Dedicated to our parents
for providing me with such a wonderful childhood
My fondest memory of childhood is our huge
family picnics. There were so many people they lined the beach.
My Dad, second from youngest in a family of 12 children, sported
coal black hair and a laugh that was contagious. All but two of
his brothers lived in our town. His sister had twelve children
and the rest of his siblings had at least four children each.
Most of their children had children of their own. I guess you
could say our family did their share to populate the earth.
Families of that size are a rarity today.
Instead of calling our outing a family picnic, we called it a
"Boil Out". It was basically the same thing as a
picnic, except there were no gas barbeques as we have today. We
used Coleman stoves, charcoal barbeques and an open fire. The
beach was uninhabited, and at that time, there were no fire
restrictions. We didn't bring cooked food to the picnic, we
cooked it there.
The boys went fishing while the older girls picked
blueberries on the hill just up from the beach. The little kids,
aged ten and under, which included me, dug clams and picked up
mussels along the shoreline. There were thousands of snails so
we picked them too. It was so much fun. When we had enough, we
cooked them and ate them right there on the beach. Dad with his
cast iron frying pan added some garlic butter to the snails and
we ate escargots, without even knowing what that really was. I
do remember him saying they were a delicacy, but so what? There
were plenty more where they came from.
The adults did a lot of planning and organizing each year for
the Boil Out. Each family was designated certain vegetables,
meats to bring, and we all brought our own drinks. Dessert was
my favorite part though. There were pies, cookies and cakes, and
always more than enough food to feed an army.
We made our own fun. We played horseshoes, built sandcastles,
buried each other in the sand, and went swimming. My favorite
part was singing songs to the guitar music while we all, about
eighty of us, sang songs and roasted marshmallows on broken tree
branches over the open fire.
Those were the days when people appreciated each other for
who they were. We grew up knowing who we were and knowing who
our extended families were. It was an opportunity to spend a day
with all our relatives. We children played together and visited
each other frequently, but this was the one time of the year
when we all got together as a family. I hated for that day to
end every year, but I had the rest of the year to look forward
to the next Boil Out.
