When I was twelve Elvis, Buddy Holly and hula hoops were invented and became popular. By the fall of that year, everyone knew about them but me. I spent the summer on the farm in South Dakota with my Cousin Carol Rae. My granny said "don't go, those farm kids will pro'ly try to drown you in a stock pond."
It was the summer that they closed off the Oahe Dam and started collecting water. My Uncle owned a great deal of condemned bottom land with crops and livestock still on it. As the water rose over the next several days and weeks, we spent time digging potatoes, herding sheep, cutting and stacking hay, and swimming in the new "lake" . I should say, the men did those things. My cousin and I mostly played in the water.
We drove the 57 Plymouth Station wagen down to where the potatoes were planted and began digging them before the water got there. When we saved all we could and went back to the car, the water had risen over the floorboards and drowned all my firecrackers and my first basemans ball glove.
We waited for the hay stacks to float free from the rising water. The men wrapped cables around them and to a couple of motor boats to tow them to dry ground. Carol and I were swimming around the stacks noticing a great number of small rodents in the hay. I picked up a mole by the tail because I had never seen one before. It wheeled around and bit me on the index finger and wouldn't let go. I flung it across the water with a hunk of my skin in its mouth and still have the scar. I never told anyone because I was afraid I would have to get rabies shots.
We (the men) were herding sheep off of a peninsula that had become an island and I discovered a little pink baby pig and captured him. What a squealer! We took him home to the farm, bottle fed him with the bum lambs and made him my pet for the summer. I went back to the farm a couple years later and my pig had become as big as a house. The next time I went...the pig was gone.
There are other single memories of the summer on the farm and I may tell some later. When I returned home, by airplane, A Western airlines twin engine DC 3 Gooney bird, the stewardess asked if it was my first airplane ride and I told her, "No, I have flown to Japan and back." I don't know if she believed me or not but she didn't give me special attention anymore. I wasn't very smart about women at that age.