Farmer Leland
While Grandma Lill was getting the house and the gardens under control, Grandpa Lee had several daunting tasks, and I marvel at the memory of how buff he really was in those days. He got busy right away cutting deals with neighbors to pasture cattle. There wasn't going to be any dairy farming and I certainly don't blame him. That game is for people who have three or four strapping sons to help with the myriad chores that go along with it and with the unrelenting and never-ending schedule of tasks it entails.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Grandpa Lee could drum his fingers and drink his coffee while watching about fifteen head of young steers and heifers grazing on the sparse pasture around and above the barn. They drank from the pond and licked on a block of salt up on the hillside.
Stretching from the house alongside the road to the property line was about a twenty acre field in which corn and soybeans could be alternated.
Across the road was about eighty acres which was cropped. Some of it was flat, but the large hill was farmed as well, and that required some strip planting. Grandpa Lee cut deals whereby he would buy the seed, the neighbor would cultivate and harvest the crops and they would have an agreement as to how the profits would be split.
Directly across from the house, there was quite a ditch with three large cottonwood trees growing in it. There were black walnut trees here and there, and three of them bordered the road in front of the house. The one nearest the driveway had been cut down and a large stump remained.
Up the road to the east of the ditch, there was a wooden corral which led to a valley which provided probably eighty more acres of hilly pasture. Lee and a neighbor had probably twenty Holsteins roaming around it, enjoying the graze. Where the valley finally reached its southern limit, deep woods surrounded a natural spring which filled a tank for these cattle to drink from.
I can remember Grandpa Lee fixing fences all the time. They didn't yet have steel posts, so the existing fences were bolts of wood, usually medium size trees that had been cut and sized to about seven feet in length. Lee would use a two handled post hole digger to replace missing or rotted posts. Then he had to roll out barbed wire or pull the old stuff out of the grass and stretch it if it wasn't too rusty to take the strain.
Stretching the barbed wire was a job. Every ten posts or so, and at all corners, a hefty post had to be put in and braced with diagonal posts going to the ground. The wire was stapled firmly to one end and stretched using a "come along", a metal ratchet-lever, until it was very tight. Then he would go along and staple it to each fence post in between. The large, steel staples were pounded into the posts with a common claw hammer and it was not difficult to miss the staple slightly and hit one's thumb.
Cattle were always leaning and rubbing against posts and fences and trees would fall and take the wire down on occasion. Cattle are notoriously fond of going to visit the neighbors and would almost immediately find any breach. Then the phones would start ringing and poor Grandpa Lee had to amass a small army of people to herd them back where they belonged.
But the real killer job that Grandpa Lee had to do all autumn was to cut firewood. The basement of the house had three big rooms with dirt floors. The first room, upon entering from the steps that went down from the outside, was to be filled to the max with firewood. The second room contained the furnace, a big octopus, that sent most of the heat up the chimney. Big tubes connected the firebox to a few registers on the first floor.
Heat rises, and this fact is what we relied on to keep from freezing in this huge house. In the ceilings of the first floor were grates which essentially allowed the heat to keep rising up into the rooms upstairs. They also served as little snooping posts for a young child, who had been sent to bed for the night, to watch and listen to the adults playing cards and laughing in the room below.
To keep the house warm in the winter, Grandpa Lee spent many days out in the woods cutting wood in the summer and autumn heat.
I can vividly remember Grandma Lill handing me a two quart canning jar filled with cool water and telling me to carry it across the flat, lower fields and give it to Grandpa. I waddled through the stubble from the hay which had been cut a couple of weeks earlier and up through the higher weeds and sumac plants to the start of the woods below a big rock outcropping which could be seen from the house and for miles down the road.
Grandpa Lee had a small tractor with a hay wagon attached to it on which he had piled firewood. He was working with a chainsaw, felling fairly large trees, mostly white maples, oaks, and shag bark hickories and then trimming up the larger limbs and cutting them into pieces.
It was blistering hot and he wore a light, but long-sleeved shirt which was soaked in perspiration. He was happy to see me and shut down the saw. When I gave him the large jar of water, he tipped it up and drained the entire thing.
He would work for days cutting and loading the hay wagon, bringing it back to the driveway, then throwing the blocks of wood down the concrete steps and into the basement. Once enough of them had been thrown down to block the passage, he would work his way in there and stack them, slowly filling the room.
The wood smelled sweet and lots of the pieces were still slowly oozing sap. When fall came and he had to build a fire you could hear the noises of the chunks of wood being thrown into the furnace echoing up through the registers in the house. I can remember being awakened in the middle of the night to the shaking of the furnace grates and the clunking of more wood being thrown in.
Those sounds, the sounds of the whippoorwills and owls at night, rain on the tin roof at night, and Grandma Lill's radio playing the local news in the morning, are the sounds of comfort, safety, security, and love. When we were under their roof and in their care, we didn't have a trouble in the world.
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