Through the Eyes of a Child - part 2

Hey y'all. In my world it's tomorrow and time to carry on with "Christmas In America". So - we left Frankfurt in a propeller aircraft on Friday, November 13th. I will never forget my first whiff of airplane fuel; still and ever the best perfume on god's earth, eliciting the promise of adventure, the unkown. The noise of the props rumbled like the worst thunderstorm. The tarmac under my feet thrummed as if it, not the plane would take me to a new future. I was eight and anything was possible. Twelve hours later, after a three-hour refueling in Reykjavik, we landed in Newark. Behold a new scent! No, not the Jersey stockyards. The ocean I had just crossed. Never realized how the two completely seperate smells are inextricably linked in my memory...
Don't remember much of the car trip - I lived in the cargo space of Pa's Karman Ghia for three days - but I do recall that we stopped over night twice. I made him stop at whatever motel had the most gaudy neon display. How I loved those lights. One morning we woke up to find that the motel property bordered on a cemetery. Cool!
On to Colorado. Where I was promptly deposited in second grade, not knowing a word of English. You take a kid from anywhere and plop her into a group of kids anywhere else, and let me tell ya, it takes her exactly 6.7 seconds to spot the bully. Of course, he found me first. Sucker followed me home, too. Seems he lived two houses up from mine. I couldn't talk to him, but thanks to Opa, I could cuss like a sailor in German. I could run like the wind and when I refused run anymore, I kicked and bit like a chihuahua on angeldust. Obviously, the kid didn't understand me, but I think he caught the general drift. Wish I could say he never bothered me again, but we were doomed to repeat this epitome of childhood comedy nearly every day after school. Sometimes I won and sent the little shit home crying. Sometimes I was the bawling baby. The only thing that changed was that soon I cussed fluently in English. Pa contributed his part of the language lessons.
I don't remember much of that Christmas, except that it was my first introduction to electric tree lights. You know, those big colorful 9watt energy gobblers that look like glowing easter eggs? And hey - they decorated the houses too so it looked like the whole friggin neighbor hood was on fire. Other than that, the rest of it was, well...Ma n Pa did the best they could, but where once there were many, now there was just us three. Where was the sense of majik? Had I left that behind, too?
It didn't happen until Pa got a job as caretaker for a YMCA ranch. 1400 acres of mountain land, two lakes, stables, miles of trails, toboggan runs and sledding hills, an honest-to-goodness ghost town far back in the woods, and for most of the year, my personal playground. As a 13-year-old girl, I should have missed having friends, but I had school to go to like everyone else. In fact, my early experience with total language immersion actually paid out by giving me a talent for grammar, spelling and bully-pounding. School was easy, but I hated it. I never felt like I quite fit in. Pa must have known this because once every couple of weeks, he'd let me stay out. The terms were that I work with him, and I got a totally different education. That man made sure I learned to shoe horses, mend fence, drive tractors, plow snow and shoot straight. We spent hours cutting wood and polishing the toboggan runs. I learned how to track mountain lion, bear, rabbits, deer and other denizens of the ranch. All the while, Pa talked about what we were doing and why. He also taught me more effective bully control. He taught me about the behavior of the animals we lived among, especially horses and dogs. I quickly figured out that our packs of pups and half-dozen ponies were the best friends I could ask for. I was alone a lot, but I was never lonely. Best of all, in the last year that we lived on the ranch, I found Christmas again.
We'll get to that in part 3. Tomorrow.