When most people think of Marin County, California, they tend to think of BMWs, extremely costly homes requiring live-in help, and, the last time I was down to visit, traffic gridlock; albeit very expensive car-type gridlock.  Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, we had no idea that we were smack dab in the peacock feather and hot tub capital of the known world.  In fact, since both of my parents hailed from the middle of the country - Kansas and Nebraska to be exact – we lived in our own little acre of the Midwest.  In Marin.  This was not the way the rest of the neighborhood lived.  All my friends got cars the very second they turned 16 and they definitely didn’t understand the phrase “tough row to hoe”.  If I voiced the desire for a car?  “Great!  Get a job!"  was the inevitable response.  I spent many fruitless and miserable hours wondering why I had had the misfortune to get stuck in the Little House On The Prairie.  Little did I know how lucky I really was.

My father, a physician, was really a farmer at heart and we had the crops to show for it.  He was a man who could suture a laceration, deliver a baby and build a barn door into the bargain.  We grew nearly all our own produce and I was in charge of the weeding, watering and harvesting of the garden.  Many a hot summer day would find me flooding the yard as I stood with a hose in one hand and a book in the other completely oblivious to the water I was wasting.  Another fascinating job was turning the steaming compost pile my father assiduously tended.  Most people in our neighborhood had fancy cars in their front yards or pools in the back.  We had a massive compost pile which received the daily offerings from the waste bin in the kitchen.  We recycled long before it was the rage.  One fall, I learned that pumpkin seeds do NOT degrade as one might expect in a compost pile.  The following spring, after turning the rich compost into the newly planted soil, we found we had a bumper crop of baby pumpkin plants.  You could practically hear the doors slam down the street as I tried to peddle the tiny seedlings rather than destroy them.

My father’s main garden nemesis were the deer who could leap tall buildings, my father’s baling wire fence, and an eight foot hedge to dine on the tender beans and fresh leaves of lettuce each night.  He devised many different strategies for combating these nocturnal thieves.  My two personal favorites were the slingshot rigged up from rubber surgical tubing scrounged from his office and the flash camera setup designed to frighten deer away with the bright light.  While the camera idea didn’t work too well, we did get some very flattering pictures of deer with produce hanging half-chewed out of their mouths with very bemused expressions on their faces.  Whatever wasn’t eaten by the deer graced our table each night (after being picked by yours truly) and canned in late summer to be enjoyed all winter long.  My father was proudest of his tomatoes and would often bring home the postal scale or even the scale used to weigh the babies in his practice to see if he could beat last season’s behemoths.  He took particular delight in the ones which grew in quirky  human anatomical shapes.  Hazard of his profession, I suppose. We even made our own soap -- now, there's a lost art for you.  When we run out of oil and our socity is cast back into earlier, less mechanized times and the skills of our forefathers are needed: I'm your gal.

The 4^th of July was always a day of extremes.  Extremely excited children, thrilled to be released from their relentless chores for the day, extremely cranky mother faced with having to cook a huge meal (lots of fresh produce though!) for the extremely big crowd that had been invited to celebrate with us.  Homemade ice cream was always on the menu.  We hardy pioneer types would have nothing to do those new-fangled electric ice cream freezers – nothing but the hand-crank variety would do.  My main job, was to sit or stand on top of the thing to hold it down while my brothers took turns with the crank, sweating and swearing quietly under their breaths.  When the handle would no longer turn, the fights would begin over who would get to lick the paddle.  Being the youngest usually meant I would win through a blend of  whining and threatening to “tell”.  Tell anything.  I had a good batch of dirt on my brothers stored up for just such occasions.  I was generally the diabolical idea monger behind most of our exploits, but it was the boys who got punished.  They were, after all, "old enough to know better!" 

As the years went on, the chores and barbecued chicken (affectionately known as “Chicken Vesuvius” due to its carcinogenic nature) remained the same, but I began to assert some little independence of my own.  We had neighbors across the street who had had the temerity to build their house in our empty field where we had spent hours playing before they moved in.  In retaliation, I had defaced the concrete floors with indelible chalk and, in a particularly inspired move, stole lumber from the construction site to build a stellar tree fort in my own back yard.  As I got older, however, they forgave me my nasty moves (and yes, I had to pay for the lumber and scrub their concrete floors – that’s the way things are done in the Midwest, after all).  I got to know and love them and discovered that they had a most valuable asset – the cutest 14 year old cousin my fevered adolescent eyes had ever beheld.  Bright blue eyes, dark messy hair and the body of a god.  Not the sharpest tool in the shed, I would later learn, but whoo-boy that didn’t bother me a bit at first.

Dean, for that was his name, and I met at the storied 4^th of July barbecue of 1965.  There was even more tension in the air that  day than usual because my sister-in-law had just that day totaled my dad’s precious maroon Mustang – the envy of the neighborhood.  My mother was cutting the green beans with a vengeance and all I could do was look at Dean with lust (and uncharacteristic) shyness.  All afternoon long we edged closer and closer in that awkward dance that young teens do when they are so infatuated with each other they can’t breathe. 

Needless to say, the fireworks for me that year, weren’t the ones in the sky.  We went for a walk after dinner and made everyone else miss the fireworks because they were still looking for us long after the last pyrotechnical display had ended.  We lay under the bushes and laughed softly as all the adults tramped by, calling for us to come home immediately.  Yeah, right. 

So this year, when I haul out the electric ice cream freezer and make my mom’s lemon custard ice cream, as I do every year, I’ll think of Dean and fireworks.  Fireworks of the heart.