Don and I decided to run away from home and live in the woods near the NY Central RR tracks. On the way we stopped by Carl's house to see if he might want to run away too. Carl was not home. Nobody was home.
Our small bodies slipped easy through the cellar windows of Carl's house. In the cellar we appropriated (Stole) a quart of Jennie's peach preserves. Upstairs we located a half full pack (or was it half empty?) of Lucky Strikes and some matches. We left with our bounty and continued to run away.
It was dark now. In the woods we located our hut made of small trees leaves and grasses. It was a very small hut being about two feet high four feet long and a couple of feet wide. By the hut was a five gallon steel open top bucket. We built a fire in the bucket and placed it at the entrance to our hut.
With our hands we reached into the open top of the mason jar to snare a peach half. It did not take long to eat all the peaches and drink the sweet thick syrup.
In the hut with our feet at the open end we lay and smoked a few of the Lucky Strikes. For blankets we had some burlap sacks. Don slid his body into one of the sacks and when he straightened his feet out he touched the hot bucket of fire. Whoosh! The burlap caught fire but Don quickly extinguished it.
So we lay there and soon the fire went out and we shivered and shook. Many trains passed in the night a hundred yards or so from where we shivered and shook. They were mostly steam trains but now and then a diesel would hum through. Had it been daylight we would have run to see the new fangled train, the mighty diesels.
Come morning time we decided running away was not really a good idea. So we went home to where I lived on the cliff over looking Lake Erie.
There we learned nobody had missed us.
It was not many years later when Don was taken prisoner in North Korea and I was off shore there on a minesweeper.
Don told me years later that being a POW was not much worse than his life growing up at home. It was that way.
And nobody missed us then either.
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