I was 14 and Margaret 12; the days were still ringed by make-believe quite undisturbed by facts such as my shoes being worn to the point where each resembled a hungry crocodile. The drifting pace of the days was calm and nearly pure with timelessness. As I snapped an adhesive-patched and wildly warped red tiddlywink into the air, watched it clink on the rim of the glass jar and fall back to the cotton mat, and then, while Margaret as Lady Bluntboots of Houndsditch uttered a derogatory "Ha!", gazed placidly into the blizzard, I was only one minute away from the indirect inauguration of my career and the transition from a land of pretend to that of stark reality.

Out there in the square vista formed by the Breakfast Nook window, Chingo's short, furry, red ears flipped to sharp attention, a scowl of teddybear-like fascination came over her face, and she lurched with her extraordinarily rapid clumsiness out of the snowbank and began a grotesque dance of glee, faintly reminiscent of a dragon in a Chinese street carnival. At the same time came the exuberant cry, "That's the old girl! That's my old Chingo, gained another twenty pounds! How'd you like to trade coats?" — and into the picture pounced Uncle Clyde, making a series of short feints just to the edge of Chingo's glistening teeth, which were bared in pure delight.

Uncle Clyde, at that time 45, was clad in a coonskin coat he had purchased 10 or 15 years previously and which was now worn here and there to the hide; he wore a pair of black bearskin gloves about the size of tennis rackets and thoroughly motheaten, and a hat worn at a severely jaunty angle, the rim turned down all the way around, the crown adorned with three or four grease spots, evidently from the motor of his old yellow Pontiac. His unbuckled overshoes flapped batlike around his ankles as he cavorted capriciously among the flakes, occasionally seizing Chingo by her bushy tail or rubbing her behind the ears. He was holding with his left arm a large bag of groceries, from which waved celery leaves and carrots; nevertheless, he resembled Ty Cobb as he dashed around and jigged about the harassed and happy Chingo; he had an expression of mingled gay roguery and threatening concentration, his coonskin coat scraping swathes from the snowbanks.

In the middle of one of these manoeuvres he glanced toward the Breakfast Nook window, through which Lady Bluntboots and I were rather intently gazing, and waved a huge bearskin glove. Then he started abruptly for the back door, with a brand-new and apparently powerful limp.

I opened the door and he stamped into the entry, set the groceries in a corner, and brushed cascades of snow to the linoleum, exclaiming, "Hello, Uncle Nelson and Aunt Margaret." "Hello, Uncle Clyde," we replied as he began batting his ears and lamely moving from one foot to another. "It's a pretty bad storm for you to be out in. Isn't the Pontiac running?"

"No, that Pontiac is like a damned cinnamon bear. It's been hibernating ever since November. I've walked up and down Five Mile Road this winter until I've worn a trough a foot deep in the cement."

"Won't you come in?"

"No, thanks, I can only stay a minute." He hobbled about the entry, stroking a four-day's growth of whiskers, which glistened silverly as he turned his head. Uncle Clyde had never, as far as anyone knew, shaved himself; for a good many years, he had driven, or been driven, down to a droll and clublike barbershop on Grand River near Grand Boulevard, where, as the razor roved through the lather, he reclined, describing, for example, to a devoted audience, the large number of no-hit games he had once pitched at South Lyon.

"Don't let anybody tell you it's not cold today. Baby, baby, baby. When I went past that cast-iron dog by the Totem Pole Waffle Shop, it had turned blue. The only living thing I've seen outside today is Chingo, but she never really looks comfortable until it's near zero. I came straight here from the grocery hell bent for election, in spite of a fallen arch and a broken kneecap. Oh dear!" He gently seized the knee. "My heart feels like a three-ring circus."

"Uncle Nelson," he said abruptly, massaging the knee, "how'd you like to start helping out some at the Old Dutch Mill?" I was too surprised to reply; he continued with sudden dolor. "Things have been slow as molasses in Greenland; I've stood around the Mill twiddling my thumbs for hours on end without serving a single soul." He sneezed with a kind of casual violence. "Nobody has played that damned fool Old Dutch Mill Golf Course but you and I and Uncle Ora Chilson since 1931." Then he added, amid frequent anguished groans and while staggering into and about the kitchen, clutching his heart, "You'll soon see things humming like a top (groan) though. Your Dad's going to close the Elm store and join me at the Mill; right off the bat I'll start an old-time (groan) ripsnorter of an advertising campaign. There's no use just waiting for business (groan) till you're old as Methuselah."

He pulled from a coonskin pocket and unfolded a huge piece of wrapping paper the color of raw hamburger, covered with huge ornate handwriting, which he studied at arm's length like a duke in a Shakespearean play. "I've written a handbill that will knock everybody in four counties galley west; as soon as the snow thaws, we'll get the Pontiac running and start a handbill blizzard." He capered slowly about the linoleum in a long-outmoded tap routine, looking like a kangaroo off-balance. "Next day, they'll head for the Old Dutch Mill by every road, four abreast, like to the Northville Fair."

A tinge of doubt passed through me, but, as I recalled, Uncle Clyde's descriptions usually had a queer, astonishing sort of oblique accuracy, and the Old Dutch Mill surely bore favorable comparison, point for point, with the Northville Fair.

I pondered for a few seconds, with a kind of minor awe, my recollection of the Mill and environs, over which hung an aura of robust eccentricity, a bucolic charm with shades of the Faerie Queen, Brueghel, Mark Twain, and Lucky Strike advertising.

I saw in my mind's eye the then three-storey structure of peeling white trimmed with green, surmounted on the east and west ends by huge, red latticework fans whirled gently by the wind; painted beneath each of them, a Dutch boy and girl ten feet high, frolicked in Uncle Clyde's version of a Dutch dance, their long swishing yellow hair like sheaves of wheat, huge wooden shoes lifted in vigorous rhythm, their round, broadly smiling faces like setting harvest suns, with bulging cheeks, the whole concept apparently stemming from the Hans Brinker tale of grade school, but giving the effect chiefly of gay intoxication.

In front of the Mill, scattered among four old oaks and elms, were numerous eight-foot signs in red, blue and white reading, for example, "OUR EGGS ARE SO FRESH THEY REALLY SHOULDN'T BE SOLD UNTIL TOMORROW," "WE HAVE BEEN LAYING FOR YOU," and "CHICKENS DRESSED AND UNDRESSED," each with a pastoral scene containing crowing Rhode Island Red roosters, blithe "Dutch" characters, and faintly grinning, heavy-uddered Jerseys and Guernseys.

Making a complete half circle around the Mill, the Old Dutch Midget Golf Course, looking rather the worse for wear, wound among 15 cherry trees on large islands of grass looped by deep sandy driveways. Around each green island were borders of whitewashed rocks and small American flags; from a very tall pole on the top of the Mill, between and slightly above the red fans, billowed the main American flag, twelve feet long, and saw-toothed.

On the easternmost fringe of the Gold Course, alongside the third hole, just below the high sand hill where Great-grandfather had built his log cabin in 1843 and where Uncle Clyde's yellow and brown frame house now reposed, stood the Old Dutch Lunch, inoperative since 1931, built around two cherry trees that existed in the center of the floor and stuck through the roof; nine-tenths of this structure was a screened dining floor decorated on the few wooden areas with mildly gastric cartoons, for example, a strenuously jazzing couple labelled "I call my girl Grapefruit; when I squeeze her she hits me in the eye."

Dominating, or setting the tone of, the scene was "The Old Dutchman Himself," painted on a piece of metal cut to his contours, standing 17 feet high and stationed 100 yards east of the Mill, to catch the eye of the traffic from Detroit as it swept over the sand ridge. He had a red shirt barely buttonable along his profiled stomach, which could have held a barrel of beer, barrel and all (not a mere keg), blue pantaloons of equivalent proportions, and wooden shoes resembling Noah's Ark; his chubby face, mushmelon-shaped nose, shrewd yet naive eyes and huge smile of boisterous irony might call to mind the comparatively ascetic W. C. Fields; he had, too, a thick shock of wheat-colored, ear-length hair, curling sharply outward at the edges; one hand rested casually on his ample hip, the other pointed Millward with a compelling rapture.

Stretching to half a mile in back of the Mill and beyond the edges of the black-raspberry-filled woods were the fields where my father had plowed as a boy in the 1880s and '90s, with the fine old team of Ike and Dandy, before going to Ann Arbor and then to his teaching days in Colorado. In the '20s, Uncle Clyde had staged in these fields, for publicity, occasional mildly grotesque motorcycle races and aeroplane rides, and constructed a large, roofless dance floor, used in 1932 as firewood. Down the center of the farm ran the narrow but quite high sand ridge where I had found many finely fashioned arrowheads; and where it jogged, near the Mill and house, stood six variously sized barns including the quaint one erected long ago without nails. Over this ancient and various homestead now brooded, in the depression's diminuendo, the air of a slightly dissonant and flamboyant polka.

"Just glance this over, Uncle Nelson; see if you have any suggestions," said Uncle Clyde, handing me the wrapping paper and throwing his coat on top of the refrigerator, "I don't see how a raccoon wears this sort of thing the year around." @prose = I read the flourish-laden script while Uncle Clyde, sitting on top of the three-step ladder, held his heart (actually the left collarbone) and sung with a voice and expression resembling a yawning Airedale (an imitation, apparently, of his dog Pat), "When You and I Were Young, Maggie," wincing now and then and saying "Oh dear; oh baby, baby."

Visualizing type of assorted sizes like an 1880 "Wanted for Robbery" poster or an Elizabethan title page, I read: