LIFE ON WILBRAHAM MOUNTAIN, BEFORE THE TORNADO

Marash Girl asks any of you who have stories about the happier days at the cabin in Wilbraham to please send them via comments (below) or email.  Here is one which piggybacks on another and another.

Having grown up summering in the cottage on Wilbraham Mountain, Dr. George Charkoudian built a year round house and swimming pool for himself and his family on the land bordering the family land to the North.  Those were wonderful days.  The Thanksgiving and Easter celebrations, the sitting on top of the rise at the back of his house watching the sunset, the lighting of sparklers with Charlie Merrick to the West of the swimming pool watching the fireworks on the Fourth of July, Uncle George's famous losh kebab which he carefully prepared with a mix of ground lamb and beef and chopped onions and parsley, and then barbecued behind his house, facing the cabin.

One summer, Marash Martha brought her children to visit us at the cabin:  Katie, Caroline, and Alison.  On a beautiful hot summer's day in the 1980s, Marash Girl and her children Nisha, Lorig, Deron, Karoun, along with Katie, Caroline, and Alison, all trekked over to Uncle George's house to go swimming, but were they ever surprised at what they found at the pool:  not frogs, as sometimes happened, not Juliette, Uncle George's Dalmatian, but full-sized cows having a leisurely drink of the water from Uncle George's pool. Yes, they were cows, gigantic cows, we assumed from Nietupski's farm, which bordered our land to the east.  The kids all went running and screaming to the cabin and a call was made to Nietupski, who came to claim his cows.

This incident was apparently not an isolated one.  Here is a memory that Arax writes:
Kermer (Arax's Grandmother Sanjian who was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide) used to tell us that in Marash, before the Genocide, she had her own horses and would hang on to the horse's mane as she rode the horse bareback.  While telling us this, she would motion with her right hand as if grabbing a horse's mane.  Thus it did not really surprise us that whenever stray cows from the Nietupski Farm would break through the barbed wire and stray onto our land,  the outcry from the children brought Kermer (a tiny woman well under 5 feet tall); walking directly to the lead cow, she would grab it by the ear, turn it around, and walk it back to Mr. Nietupski's pasture at the end of our 'driveway', all the other cows following.

The 'driveway' leading east to Nietupski's pasture.

Thus, years later, when Uncle George went to the Town of Wilbraham to ask permission to build a house on what was known as the "Smith land" bordering the family land to the north, by that time a peach orchard owned by Manley, but purchased by Uncle George, the neighbors gathered in support.  Among them were the Nietupski brothers, dairy farmers from the neighboring farm.  They each stood in possibly their first public appearance.  The first brother said, "The Charkoudians are good neighbors; they always return our cows."  The second brother said, "The Charkoudians are good neighbors; they always return our cows."