Saga of the Sanpitch Volume 13, 1981 - Sanpete County

OUR HILL
Thelma G. Burnside
Fairview, Utah 84629
Non-Professional Division, First Place Personal Recollection (Tie)
The kids in town may have had their movies and an occasional dance, but we had our hill, the most
wonderful thing on the farm east of Fairview. It offered endless learning experiences and just plain fun the
whole year round.
A path led from our dooryard up through the alfalfa field to the hill. A little patch of morning glories,
the only ones on the entire farm, grew alongside the path. Papa was always saying he would have to get rid of
them, and it made my heart hurt to think he would want to get rid of anything with such heavenly fragrance.
Our hill was just plain awesome to those of us who lived nearby. We could hardly wait for spring to
come so we could begin our search through the dead leaves under the squaw bushes where tiny yellow and
purple violets pushed their brave little heads up through the damp, moldy earth. A toothpick holder or a tiny
discarded bottle made the perfect vase for this first bouquet of springtime.
The golden buttercups made a special gift to take to "teacher* before school closed for the summer. A
quick dash through the sagebrush just as the sun peeked its head over the mountain top gave us all of those
sweet smelling cups of gold our small, eager hands could hold.
Indian paint brush grew among the sagebrush, too. And a rocky spot was the perfect garden for
incomparable bluebells... so blue they blended perfectly with the blue of a cloudless sky.
Sego lilies swaying on their long stems brought to mind bedtime stories of Great-great Uncle Brigham
and our other pioneer ancestors. We dug the bulbs and tasted the sweet milkiness that had helped sustain
those hardy folk of not so long ago.
Larkspur, forget-me-nots, and myrtle all grew in profusion, and how we loved each smiling blossom.
We gathered bouquets for the animal graveyard where the bones of our beloved animals lay bleaching in the
sun. Old Sue, Nellie, the cow, and the dog with the porcupine quills in his nose...all had been a special part of
our lives.
Then there was the grove of oak brush that made the perfect playhouse. We swept the leaves away
from the center to make kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms. It was our mansion, though furnished only
with an old discarded stove, orange crates for tables and chairs, or cupboards to hold our broken dishes—
dishes too broken to use in the kitchen at the house, but nevertheless still beautiful to us. And what a place
for baking mud cakes and pies...almost good enough to eat.
One day we found a horny toad and ran fast to Papa to show him the baby prehistoric monster. We
were terrified. We just knew it would grow up to become a huge dinosaur, that there were still some left on
this earth, and that surely they had their beginning right there on our hill.
Papa assured us the toad never get any bigger, that it wouldn't hurt us, and that we shouldn't hurt it
either because it ate all kinds of bugs and insects. We obediently took it back to its home under the same
sagebrush on the hill where we found it.
There was a beautiful white lily that bloomed only at night. When we saw one ready to burst open,
we'd gather around it at dusk and, as the night hawks swooped closer and closer, sit squat-legged to watch
each tender, delicate petal break loose and slowly spread out into full bloom. Then, next day, when it began to
wither and die, we would pick it and suck the nectar from the stem, just as we did the honeysuckle that also
grew on our hill.
On extra warm days, or whenever else we were allowed to, we donned old clothes and "swam" in the
irrigation canal that ran around the bottom of our hill. The ice cold water, fresh from nearby canyons, made
our teeth chatter wildly until, finally we dared each other to jump in and quickly get wet clear up to our
62