Lois Hodgson
Here’s to Agnes and Loy,
whose lives spanned the era of joy
from Old Barney to Leonard Nimoy.
These stories were written about a time that was, a family that was, and a valley that still is. The winters are still harsh and, though the roads are greatly improved since the time in these stories, they have never been paved. There is no sense in washing your car if you live out in Benewah. After a trip out of the valley behind a logging truck it will just be covered with dirt again. The eight-grade school was closed years ago and, unlike when I was attending school, a bus joggles out from St. Maries to pick up the students every day. Benewah students expect more “snow days” than the kids living in Town. The women’s club is going strong and residents formed a Benewah Valley Association that purchased the old school to be used as a community building. They sponsor many interesting activities each year to raise money for maintenance and improvements on their beloved building.
I wrote the first story for my granddaughter and found I liked writing, especially about that time and those remarkable pioneers. If I don’t tell their story I feel it will be as lost as if it had never been.
Lois Hodgson
Lois Hodgson loved reading from an early age and as a teenager gleefully rhymed almost everything that came out of her mouth. Some of those rhymes were written down on pieces of paper and stuffed in a dresser drawer. She always wanted to be a writer and a painter but thought to be either one of those things, a person must be especially gifted from god. Any way, soon enough, life got in the way of persuing them as she fell in love with a returning WWII soldier that she met the first day of college and in 1949 they were married. She worked at jobs to supplement the barely adequate VA allotment while he got his masters degree. In a scant sixteen months they produced two fine boys. They moved to Filer, in southern Idaho, where he taught school and they added a baby girl to their family. Eighteen years passed before she had the opportunity to resume her college education. She and her eldest son, Kevin, started attending classes at Twin Falls Jr. College in 1968 and they graduated together with AA degrees with in 1970. It was a year later when her husband died and twenty years passed before she had the opportunity to go back to college again.
In 1992 she took both writing and painting at Washington State University and graduated in fine arts in 1995. Her writing instructor told her she was a writer and it was there in writing class that she wrote the prologue to this book. She joined a critiquing group called Writers Bloc and continued to write stories of her early childhood. One of the stories “The Morning From Hell” was awarded an Honorable mention from Writers Digest in their 73rd annual writing competition.
The morning from hell was not yet over and the rancor in the yard only intensified. Now Punk and Miles truly had reason to want their little brother, "sold into slavery and taken away.” They went into the bunkhouse and locked the offending party out. He had no intention of taking this lying down and began to beat on the bunkhouse door with his fists and when that didn't work tried whacking it with a stick.
I was back at the dishpan trying to figure a way to handle this burgeoning problem when the sharp crack of a gunshot pierced the air, followed by a high-pitched scream. Then silence! I glimpsed out the window, as I rushed from the house, to see a solitary figure standing at the entrance to the bunkhouse door, and was relieved to see that he was still standing. Punk stood just inside the door, white as a ghost with a pistol hanging limply from his fingertips.
“I wasn’t going to shoot him,” he said in a quivery little voice. “I just wanted to scare him so he would leave us alone.”
He let me take the pistol from his hand and we found the bullet hole about an inch or so below the top of the threshold. What a price we almost paid for the peace that ensued for the rest of that day. My little brothers melted quietly into the woods and played harmoniously together. Young as they were the shock of what might have happened had affected them deeply and at least one of them was fearful about what I was going to tell Mamma when she returned home. I thought, the less Mamma knew about what went on that morning the better and I didn’t tell her anything. On my way back to the kitchen I took a detour by way of the outhouse and vehemently flung that dreadful pistol into the dark depths of waste below, never to be pointed at anyone again.
