I wrote this last year and it seemed like a good way to start out my Blog. Hope you agree.

Tomorrow is Easter. April 5 2015. This morning I got up at 4:30 am and watched as the moon hid in the shadow of the earth, an event that helps us to define who we are and what we are.  It made me reflect back on my life. What popped into my head was the Easters I spent as a child. They were some of the happy times in my life that we old people that live at the end of the street enjoy, in our travels of memory.

In my family we all gathered at my aunt Aggie’s house. There were about 20 of us. The years were in the early 1940s. She and Uncle Leo had about an acre of land right on the Los Angeles river somewhere in “the valley,” I have no idea now where that would be but it was rural. She had a goat that she milked and my cousins and I would go out and see if we could milk it. We were primarily city kids and milking a goat was a skill we didn’t possess. My aunt would squirt the milk in our mouth from three feet away. Of course it would get all over us and that was part of the fun.

Being right across the street from the river, the cousins (there were four of us that lived close enough to be there), were given the duty of collecting enough crawdads to put in the salad. The L.A. River was all mud banks in those days and it was full of crawdads.  We even had a swimming hole in it, and went swimming if the weather permitted us to without our mothers thinking we would get too cold and get sick. My mother and all my aunts would prepare the meal and of course the crawdad salad was my favorite part of it.

As I write this there are tears running down my face. These were wonderful times. Now the river is all cement. No more crawdads. No more swimming hole. No more goat milk. All of those people are dead now, except me and two of my cousins. I don’t think any of us have had a crawdad salad or gone swimming in a swimming hole or milked a goat for a long long time. What a travesty that is.