TTT 062218

Today's topic is books that are linked to specific memories/moments to your life.

One book is alone in my memory. It's not a great book, but it is funny in places. The memory is the context in which I heard it being read.
It was labor day 1961. My grandparents owned a cabin in Beulah, CO. It was a forty-five minute drive from Pueblo. We drove up on Friday night and planned on going to Lake Isabel on Saturday to fish and relax.
The cabin had two rooms. The front room was lined on the front wall and side wall with books. Most of them Reader's Digest Condensed books. There were also decades of National Geographic. At the back of the room was a sink and wood burning stove. The back room was the bedroom with a double bed. The back door led to an outhouse. The highway ran alongside the cabin and curved around in front of it. There was three acres of land and a small stream on the other side of the cabin.
Saturday morning Mom woke up and started to make a fire in the stove. She filled the cabin with smoke. Dad got up and wondered what she was doing and got the stove working properly. 
Mom told dad to look outside. There was seven inches of snow on the ground. We were not going fishing.
They hoped it was a flash storm and it would be melted off by noon. We brought plenty of food so we ate breakfast and Dad picked out a book that they would read aloud. My brother was eleven and I was nine. This was a time we both have never forgotten.
The book was Pioneer Go Home. It's about a family of hillbillies traveling on a new highway and they break down.
Somehow they got on the road before it was officially opened and when government officials come along insisted they leave. Pa is a stubborn man and doesn't like being pushed around and decides he's going to homestead the land where they've set up camp.
There were numerous funny parts in the book and I remember Mom having trouble reading a couple of places because she was laughing.
By noon the cabin ran out of wood for the stove and Dad went out to get more. He came back with some lumps of coal. In a couple of hours those were used up and we went home. Mom finished the book right about the time we pulled up to the house.
If it hadn't snowed and we went fishing, it would have been just one of many times we went to Lake Isabel. I would have never heard of the book.
Ten years later I was watching an Elvis movie on TV. Follow That Dream. Guess what, it was Pioneer Go Home, made into a movie. Somehow when Elvis goes into the bank and tries to get a loan, it wasn't as funny as in the book.