably 15 miles. I hadn't been on a horse in a couple of years and by the time I got off that horse I was so stiff and sore, I couldn't hardly walk for days. A brand new saddle will do that to you because it's so stiff. Harvey and his brother, Blaine, and my brother, Evan offered to take us to a dance up in Holbrook that night, but needless to say we didn't go.
One other thing that Opal and I did, one hot summer I was out there - we could see snow in the tops of the mountains. Her dad was going up after logs, and we said, ok, we'll ride up with you to the mountains and hike up and get some snow. So we did. We took a gunny sack with us, hiked up to the top of the mountains - strange how heavy that bag of snow got before we got back down again. But we did bring back down enough snow to make two freezers full of ice cream. It was wonderful; something that I'm sure neither one of us ever forgot.
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