Wendy Dew:
I never got anything brand new my whole life, until I was 14, and the first brand new thing I ever got was a pair of white anklets. I was so proud and I couldn't be more excited about my brand new white anklets.
Well, I put down a bunch of newspaper to keep my socks clean from the floor, and the bottom of my brand new socks were black as heck from the ink on the newspaper. I think I bawled for a week.
I loved my mothers and I loved my dad. They were good, honest, loving, hard working people. I remember my mom would tell me that they were so dirt poor. They lived in Mud Lake, Idaho, and she said "I got so used to the whistling sound of the wind blowing through the cracks in the house that when I left there, I couldn't sleep for months because I couldn't sleep without that 'wooo-wooo' sound."
And I'm a hard working person. I want- my hands are pretty beat up, but I always wanted my hands to look like my mother's, and believe me, they do. I've always worked hard. My dad had me mixing cement most of my life.
We had a 180 acre farm up right over the border in Creston, British Columbia. Beautiful, beautiful little area. We had a mile long pond. My dad's a compulsive builder, so we had 32 rooms in our house; 26 buildings on the place.
In the wintertime, you could not go out the door. It would snow so much that you'd open the door, and it's just solid snow.
You got to get the snow now while it's soft, because by the time the sun is on it all day, it turns to ice and it sets up like cement. And you've got to put trails to everywhere you're going to go, or you're not going to get there. You know.
There was a building for everything. He had a "Shoe House." He would get shoes that people would throw away and put it there for people to come and get free shoes.
There was a dump about a mile away, and we lived at that dump. It was Christmas every day at the dump, and I found a doll, and she was missing a leg and an arm, and it had a head and a body. And I was very in love with that doll. I was so excited that I had that much of a doll.
I never had a fishing pole, and so I'm out there, and I'd get a worm and put on there and tie it on a stick. Anyway, I get a tug, and you can't reel it in. All you can do is run!
So anyway, I remember my first fish. I never let anybody ever eat him. I think- got freezer burned because I kept him in the freezer for so long. I was so proud. There's nobody that came to that property that didn't get to see my fish.
I feel I'm lucky. You know, growing up like I did gives me a chance to see so many sides of life. The real part, like the love between them. My parents were so cute together, and my mothers loved each other so much, and it's made a huge difference in my life.
