Isaac and I were talking about the Peterbang Kids on the way home from town tonight. I don't know where my mother got their name. I don't know if the Peterbang story was a product of her imagination, or if it was something she remembered from her own childhood.
When I first learned about the Peterbang Kids, my family lived south of Johnstown, Nebraska. We had a blowout that we used as a landfill (as folks did in those days), and Mama said that the Peterbang Kids lived there.
The Peterbang Kids matched us exactly. They even had our names (except that their last name was Peterbang), and they looked exactly like us. The one big difference was that they were ornery and naughty, whereas we were sweet and nice. The Peterbangs loved to sneak into our house and do forbidden things and let us suffer the consequences!
When I was six, we moved to a ranch in southern Rock County, Nebraska. The Peterbang Kids slipped onto the very last truckload of stuff that was moved (according to Mama). And of course, they moved right into the junkpile in the blowout at the new place.
Even though I knew that the Peterbangs were imaginary, it was easy to imagine them living in the blowout. Many interesting pieces of junk had been thrown into the blowout over the years -- old cookstoves and broken chairs, rusted out pans and leaky chamber pots, bottles of all sorts, broken dishes, old magazines, snarls of wire, odd bits of broken machinery and every other thing you could imagine. There was plenty of everything that a Peterbang might need.
It was handy that they did make the move with us. When we did something naughty but not too serious, sometimes Mama laughed and said that she guessed the Peterbangs had been visiting again.
The years went by, and I became a teenager and then a grown-up, and finally, I almost forgot the Peterbangs. But when I had children, one of the Peterbangs found me again. It was the Peterbang girl who looks just like me. She was grown-up too, and she had a little girl and boy who looked exactly like my little girl and boy. Her children even had the very same names as my children (except that their last name was Peterbang, of course.)
The Peterbangs first found us in Berlin, and then they slipped onto the plane when we came to Kentucky. They settled in the gully in Clarence's pasture not far from the house. People had thrown a lot of old junk in the gully over the years, so they felt right at home. And they certainly have caused a lot of mischief around here. Just ask my kids!
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