Ellwin Rogers

I have been asked to contribute to this website. Occasionally I write a little. I have some unpublishedshort stories and I have taken a few of the stories that my grandfather told me and turned them into short stories. Following is a sample of what I have done. If I receive requests to do so I will post others at a later date.

The first is a true experience of Virgil & I.

THE BIRDS

I can remember it like it was yesterday. My brother and I were playing in one of our most favorite spots, across the canal in the cottonwood grove. I was seven and he was just about six. I don’t really know how tall those trees were, probably about twenty five feet to thirty five feet tall, but to a small boy they seemed to reach at least a mile into the sky. It was in the middle of June when the birds eggs have hatched and the baby birds are still in the nest, too small to fly. I don’t remember if it was me or my brother who first noticed the robins busily coming and going to the nest, trying to keep her hungry brood fed. Once we had noticed the nest up there, about three fourths of the way to the top of that big old cottonwood tree, one of us just had to have a look at it. The hardest part was getting the first ten feet to the lower branches. With the help of a rusty old oil drum and my brother I managed to get to that first branch. When I looked down at the ground it seemed like a long way down. That’s when the first doubts flooded over me. I can remember thinking about how far it was to the ground but then the exhilaration of being higher off the ground than I had ever been before poured over me and I felt like a great explorer. I was like Admiral Byrd, I could do any thing I wanted to. It took me a long time climbing up to that nest. Every time I climbed one branch higher I would look down and then I would have to build my courage to go to the next branch. My brother was shouting encouragement to keep me going. About half way up, I remember that I was going to come back down but he called me chicken and said “Okay come down and help me up and I’ll go up there.” I couldn’t let my little brother be braver than I was so I kept going. The higher I went, the harder it got for me to make myself climb higher. Finally I was right beneath the nest. I looked down at my brother, it seemed like a mile down. I could see over the tops of the rest of the trees in the grove. I could see the farms laid out below me. Across the fields I could see the neighbors barns, corrals, and house a half mile away. It was great I could see all over the world. I shouted down to my brother “I can see everything in the world.” “What about the birds?” He shouted back. I took a deep breath and found a branch that was sturdy enough to hold me and climbed up. My face was just barely above the edge of the nest. There were four baby birds in the nest. They only had about half their feathers. This was the first time I had seen baby birds and I thought “boy they sure are ugly.” They were standing up with their beaks open and making a terrible racket. About that time mama robin decided that it was time to protect her young. She came flying through the branches, across the top of the nest, and straight into my face. I lost my balance and fell. I was grabbing ever branch I could on the way down. Each time I grabbed a branch it would break and I would fall on to another and it would break. I would grab the next one and it would break. After what seemed like forever I hit the ground. My shirt was torn, I had scratches on my face and all over my back and stomach and I had a horrible time breathing until I could catch my breath. I remember it well because from that day to this I have trouble climbing to any great heights.

The next is a work of fiction that I came up with for a creative writing class. The basis is true inasmuch as I was tormented by a fly when I was trying to study.

The Fly and The Student
or
How Can I Study.

Statistics is not a subject for which I have a great deal of aptitude, nor do I have a great deal of patience when I am forced to study the subject. With something like eight people in the household, including Colby who is barely two months old, it is very difficult to get the quiet environment which I need to undertake the ordeal of studying Statistics. However, last Saturday in dire need of study time for an exam the first of the week. With my son gone out to seven mile on a mechanical adventure with a friend, at his grandfathers shop, and not expected home until late night, I was struck with a brilliant idea. My three younger daughters, I endowed with the financial ability to peruse a movie that they had been wanting, no begging to see. My wife and older daughter, Colby’s mom, I generously enriched by five dollars each, with which to drive themselves crazy at Wal-Mart, and at last had the whole house to myself for at least three hours.
After they had left I settled at my desk to study and was actually making some headway in the murky netherworld of statistics when I noticed a buzzing in my head. Now this isn’t the first time that statistics have done this to me, but this time it was different, the splitting headache was not present. This realization led me to notice that the buzzing was from external sources, rather than from within.

It became very noticeable when the buzzing stopped as a large, greenish black, ugly fly landed on my nose. The cessation of the buzzing tempted me to let him stay there, but fly feet have an uncanny ability to irritate nerve endings, and on the end of my nose it was very distracting. Automatically my hand went to my nose and as the fly removed himself the buzzing began again. Now it wouldn’t have been nearly so distracting if it had flown off into another room or even better, if it had landed on a wall for a two or three hour nap, but no that fly began to circle like and airplane at a crowded airport, at an altitude of about six inches to two feet from my head. Now usually I have a quick and dirty remedy for such pests, it’s called a fly swatter. Quickly arming myself with said instrument I patiently waited for that fly to land…and waited … and waited …. and waited. After two minutes twenty four and one half seconds I concluded that he must be getting midair refueling and had no intentions of landing. That’s when I took my first swing, a clean miss, not even close. Three more quick strikes and I realized that if I were going to get this pest I was going to have to go to wider coverage. A quick trip to the bathroom and I returned with a hand towel. A couple of quick swipes with it and I had removed a picture of one of my sons from the wall along with a 4-H trophy from the top of the bookshelf. Another quick trip to the bathroom for a bath towel and back to the aerial combat. The bath towel worked better. I removed three more trophies and two pictures in one wild swing. A couple more swings and I had the top of the bookcase and one wall completely rearranged, but that fly was still combat ready. A beach towel only allowed me to clear the three remaining walls of their decorations, along with clearing the lamps from both end tables. As I sank to the couch to catch my breath that fly again landed on the end of my nose. A primeval scream of rage tore from my throat, leaving it raw, as I came to my feet and tore into the kitchen and frantically searched the cupboards for an effective weapon.

In the corner of the very top shelf I found the ultimate weapons. Something that would be as effective as a full spread of photon torpedoes. There they were, two cans, each half full, of Black Flag fly spray, a full can of Raid Ant and Roach, and some kind of room fogger. I laughed demonically, I knew that I had him now, he could not escape. With a spare can under each arm, and one in each hand I began to lay down a blanket of chemicals that I knew that fly could not avoid. As the cans in my hands ran dry it was a matter of only a split second before the spares were in action. As they too began to sputter on empty I sank to the floor and began to feel my way through the dense fog, feeling and groping for the door.
I glimpsed the door through the haze and was reaching up for the handle when the door opened suddenly, spraining three fingers and a thumb. My wife fell back to the porch rail as the mist hit her full in the face. I managed to crawl through the open doorway and lay gasping for air. As I lay on the porch gasping for air and nursing my injured hand my good wife managed to open all the windows so that the gentle Wyoming breeze could clear the house before the girls returned from the movie.
Finally rising to my feet I stood there on the porch waiting for my wife to lift the quarantine. Suddenly a big greenish black fly flew out the open door, landed on my nose, and as I feebly brushed at it, it went into warp drive and disappeared.

Let me know if anyone enjoyed these. If you did I will post some more.