Grandma Lill's Christmas
I remember Christmas of 1953 on the farm, but only snatches of it. Someone, probably Uncle John, had gone up into the woods and cut a Norway pine and it had been erected on a metal stand in the living room in front of the large picture window that looked west down Farmer's Valley Road, which approached from Highway 71. You could see the lights from anywhere outside the house on that side, of course, but you also saw them the instant your car crested the little hill about a quarter mile down the road.
Grandpa Two had died, I believe, but Grandma Two, Elsie, was picked up in Westby by someone and was staying about a week. She had one of the beds in the large bedroom right above the kitchen. This is where I saw her inject her insulin into her thigh. I am not certain whether Aunt Donna was available, but Aunt Jeannie was certainly there, as was her son and my cousin, Danny.
Danny was an infant yet. Jeannie had divorced Tom Sullivan, but there was a rather big package under the tree from his dad. There was nothing from my dad, who was living in Iowa somewhere.
There were, of course, lots of gifts from my grandparents, my mother, and her siblings, as well as from Grandma Two and from Carrie and Si, who drove up from La Crosse, about thirty-five miles distant but not as simple a drive as it is nowadays.
Grandpa Lee's brother, Hazel, was there as well, probably having ridden with Carrie and Si.
We celebrated Christmas eve in our family. I was the only child old enough to be cognizant of the plan. The adults would talk incessantly all day long, even as they prepared dinner. Lill and Lee had a table that could spread apart and take two or three extra "leaves", boards that were inserted to make the table longer. They were all in and her best dishes and silverware, all scrubbed and polished, were on the table, along with cloth napkins.
I had been snooping and shaking gifts for a couple days, holding them up to the light to speculate on what might be within. As Danny got older and more aware, and as the other children of my generation came along and matured, they all got chances to experience this magical anticipation.
Grandma Lill's eyes would twinkle as she watched, but there was no early opening of gifts.
Finally it was time for dinner. Everyone came to the table. Danny was placed in a high chair; I'm not sure he was even walking yet. Then the food was passed around. A typical Christmas dinner was either roast chicken or beef, served with plenty of mashed potatoes and gravy, stewed carrots and onions, and likely a huge bowl of boiled green beans. Guests would have brought large pots of meatballs and a variety of desserts. In addition to that, cakes and cookies abounded.
Grandma Two, Grandma Lill, and Aunt Key, of course, all knew how to make lefse, the Norweigan potato treat. I loved it with butter on it, but some of the adults placed meatballs in it and rolled it up. Christmas would not be complete without it. Lefse was the shape of a bit cloth napkin, made of a potato mixture and rolled flat and dried before a brief dry-baking, which put little brown blemishes all over it.
When the meal was on our plates, the Norweigan prayer was read, Lill and Aunt Key leading and everyone else chiming in:
Y Jese' namn….gar vit il boord
A spice drek….put id toord
So faar ve mad.....ost til gon
So gud til aar…..Y Jese' namn AMEN!
Then Aunt Key would insist on everyone singing Silent Night together, just the first verse:
Silent night...holy night
All is calm...all is bright
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.
Now the feast began in earnest. Lots of laughing. Lots of chatter. Lots of good food. And the grand finale was always Aunt Key's cranberry cobbler. She always brought it, and while she was able, no one ever had the audacity to prempt her or copy her recipe.
The anticipation was nearly killing me, but when dinner was done, we didn't yet get to open the gifts. Lill and Carrie and any number of the other women present slowly and thoroughly did the kitchen clean-up and the dishes.
There was always a huge platter of left over chicken or beef and it went right out on the porch along with extra plates of lefse and desserts. It was cold out there so it was like a refrigerator attached right to the house. These ladies did not make small batches of cookies. There were trays of everyone's interpretation of sandbackles, sugared hats, snowmen, and the little peanut butter cookies with a Hershey's kiss pressed into each one. The snowmen had little candy buttons going down their fronts. The Norweigan hats were spackled with various colors of glistening sugar or chocolate beads.
When all the kitchen work was finally finished, we gathered into the large living room for the opening of gifts. Danny got lifted up to put the little angel on the very top of the tree. It was always the youngest child present that got to do this and my time was over. Then there were a few Christmas songs sung just to whip the anticipation into a frenzy.
Presents were passed out and people took turns opening one, starting with the youngest. Nowadays we take turns one gift at a time but in those days, when there were only two or three very young kids and we were rambunctious boys, they let each child open all his gifts in one shot. That way we could play with our toys afterward and not detract from the adults enjoying their turns.
Of the many, many gifts, several of them would be practical in nature. I would have gotten at least one pair of pajamas, made by Grandma Lill. They would be flannel and very warm. I would open a package and in there would be several pairs of socks. One or two homemade sweaters would be in the mix. These gifts would be tossed aside without much enthusiasm, and the adults would laugh.
Lill and Lee would get boxes of Keeley's chocolates. They came in a yellow box with brown lettering and each crème-filled chocolate was individually wrapped, half in yellow paper and the other half in brown. The yellow ones contained white crème and the brown ones contained chocolate crème.
The most pleasing gifts for a six year old child with about a four-year-old maturity level were things like a plastic airplane or navy ship, a model car, toy soldiers made of green plastic, perhaps a cap-gun. A cap gun had a trigger that operated a hammer which slapped up against a "cap", a little dot of gunpowder which made a snappy report as it quickly burned. The caps came in a roll and when you shot one, the action of the trigger advanced the next one up onto a little plate for the next shot.
I would have gotten some edible treats as well, perhaps a box of chocolate covered cherries to be doled out as I could handle them.
Danny's large box from his dad was opened. He was hardly even aware that it was for him, but tore at the paper because it was fun. The box inside contained a nice, big, red wagon, a Radio Flyer. It was awesome and I was green with envy. I had gotten nothing even close. Uncle John got busy putting it together. The wheels had to be put on and the handle fastened into a yoke in front.
It was astonishing and my nose was a little out of joint as Danny was picked up and placed into the wagon, hardly even knowing what it was all about.
Not to worry! As it turned out, it was as if the wagon was meant for me, because after that little introductory ride, it was of little use to one who could not yet walk! That wagon stayed at the farm and I rode it all over the front cement deck any time I wished, until Danny was old enough to actually play in it. We had more fun together in that wagon, pulling it up the hill toward the pump house, both climbing in and rolling down, trying to miss Grandma Lill's bushes and ultimately jack-knifing and both falling out into the grass. Over and over and over.
I hope Tom Sullivan was told just how much fun he enabled when he sent that Christmas gift to his boy. I'll bet Grandma and Grandpa got some chuckles watching from the kitchen window. But that fun was all to be had the next summer when the snow was gone and the grass was a lush mat upon which to land.
As it got late, we would be put to bed, but that was fun, too, because I could watch and listen through the grate in the floor. My mother and I were living right above that room and our heat came up through that grate, so it had to be left open.
Gradually, people like Carrie and Si and Great Uncle Hazel, would head home and you could listen to them shifting through the gears as they drove down the dirt road and their taillights finally disappeared over the little hill.
There would be a grating sound as Grandpa Lee shook out the embers in the basement furnace and some loud clunking as he threw in two or three "all nighters", chunks of wood that were large enough that they would take a long time burning and supply us with even heat all night long until he had to get up and repeat the process.
Ultimately the laughter and clinking of dishes from late night snackers would subside and my mother would creep into the bedroom and slide in with me.
Christmas might be over, but there would be lots of treats as we finished up what Grandma Lill didn't send with people. It would be days and perhaps even weeks before I lost or broke all my toys. I would be warm at night with the pajamas and during the day with the sweaters.
And that Radio Flyer wagon of Danny's lasted years and years.
All the magic of Christmas, for all those people, was created mainly by the efforts of Grandma Lill and in retrospect, I just sit and wonder how she did it all, from tilling and planting the garden to the endless food processing and cleaning of the house, to hostessing and cleaning up afterward. She seemed tireless and all the while her eyes would twinkle with the joy of it all.
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Friday, February 21, 2020
Hickory Hill
Hickory Hill
In the fall of 1953 I was six years old and the time came for me to start school. I had filled many little calendar books with scribbles and done some coloring. The adults made a big deal out of it so I was naturally skeptical. They had gotten me some new blue jeans and plaid shirts. I think my mother was working at Camp McCoy and Grandma Lill actually might have been as well. She was earning extra money to pay for Uncle John's college tuition by cleaning out officers' barracks.
They had gotten me a little square lunch bucket with a cowboy scene painted on it and there I sat on the walnut stump out in front of the house.
It wasn't a full sized school bus like we see nowadays because there were only eight or ten of us that had to be transported. It was more like a van and it seems to me that Morgan Jones was the driver. Morgan Jones lived in a square brick house just beyond Highway 71 and the Community Hall. His son, Alan, lived on our side of the highway and to the south. Alan farmed the old homestead and Grandpa Lee occasionally stopped there to talk about small, joint, cooperative ventures with grazing or cropping.
I got in and took a seat.
There was a one room school house only a quarter of a mile down the road but it was from the real old days and wasn't used anymore. It just sat there in a little carved out lot from George Hudson's farm. Three and a half miles away was Hickory Hill School not too far off of highway 71. That was where we were headed.
I immediately felt quite a bit of unease. Not only did everyone else on the bus seem to know one another, but I was by far the smallest person. It didn't even take a half mile of bouncing along on the dirt road for some of the more aggressive boys in the higher grades to begin laughing at me and invading my space, a little nudge here or a shove there, probing and grabbing at me.
I was about to cry over it when the biggest of them suddenly whapped one of the boys picking on me. It was Kermit Schultz who was probably a third grader. He made it clear for them to leave me alone and that was the end of it.
The Schultz's lived further up the road and up over a ridge. The road actually petered out into a farm path long before reaching their farmhouse. They had no electricity and lived very primitively. Grandpa Lee had some pasture sharing deals with them on and off, but they were treated by most people as pariahs. I only met a few of them. Erwin was the oldest sibling, I believe, and had had a part of a tree fall on him and he got a bad back injury from it.
Billy Schultz was an older juvenile and had a car which he somehow drove in and out of that farm, at least in the summer. He would go zooming by once in a while, feeling his oats.
Kermit was just a little older than me and a large husky lad. He wasn't scholarly, but had a sense of proper behavior of bullies toward little whelps. I always liked him after that because, for no particular reason, he stood up for me against those little mobsters.
Hickory Hill school was another archetypical one-room school. It had a little ante room that you walked through before getting into the big one, sort of like a small church. There were about four of us first graders, two second graders (a boy and a girl), and maybe fifteen others spread across the higher grades up through eighth grade. There was a high school in Sparta.
One teacher. One teacher's helper.
They had us first graders up front and center because we were squirrely. We would be given a piece of very thin paper, the quality of newspaper, which was ruled with dark horizontal lines and one dotted line between them. We practiced making our letters with a fat pencil. It was not easy to do and after a couple, I tired of this and just looked around for a while. The teacher, having done a few practice rounds with each of us, had moved on to the two second graders, and then on to the third graders. When she had gotten back to us, I had perhaps half of the top line of my page filled with attempts. This, she informed me, was not good enough!
While I filled my page with attempts at copying letters, the rest of the kids went out for recess. I could hear them laughing and yelling as they played football and ran around the back yard of the school.
We went on to reading after recess. We had the so-called "Dick and Jane" books which consisted of a colorful picture and a smattering of words about it which we practiced over and over.
"Here is Dick." "Dick can run." See Dick Run!" "Run, Dick, run!" "This is Jane." "Jane can run." "Run, Jane, run!" "Dick and Jane can run."
By the end of the first week we were reading also about Sally and Spot, their dog. The teacher also had us memorizing the sounds each letter made and before long we had some word attack skills. I took to it quickly because it was simple and fun. When I would get home, Lill and Lee and particularly my mother, would be thrilled that I could read these little words.
I actually got to go out for recess after a few days of struggling for power with the teacher, and learned a disturbing thing. I was very, very small. I probably weighed forty pounds and the other children, even the girls, probably weighed fifty to seventy. I was also, by a considerable margin, the shortest person in the place. Playing football was not fun at all because I got shoved around quite easily.
My only consolation was that I was much faster on my feet than anyone else. No one could catch me or beat me in a footrace, not even the sixth grade boys.
Lunchtime was an interesting event in the one room school. We had our lunch boxes which were stowed in the anteroom along with our boots, coats, hats, and mittens. We would be outside when the little bell was rung by the teacher. Two of the older kids had, by then, obtained a pan of water from the hand pump in front of the school, and it had been warmed on the stove by the teacher or her helper.
We would file in, hang up our coats, and take off our boots if they had been needed. Then we filed past these two children. One of them poured a dipper of the warm water over our extended hands and we rubbed them together with a little soap. Then a dipper of water was poured over them to rinse them off, and we dried them on a big towel.
Now we were free to take our lunch boxes and eat at our desks.
Grandma Lill would always have a sandwich made of a slab of home made bread with some butter and dried beef on it. Dried beef was like our present day sandwich meat, only cut very thin and it was very salty. There would also be a piece of fruit, usually an apple, and a cookie. The school provided a little half-pint bottle of milk with a circular cardboard plug in the top, covered by a thin cardboard wrapper that was cinched around the top. We removed the cardboard wrapper and then pried out the cardboard disk and drank right from the bottle.
Every two weeks or so, we would get the option of chocolate milk.
The school had two outdoor toilets, one on each side, a boys' outhouse and a girls' outhouse. You learned to use them during recess time for sure, because the teacher was not going to play a lot of games with you later about needing to go to the outhouse over and over. That was going to cost you.
About once a month these rather big, dark red pills were passed out, one to each child. We didn't have iodized salt in those days and these pills, which were sucked on like a candy, provided us with a small dose of iodine. They called these pills goiter pills, as iodine deficiency can result in goiters. I am glad they gave us the goiter pills because if you look up a picture of someone with a goiter you will see that it is as if their head is sitting on top of a bowling ball instead of their neck. Oddly enough, iodine deficiency can result also in cretinism and I just got done relating above that I was pretty close to being a cretin. Maybe they helped me with this. If they did, it sure took a while.
After several weeks, I was good enough with my phonics skills that I could read out of books that my mother had. One book she had was called "Shakespeare's Sweetheart" and I could read this iambic pentameter stuff pretty well and it was exciting, except that I didn't have a clue as to what any of it meant. I had no comprehension beyond Dick and Jane and see Spot run. It was very frustrating and I would cry after reading it. She would try and reassure me.
If I am not mistaken, we were pretty proud of ourselves for learning to count to a hundred without making mistakes, and we had internalized a general idea of tens, twenties, thirties, and so forth. We might have been learning some simple addition and subtraction of quantities less than ten.
Sometimes children from the upper grades would be given the task of helping us while the teacher busied herself with the intermediate grades. I don't know how she did it, except that there were small numbers in each grade.
I like to remind people that twelve men have walked on the moon and six of them attended one-room schools. Deke Slayton, Sparta's astronaut. didn't get to walk on the moon, but I am sure he attended a one-room school in the days that my mother was an elementary student, and he ended up being the chief administrator for the whole lot of them.
As I settled in to the routines at Hickory Hill school, who would ever guess that I would not even finish out the first grade year!
In the fall of 1953 I was six years old and the time came for me to start school. I had filled many little calendar books with scribbles and done some coloring. The adults made a big deal out of it so I was naturally skeptical. They had gotten me some new blue jeans and plaid shirts. I think my mother was working at Camp McCoy and Grandma Lill actually might have been as well. She was earning extra money to pay for Uncle John's college tuition by cleaning out officers' barracks.
They had gotten me a little square lunch bucket with a cowboy scene painted on it and there I sat on the walnut stump out in front of the house.
It wasn't a full sized school bus like we see nowadays because there were only eight or ten of us that had to be transported. It was more like a van and it seems to me that Morgan Jones was the driver. Morgan Jones lived in a square brick house just beyond Highway 71 and the Community Hall. His son, Alan, lived on our side of the highway and to the south. Alan farmed the old homestead and Grandpa Lee occasionally stopped there to talk about small, joint, cooperative ventures with grazing or cropping.
I got in and took a seat.
There was a one room school house only a quarter of a mile down the road but it was from the real old days and wasn't used anymore. It just sat there in a little carved out lot from George Hudson's farm. Three and a half miles away was Hickory Hill School not too far off of highway 71. That was where we were headed.
I immediately felt quite a bit of unease. Not only did everyone else on the bus seem to know one another, but I was by far the smallest person. It didn't even take a half mile of bouncing along on the dirt road for some of the more aggressive boys in the higher grades to begin laughing at me and invading my space, a little nudge here or a shove there, probing and grabbing at me.
I was about to cry over it when the biggest of them suddenly whapped one of the boys picking on me. It was Kermit Schultz who was probably a third grader. He made it clear for them to leave me alone and that was the end of it.
The Schultz's lived further up the road and up over a ridge. The road actually petered out into a farm path long before reaching their farmhouse. They had no electricity and lived very primitively. Grandpa Lee had some pasture sharing deals with them on and off, but they were treated by most people as pariahs. I only met a few of them. Erwin was the oldest sibling, I believe, and had had a part of a tree fall on him and he got a bad back injury from it.
Billy Schultz was an older juvenile and had a car which he somehow drove in and out of that farm, at least in the summer. He would go zooming by once in a while, feeling his oats.
Kermit was just a little older than me and a large husky lad. He wasn't scholarly, but had a sense of proper behavior of bullies toward little whelps. I always liked him after that because, for no particular reason, he stood up for me against those little mobsters.
Hickory Hill school was another archetypical one-room school. It had a little ante room that you walked through before getting into the big one, sort of like a small church. There were about four of us first graders, two second graders (a boy and a girl), and maybe fifteen others spread across the higher grades up through eighth grade. There was a high school in Sparta.
One teacher. One teacher's helper.
They had us first graders up front and center because we were squirrely. We would be given a piece of very thin paper, the quality of newspaper, which was ruled with dark horizontal lines and one dotted line between them. We practiced making our letters with a fat pencil. It was not easy to do and after a couple, I tired of this and just looked around for a while. The teacher, having done a few practice rounds with each of us, had moved on to the two second graders, and then on to the third graders. When she had gotten back to us, I had perhaps half of the top line of my page filled with attempts. This, she informed me, was not good enough!
While I filled my page with attempts at copying letters, the rest of the kids went out for recess. I could hear them laughing and yelling as they played football and ran around the back yard of the school.
We went on to reading after recess. We had the so-called "Dick and Jane" books which consisted of a colorful picture and a smattering of words about it which we practiced over and over.
"Here is Dick." "Dick can run." See Dick Run!" "Run, Dick, run!" "This is Jane." "Jane can run." "Run, Jane, run!" "Dick and Jane can run."
By the end of the first week we were reading also about Sally and Spot, their dog. The teacher also had us memorizing the sounds each letter made and before long we had some word attack skills. I took to it quickly because it was simple and fun. When I would get home, Lill and Lee and particularly my mother, would be thrilled that I could read these little words.
I actually got to go out for recess after a few days of struggling for power with the teacher, and learned a disturbing thing. I was very, very small. I probably weighed forty pounds and the other children, even the girls, probably weighed fifty to seventy. I was also, by a considerable margin, the shortest person in the place. Playing football was not fun at all because I got shoved around quite easily.
My only consolation was that I was much faster on my feet than anyone else. No one could catch me or beat me in a footrace, not even the sixth grade boys.
Lunchtime was an interesting event in the one room school. We had our lunch boxes which were stowed in the anteroom along with our boots, coats, hats, and mittens. We would be outside when the little bell was rung by the teacher. Two of the older kids had, by then, obtained a pan of water from the hand pump in front of the school, and it had been warmed on the stove by the teacher or her helper.
We would file in, hang up our coats, and take off our boots if they had been needed. Then we filed past these two children. One of them poured a dipper of the warm water over our extended hands and we rubbed them together with a little soap. Then a dipper of water was poured over them to rinse them off, and we dried them on a big towel.
Now we were free to take our lunch boxes and eat at our desks.
Grandma Lill would always have a sandwich made of a slab of home made bread with some butter and dried beef on it. Dried beef was like our present day sandwich meat, only cut very thin and it was very salty. There would also be a piece of fruit, usually an apple, and a cookie. The school provided a little half-pint bottle of milk with a circular cardboard plug in the top, covered by a thin cardboard wrapper that was cinched around the top. We removed the cardboard wrapper and then pried out the cardboard disk and drank right from the bottle.
Every two weeks or so, we would get the option of chocolate milk.
The school had two outdoor toilets, one on each side, a boys' outhouse and a girls' outhouse. You learned to use them during recess time for sure, because the teacher was not going to play a lot of games with you later about needing to go to the outhouse over and over. That was going to cost you.
About once a month these rather big, dark red pills were passed out, one to each child. We didn't have iodized salt in those days and these pills, which were sucked on like a candy, provided us with a small dose of iodine. They called these pills goiter pills, as iodine deficiency can result in goiters. I am glad they gave us the goiter pills because if you look up a picture of someone with a goiter you will see that it is as if their head is sitting on top of a bowling ball instead of their neck. Oddly enough, iodine deficiency can result also in cretinism and I just got done relating above that I was pretty close to being a cretin. Maybe they helped me with this. If they did, it sure took a while.
After several weeks, I was good enough with my phonics skills that I could read out of books that my mother had. One book she had was called "Shakespeare's Sweetheart" and I could read this iambic pentameter stuff pretty well and it was exciting, except that I didn't have a clue as to what any of it meant. I had no comprehension beyond Dick and Jane and see Spot run. It was very frustrating and I would cry after reading it. She would try and reassure me.
If I am not mistaken, we were pretty proud of ourselves for learning to count to a hundred without making mistakes, and we had internalized a general idea of tens, twenties, thirties, and so forth. We might have been learning some simple addition and subtraction of quantities less than ten.
Sometimes children from the upper grades would be given the task of helping us while the teacher busied herself with the intermediate grades. I don't know how she did it, except that there were small numbers in each grade.
I like to remind people that twelve men have walked on the moon and six of them attended one-room schools. Deke Slayton, Sparta's astronaut. didn't get to walk on the moon, but I am sure he attended a one-room school in the days that my mother was an elementary student, and he ended up being the chief administrator for the whole lot of them.
As I settled in to the routines at Hickory Hill school, who would ever guess that I would not even finish out the first grade year!
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Carrie (Nottestad) Nelson
Carrie (Nottestad) Nelson
Si Nelson told me once that when he graduated high school, he had absolutely no clue as to what he might do for a living or how he could be of any use whatsoever to society and that this had been very troubling to him. He was walking in downtown La Crosse and noticed a sign posted in one of the windows of Doerflingers, a large department store, advertising a need for a window dresser.
A window dresser just puts items for sale onto mannequins or improvised displays in the windows along the sidewalks and adjusts the lighting and other features. Si went in and applied for the job and got it. He told me it changed his life forever. He took to it like a duck to water! Not only did he knock the job right out of the ball park, but he soon was being sought after to decorate the city light poles for Christmas.
Soon after that he was decorating the streets of other nearby towns and started up his own business, Nelson Flag and Display, in south La Crosse. This shop became one of the most wonderful places for a young kid to roam around in. There were scores of tables and counters with hundreds of bins full of all kinds of little decorative objects--flags, ribbons, pins, ornaments of all types, little objects for decorating tables, windows, or even yards, almost like a toy factory.
Si said that falling into this career was the second most important miracle that ever happened to him.
The first, he told me, in a most serious tone, was Carrie Nottestad, his wife. He had met and fallen in love with Grandma Lill's sister and had no idea of how he might pull himself up out of his boyhood and become someone capable of commandeering her affection, and the Doerflingers job and subsequent career provided the twin miracles he needed.
By the time I came onto the scene, Carrie and Si were older and kind of like another Lill and Lee. Their son Ron and my Uncle John were dealing with college and the military but both had worked for Si in his business of decorating town streets.
Lill and Carrie loved one another very much and Carrie and Si were an automatic guest at their house for anything that went on. Other Hanson and Nottestad siblings would visit them a lot, but nowhere near as often as Carrie and Si. Likewise, if we had occasion to go to La Crosse, we never did so without spending an afternoon at their house.
I was always a little bored at Carrie and Si's house. The adults chattered endlessly, catching one another up on all the news gleaned from letters each had received from other relatives. Carrie would drag out this medium sized brown wicker basket containing dozens of domino-like blocks. They might have been majong tiles or something like that. They could be stacked up to make structures, or lined up to knock each other down in long, curvy rows, in a chain reaction.
She also had a container of smooth river stones collected from different places. Grandma Lill also collected stones from places she and Lee went, so perhaps it had some connection to their childhood.
After an hour of this, however, I would get kind of bored, and would sometimes nap on the rug while the adults shared news. There were no computers or internet in those days and telephone calls outside one's own town were expensive. Everyone communicated with their loved ones by writing letters. Grandma Lill would have several letters in her purse, which she would either read aloud, if there were multiple people present, or simply pass on to Carrie. These letters would often be eight or ten handwritten pages.
Aunt Carrie had a laser-like glance that penetrated right into you. She also had no filter; she said what was on her mind. If you needed a haircut, she bored her intense blue eyes into you and said, "what do you want to look like a girl for?"
Unlike Grandma Lill, who could rule the roost but was amenable to cajoling around and negotiating with at times, Aunt Carrie was unapologetically strong minded. She called the shots. Uncle Si kind of laughed his way through each day, never angered by her zeal or fading in his devotion to her. He got to go to the Bodega, downtown, for coffee clutch with his buddies in the morning and went fishing on the Mississippi River if it didn't interfere with her plans. It seemed to me that he happily deferred all other decisions to her and I never heard, nor heard of, any instance where he criticized or lamented her. Si didn't seem to have a negative bone in his entire body and everyone loved him.
For all her bossiness, Great Aunt Carrie, or Aunt Key, as she was nicknamed, was an extremely loving person and all her energies always went toward the betterment of someone or something. It's just that she wasn't afraid to speak out if anyone deviated from the correct path to achieving that betterment. She was a generous and wonderful woman.
I will later mention Aunt Key and Christmas together because she had so much influence on it, but any time she visited, she immediately sized up the work situation that Grandma Lill was embroiled in. Lill, of course, would have preempted nearly all tasks that needed to be done, but there was always something--a little stack of utensils that had been used for baking but had not yet been cleaned up and put away; a floor that needed one more mopping; or a big pan of carrots or potatoes that needed to be peeled.
After the meal, Lill would suggest that everyone go into the living or dining room and talk, but Aunt Key would not have it. They could talk while they did the dishes together and cleaned up all the kitchen. In those days, the women did the housework and it was unusual, but not unheard of for the men to pitch in. I remember my Uncle John helping Grandma Lill by drying dishes and putting them away.
Grandpa Lee liked Uncle Si a lot and they would sit and talk about baseball. I think that Grandpa Lee was a New York Yankee fan. Si loved the Milwaukee Braves, and later the Milwaukee Brewers. He would always have the TV on if there was a game.
I can remember Grandpa Lee smoking his pipe and watching a baseball game with Si. The team they were rooting for was ahead perhaps by one run, but the other team was at bat with two or three men on base. The batter hit a home run and Grandpa Lee commented with disgust, "well, he pitched his way out of that jam."
My mother loved Aunt Key, of course, but was a little disdainful of her, probably because Aunt Key could not be fooled by the usual palaver. While growing up, my mother and her siblings engaged in the usual number of chicaneries and probably gave Grandma Lill a fair number of snowjob explanations, which Aunt Key would naturally see right through and tip her off about. My mom would not have appreciated that extra scrutiny.
My mom was not one to be bossed around. Being a maverick, she would resist any authoritarian impingements on principle alone. She also did not like criticism, even if constructive, as though she were locked permanently at age sixteen. It was just the way she was. I may have inherited and/or learned some of this from her.
Nonetheless, Aunt Key and Uncle Si were occasionally around and always welcome; and they were always good to me.
Grandma Lill's house somehow became the locus of weekend visitors and any and all relatives seemed to appear, particularly her sister Carrie and her husband Si. Si was short for Silas. Carrie and Si lived in La Crosse.
A window dresser just puts items for sale onto mannequins or improvised displays in the windows along the sidewalks and adjusts the lighting and other features. Si went in and applied for the job and got it. He told me it changed his life forever. He took to it like a duck to water! Not only did he knock the job right out of the ball park, but he soon was being sought after to decorate the city light poles for Christmas.
Soon after that he was decorating the streets of other nearby towns and started up his own business, Nelson Flag and Display, in south La Crosse. This shop became one of the most wonderful places for a young kid to roam around in. There were scores of tables and counters with hundreds of bins full of all kinds of little decorative objects--flags, ribbons, pins, ornaments of all types, little objects for decorating tables, windows, or even yards, almost like a toy factory.
Si said that falling into this career was the second most important miracle that ever happened to him.
The first, he told me, in a most serious tone, was Carrie Nottestad, his wife. He had met and fallen in love with Grandma Lill's sister and had no idea of how he might pull himself up out of his boyhood and become someone capable of commandeering her affection, and the Doerflingers job and subsequent career provided the twin miracles he needed.
By the time I came onto the scene, Carrie and Si were older and kind of like another Lill and Lee. Their son Ron and my Uncle John were dealing with college and the military but both had worked for Si in his business of decorating town streets.
Lill and Carrie loved one another very much and Carrie and Si were an automatic guest at their house for anything that went on. Other Hanson and Nottestad siblings would visit them a lot, but nowhere near as often as Carrie and Si. Likewise, if we had occasion to go to La Crosse, we never did so without spending an afternoon at their house.
I was always a little bored at Carrie and Si's house. The adults chattered endlessly, catching one another up on all the news gleaned from letters each had received from other relatives. Carrie would drag out this medium sized brown wicker basket containing dozens of domino-like blocks. They might have been majong tiles or something like that. They could be stacked up to make structures, or lined up to knock each other down in long, curvy rows, in a chain reaction.
She also had a container of smooth river stones collected from different places. Grandma Lill also collected stones from places she and Lee went, so perhaps it had some connection to their childhood.
After an hour of this, however, I would get kind of bored, and would sometimes nap on the rug while the adults shared news. There were no computers or internet in those days and telephone calls outside one's own town were expensive. Everyone communicated with their loved ones by writing letters. Grandma Lill would have several letters in her purse, which she would either read aloud, if there were multiple people present, or simply pass on to Carrie. These letters would often be eight or ten handwritten pages.
Aunt Carrie had a laser-like glance that penetrated right into you. She also had no filter; she said what was on her mind. If you needed a haircut, she bored her intense blue eyes into you and said, "what do you want to look like a girl for?"
Unlike Grandma Lill, who could rule the roost but was amenable to cajoling around and negotiating with at times, Aunt Carrie was unapologetically strong minded. She called the shots. Uncle Si kind of laughed his way through each day, never angered by her zeal or fading in his devotion to her. He got to go to the Bodega, downtown, for coffee clutch with his buddies in the morning and went fishing on the Mississippi River if it didn't interfere with her plans. It seemed to me that he happily deferred all other decisions to her and I never heard, nor heard of, any instance where he criticized or lamented her. Si didn't seem to have a negative bone in his entire body and everyone loved him.
For all her bossiness, Great Aunt Carrie, or Aunt Key, as she was nicknamed, was an extremely loving person and all her energies always went toward the betterment of someone or something. It's just that she wasn't afraid to speak out if anyone deviated from the correct path to achieving that betterment. She was a generous and wonderful woman.
I will later mention Aunt Key and Christmas together because she had so much influence on it, but any time she visited, she immediately sized up the work situation that Grandma Lill was embroiled in. Lill, of course, would have preempted nearly all tasks that needed to be done, but there was always something--a little stack of utensils that had been used for baking but had not yet been cleaned up and put away; a floor that needed one more mopping; or a big pan of carrots or potatoes that needed to be peeled.
After the meal, Lill would suggest that everyone go into the living or dining room and talk, but Aunt Key would not have it. They could talk while they did the dishes together and cleaned up all the kitchen. In those days, the women did the housework and it was unusual, but not unheard of for the men to pitch in. I remember my Uncle John helping Grandma Lill by drying dishes and putting them away.
Grandpa Lee liked Uncle Si a lot and they would sit and talk about baseball. I think that Grandpa Lee was a New York Yankee fan. Si loved the Milwaukee Braves, and later the Milwaukee Brewers. He would always have the TV on if there was a game.
I can remember Grandpa Lee smoking his pipe and watching a baseball game with Si. The team they were rooting for was ahead perhaps by one run, but the other team was at bat with two or three men on base. The batter hit a home run and Grandpa Lee commented with disgust, "well, he pitched his way out of that jam."
My mother loved Aunt Key, of course, but was a little disdainful of her, probably because Aunt Key could not be fooled by the usual palaver. While growing up, my mother and her siblings engaged in the usual number of chicaneries and probably gave Grandma Lill a fair number of snowjob explanations, which Aunt Key would naturally see right through and tip her off about. My mom would not have appreciated that extra scrutiny.
My mom was not one to be bossed around. Being a maverick, she would resist any authoritarian impingements on principle alone. She also did not like criticism, even if constructive, as though she were locked permanently at age sixteen. It was just the way she was. I may have inherited and/or learned some of this from her.
Nonetheless, Aunt Key and Uncle Si were occasionally around and always welcome; and they were always good to me.
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
First Near Death Experience
My First Near Death Experience
I had to be about five years old and it had to be the first summer at the farm. I had been snooping in the little attic above the garage on a regular basis and when I came upon a small baby bird flopping along on the ground near the house, I knew just what it needed.
Clambering up the wooden outside stairway, I pulled the stick out of the hasp and entered the little attic to retrieve a bird cage which was stored up there along with a hundred other things from the old house in Sparta. It was a cheap little thing, probably all that remained with one of my mother's or one of her siblings' experiment with keeping a pet.
I dragged it down, scooped up the fledgling and inserted him through the little spring-loaded door and took him to show Grandma Lill. She was busy working, of course, and gave me the cursory bit of attention that I was seeking. She peered very attentively at the situation, at the bird, clucked something or other and smiled as I moved on, holding my cage.
The next thought that entered my mind was that I had to show Grandpa Lee. I had already bonded with that bird. He was my best friend. I can remember being just ecstatic.
Grandpa Lee was up the road working on a fence in the cow pasture. There was quite a ditch across the road from the house and he had determined that it would be advantageous to fence it off from the cattle, otherwise they would continue to wallow around in there and further degrade the area.
Birdcage in hand and barefooted, I began the trek up the dirt road to the corral. The corral was not huge, but was built of split logs across thick posts, so that a few animals could be herded or coaxed into it, contained by some temporary makeshift wire fences, and eventually loaded into a truck.
I climbed up and over the split logs and down the other side, bringing with me the bird in its cage.
Just past the side rails, the hillside was moderately steep, with a clay hillside to the left and Grandpa Lee about twenty yards down to the right, working on seating a fence post. He was surrounded by about 15 to 20 white-faced Hereford heifers and steers. They were curious as to the goings on and were all around him.
I worked my way a bit closer, downward toward him. I just couldn't wait for him to see my pet bird.
"Grandpa!" I called out. A few of the steers raised their heads, surprised.
Grandpa Lee looked up from his work and saw his little grandson stumbling down the hillside into a dangerous situation. He stood up quickly and shouted at me to go back.
This proved to be the wrong thing to do. The cattle spooked and a wave of panic went through them. They bolted in my direction and the entire small herd stampeded right over me.
I was quickly knocked to the ground and lost my grip on the birdcage. As I looked up, several of these behemoths ran right over me, just missing me with their hooves. I remember one large heifer actually choosing to place her foot down to the side of me, altering its trajectory mid-step, her huge round eye wide open with panic.
Her kind decision spared me from becoming another victim of the all-too-common farm accident. Once thirty or forty yards away, the cattle calmed down and stopped, turning to look back.
Grandpa Lee was at my side in a flash, picking me up and dusting me off, checking to see if I had been injured. My crying told him I was probably all right. Still fixated on my purpose for being there, I stepped over to pick up the cage and show him my bird.
The cage and the bird had been crushed.
After my tamtrum subsided, Grandpa Lee took me to the corral, lifted me and the cage over and told me to go back to the house. I cried all the way back and showed Grandma Lill the crushed birdcage, sobbing "my bird! my bird!"
I can still see the image of that panic-stricken heifer as she diverted her stride to narrowly miss stepping directly on my chest, as if it happened only just yesterday. Grandpa Lee, no doubt, got some commentary from his wife although I didn't hear any of it.
The heifer and I were both destined to roam all over those beautiful pastures and hillsides, drinking the fresh water that came out of the pipe from that limestone spring up the valley. The ill-fated spot was destined, many years later to become my mother's front yard.
I had to be about five years old and it had to be the first summer at the farm. I had been snooping in the little attic above the garage on a regular basis and when I came upon a small baby bird flopping along on the ground near the house, I knew just what it needed.
Clambering up the wooden outside stairway, I pulled the stick out of the hasp and entered the little attic to retrieve a bird cage which was stored up there along with a hundred other things from the old house in Sparta. It was a cheap little thing, probably all that remained with one of my mother's or one of her siblings' experiment with keeping a pet.
I dragged it down, scooped up the fledgling and inserted him through the little spring-loaded door and took him to show Grandma Lill. She was busy working, of course, and gave me the cursory bit of attention that I was seeking. She peered very attentively at the situation, at the bird, clucked something or other and smiled as I moved on, holding my cage.
The next thought that entered my mind was that I had to show Grandpa Lee. I had already bonded with that bird. He was my best friend. I can remember being just ecstatic.
Grandpa Lee was up the road working on a fence in the cow pasture. There was quite a ditch across the road from the house and he had determined that it would be advantageous to fence it off from the cattle, otherwise they would continue to wallow around in there and further degrade the area.
Birdcage in hand and barefooted, I began the trek up the dirt road to the corral. The corral was not huge, but was built of split logs across thick posts, so that a few animals could be herded or coaxed into it, contained by some temporary makeshift wire fences, and eventually loaded into a truck.
I climbed up and over the split logs and down the other side, bringing with me the bird in its cage.
Just past the side rails, the hillside was moderately steep, with a clay hillside to the left and Grandpa Lee about twenty yards down to the right, working on seating a fence post. He was surrounded by about 15 to 20 white-faced Hereford heifers and steers. They were curious as to the goings on and were all around him.
I worked my way a bit closer, downward toward him. I just couldn't wait for him to see my pet bird.
"Grandpa!" I called out. A few of the steers raised their heads, surprised.
Grandpa Lee looked up from his work and saw his little grandson stumbling down the hillside into a dangerous situation. He stood up quickly and shouted at me to go back.
This proved to be the wrong thing to do. The cattle spooked and a wave of panic went through them. They bolted in my direction and the entire small herd stampeded right over me.
I was quickly knocked to the ground and lost my grip on the birdcage. As I looked up, several of these behemoths ran right over me, just missing me with their hooves. I remember one large heifer actually choosing to place her foot down to the side of me, altering its trajectory mid-step, her huge round eye wide open with panic.
Her kind decision spared me from becoming another victim of the all-too-common farm accident. Once thirty or forty yards away, the cattle calmed down and stopped, turning to look back.
Grandpa Lee was at my side in a flash, picking me up and dusting me off, checking to see if I had been injured. My crying told him I was probably all right. Still fixated on my purpose for being there, I stepped over to pick up the cage and show him my bird.
The cage and the bird had been crushed.
After my tamtrum subsided, Grandpa Lee took me to the corral, lifted me and the cage over and told me to go back to the house. I cried all the way back and showed Grandma Lill the crushed birdcage, sobbing "my bird! my bird!"
I can still see the image of that panic-stricken heifer as she diverted her stride to narrowly miss stepping directly on my chest, as if it happened only just yesterday. Grandpa Lee, no doubt, got some commentary from his wife although I didn't hear any of it.
The heifer and I were both destined to roam all over those beautiful pastures and hillsides, drinking the fresh water that came out of the pipe from that limestone spring up the valley. The ill-fated spot was destined, many years later to become my mother's front yard.
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