Family Reminders

“It’s going to be a warm one, Mary
.
An Indian summer day,” Daddy said to me as he got up from the kitchen table and slugged down his last gulp of coffee. He grabbed his lunch pail off the counter and handed me mine
.

Mama walked us both to the door. “Be careful with that,” she said to Daddy, pointing to his lunch pail. “There’s a piece of Mary’s apple pie in there, so don’t go swinging it all around when you walk to work.”

”That pie was so good at dinner last night that I dreamed about it after I went to sleep,” Daddy said, winking at me as he gave Mama a quick kiss and a tight hug. He put on his hat and coat and lit out the front door, taking the steps two at a time and whistling “Danny Boy” as he went
.

“Wait for me,” I called after him as I scrambled to catch up. Daddy was fast, but he always waited for me at the front gate
.

“Have a good day,” Mama called out after us as she stood on the front porch sipping her coffee and taking in the bright Colorado morning. The sun in the unclouded sky promised a perfect day. The last days of autumn were my favorite. Extra special, like the last bite of Mama’s double-fudge chocolate cake. It was a beautiful mountain morning all right, and I enjoyed it just a bit more because I knew that the next day might bring the snow and cold that would last until spring
.

Daddy and I walked and talked our way down the hill toward Bennett Avenue, Cripple Creek’s main street. We walked past Brown’s Emporium, full of fancy fripperies
,
then past the grocery store and the post office. That’s where we parted ways. Daddy kept going straight to the train station to catch the trolley to his job at the Irish Rose Mine. I turned right, heading uphill again. I closed my eyes as I walked past the painted-ladies house, not wanting to get a glimpse of something, or someone, I shouldn’t. I trudged up a road as steep as a mountain (because it was a mountain) and called out greetings to my friends waiting in the school yard
.

As the sun streamed in through the smudged school-house windows, the morning passed quickly, filled with a reading lesson, a spelling test, and a page of penmanship practice
.

At lunch recess I jumped rope. The smell of pine whirled around me. Dynamite blasts rumbled from deep inside the mine straight across the valley, while the twelve o’clock train hooted and hissed as it chugged around the last curve and into the station. Every once in a while, an ornery donkey hee-hawed its stubbornness
.

Why do I remember this day so well? Because it was the last perfect day. I was ten years old, and I still believed that life would always roll along easy and uncomplicated.

When I daydream about that last perfect day, when I piece together all of the memories into a beautiful, sunny, sparkling picture, I always stop remembering just before the disaster siren from the mine screamed out its warning. I always stop remembering just before everything changed.

The mine’s shrill disaster siren
ripped through the everyday noises of the playground. Silence settled on the valley as the mine’s dynamite blasting ceased and the clanging, stomping ore press went still. All of us on the playground stopped what we were doing. Shielding our eyes against the sun’s brightness, we looked toward the telltale pile of orange-gold tailings that spilled down the mountainside away from the gold mine’s tunneled entrance. We looked hard, carefully scanning the area, hoping to see something that would explain that screeching siren. But we were too far away. Besides, we all knew that the danger was inside the mountain, not outside.