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.
Showing posts with label The Farm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Farm. Show all posts
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.
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Farmer Leland
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.
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.
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Grandma Lill's Gardens
Grandma Lill's Gardens
Grandma Lill had grown up in the country and had lived through the Great Depression. She knew that to put a lot of food on the table she had to have a big garden. In this effort, she had a good partner in Grandpa Lee, who saw to it that a large area was tilled up between the house and the old basement foundation. It was probably an acre in size and Lill planted it with green beans, peas, beets, carrots, parsnips, radishes, turnips, potatoes, squash, and sweet corn.
Most people would consider this to be a large garden, but it was only the opening salvo of Lill and Lee Hanson. In later years, they abandoned this zone and tilled up about two acres across the road in the corner of a field and planted a half acre plot just short of the pond, in addition to planting potatoes and sweet corn in part of the field west of the house and across the driveway.
I would toddle around in the yard, watching Grandma Lill weed in her garden and in her flower beds in various spots around the exterior of the house. The large, bald hill across the road had a nice apple orchard on its side and she would gather bushels of them. She would tirelessly cut them up and boil them down to make apple sauce, which she filled dozens of quart canning jars with. In addition, she would store baskets of apples in the large basement room, the farthest one in. It was the coolest and driest. Ultimately, beets and potatoes would also fill bins down there, spread out on top of newspaper and separated to reduce the spoilage.
Once garden crops started maturing, Lill would begin preparing wonderful meals. She would be very judicious in purchasing meat, and a few chickens or a ham would provide wonderful initial meals, followed by days of delicious stews and soups. She quickly identified a neighbor who sold eggs and used these both for bacon-and-egg breakfasts with pancakes or waffles, and in her baking. She was always either making bread, cakes or pies, and homemade noodles.
She would mix the ingredients for a pie or cake with device that she cranked by hand. When she was done with that and ready to move on to the baking, she would hand you the mixer and you could push off the sweet batter with your fingers and eat it.
I fondly remember her making homemade noodles, rolling out the dough on a wooden board with a rolling pin and dusting it with flour. She would then take a knife and slice the large, thin, dough into narrow slices about a half-inch wide. Then she would fold the noodles back on each other a couple of times and let them dry.
I am sure that none of our family have ever forgotten those delicious noodles in a chicken soup or beef casserole.
Dinners were soon augmented by popcorn bowlfuls of green beans, fresh peas, mashed potatoes, or corn on the cob. If I or another grandchild turned his nose up to a new vegetable, perhaps beets, Grandma Lill would plop some on the plate and tell us, "put salt and butter on them and they taste just like sweet corn."
She knew we loved sweet corn and she was right. One of the greatest gifts Grandma Lill gave us little ones was that we loved eating vegetables.
She had hundreds of fruit jars and would can as much as she could for the coming winter. She would also go on expeditions across the road and beyond the pastures and fields, picking raspberries and gooseberries, gathering hickory nuts and hazelnuts, and pear-apples that grew in the wild. There were always jars and jars of canned jellies and sauces down in the cellar, waiting patiently beneath their paraffin seals.-
She and Lee would husk the hickory nuts and walnuts until their hands turned brown. I can remember Lill filling a gunney sack three quarters full of walnuts, still in their semi-mushy husks. Lee would then drive the car over the bag several times and they would pour the contents out and the nuts would be plucked out of the mush. Then they would be dried in the sun in the driveway, but quickly transferred into metal milk cans to protect them from the squirrels and mice. They had to dry all winter in these cans before they could be cracked and the nut meats removed.
A lot of work, but who could ever forget biting into one of Grandma Lill's many varieties of cookies and tasting walnuts! And, once in a while, a piece of a walnut shell!
Grandma Lill had grown up in the country and had lived through the Great Depression. She knew that to put a lot of food on the table she had to have a big garden. In this effort, she had a good partner in Grandpa Lee, who saw to it that a large area was tilled up between the house and the old basement foundation. It was probably an acre in size and Lill planted it with green beans, peas, beets, carrots, parsnips, radishes, turnips, potatoes, squash, and sweet corn.
Most people would consider this to be a large garden, but it was only the opening salvo of Lill and Lee Hanson. In later years, they abandoned this zone and tilled up about two acres across the road in the corner of a field and planted a half acre plot just short of the pond, in addition to planting potatoes and sweet corn in part of the field west of the house and across the driveway.
I would toddle around in the yard, watching Grandma Lill weed in her garden and in her flower beds in various spots around the exterior of the house. The large, bald hill across the road had a nice apple orchard on its side and she would gather bushels of them. She would tirelessly cut them up and boil them down to make apple sauce, which she filled dozens of quart canning jars with. In addition, she would store baskets of apples in the large basement room, the farthest one in. It was the coolest and driest. Ultimately, beets and potatoes would also fill bins down there, spread out on top of newspaper and separated to reduce the spoilage.
Once garden crops started maturing, Lill would begin preparing wonderful meals. She would be very judicious in purchasing meat, and a few chickens or a ham would provide wonderful initial meals, followed by days of delicious stews and soups. She quickly identified a neighbor who sold eggs and used these both for bacon-and-egg breakfasts with pancakes or waffles, and in her baking. She was always either making bread, cakes or pies, and homemade noodles.
She would mix the ingredients for a pie or cake with device that she cranked by hand. When she was done with that and ready to move on to the baking, she would hand you the mixer and you could push off the sweet batter with your fingers and eat it.
I fondly remember her making homemade noodles, rolling out the dough on a wooden board with a rolling pin and dusting it with flour. She would then take a knife and slice the large, thin, dough into narrow slices about a half-inch wide. Then she would fold the noodles back on each other a couple of times and let them dry.
I am sure that none of our family have ever forgotten those delicious noodles in a chicken soup or beef casserole.
Dinners were soon augmented by popcorn bowlfuls of green beans, fresh peas, mashed potatoes, or corn on the cob. If I or another grandchild turned his nose up to a new vegetable, perhaps beets, Grandma Lill would plop some on the plate and tell us, "put salt and butter on them and they taste just like sweet corn."
She knew we loved sweet corn and she was right. One of the greatest gifts Grandma Lill gave us little ones was that we loved eating vegetables.
She had hundreds of fruit jars and would can as much as she could for the coming winter. She would also go on expeditions across the road and beyond the pastures and fields, picking raspberries and gooseberries, gathering hickory nuts and hazelnuts, and pear-apples that grew in the wild. There were always jars and jars of canned jellies and sauces down in the cellar, waiting patiently beneath their paraffin seals.-
She and Lee would husk the hickory nuts and walnuts until their hands turned brown. I can remember Lill filling a gunney sack three quarters full of walnuts, still in their semi-mushy husks. Lee would then drive the car over the bag several times and they would pour the contents out and the nuts would be plucked out of the mush. Then they would be dried in the sun in the driveway, but quickly transferred into metal milk cans to protect them from the squirrels and mice. They had to dry all winter in these cans before they could be cracked and the nut meats removed.
A lot of work, but who could ever forget biting into one of Grandma Lill's many varieties of cookies and tasting walnuts! And, once in a while, a piece of a walnut shell!
Sunday, January 12, 2020
The Farm
The Farm
I was told by my mother that Grandpa Lee moved Grandma Lill and the family all the time. He always was making a deal. I don't remember a thing about it, but the day came when he sold the house on Cottage Street. I have some fragmented memories of a large upstairs apartment, so I am not certain that they went immediately, but the next big venue was the "farm".
The farm was located south of Sparta on the way toward Norwalk on Highway 71. About six miles south of town, there was a little community hall on the right. The road that crossed the highway at that junction was Farmers' Valley Road. Taking a right on it bent you back toward the city of Sparta. Turning left took one to the "farm".
Farmers' Valley Road was gravel which was graded after the spring thaw and perhaps one more time during the summer. The car would raise a rooster-tail of dust unless it had just rained. In that event, the limestone gravel dust became very slippery. The road was like a roller coaster, rising up and dipping down as it traversed a number of small hills. Because it was graded, the road had a "washboard" surface and if a car traveled at more than twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, it would begin shaking, and it was possible for the driver to lose control and be shaken off the road and into the ditch.
Slightly more than two miles brought one up over a little hill where the road curved as it went over, along about a quarter-mile straightaway to a big white farmhouse on the left with a tin roof.
The house was quite rustic when Lill and Lee moved there. Lee was all excited for the new adventure but I am told that Lill cried, missing her beautiful house in town.
I will describe the house in depth because it became a sanctuary for all of Lill's and Lee's daughters as they recovered from divorces, as well as for their son John after he returned from his stint in the army and was going to college.
As one turned left and into the dirt driveway, it went over a little ditch that went through a small corrugated culvert beneath and petered out as it went west along the road. What little drain water emanated from the house came only from the sink and the ditch was quite sufficient to soak away this "gray" water.
The driveway made a right up a little rise to a rather primitive garage, very rough in construction, with support posts made from thin logs which were still round. The outside was covered with some tar-paper siding that had grey minerals adhered to it. There were two stalls capable of containing a car but only one was used that way. The car fit in very snugly and it was always better just to leave it outside if weather permitted. There was a wooden stairway in back for access to the loft of the garage, which was used for storage.
A long grainery, the newest building on the property, stood opposite the bend in the driveway. It had about four bins, separated by walls, for holding shelled corn or soybeans, then gave way to a long open section with a large opening for machinery to go in and out. An old Alice Chalmers tractor was parked in there and a huge old fashioned hay loader stayed in its parking spot spot forevermore, since the time had long passed that hay was loaded up on a wagon loosely.
On the side hill north of the grainery sat a full sized barn. The uphill side of the barn had the large sliding door so that a wagon could be backed in, but the hay lofts were all empty except for a layer of loose hay on the floor. Trap doors with ladders and a chute led to the first floor, which was a decrepit dairy parlor. There were old rusty stanchions and manure troughs. At each stanchion was a rusty drinking cup with the lever still inside.
A shallow pond lying east of the barn in the direction of the house was fed by springs in the hill beyond it which was scarred by a small shale pit. On the other side of the pond and uphill was a small pump house, the size of a modern day bathroom. There was a cast iron wood stove in there and a square, concrete pedestal with a round cover under which was a cistern which collected water from the same set of small springs which filled the pond.
Water ran down from this cistern to the house below through an inch-and-one-half iron pipe buried only a foot to a foot and a half beneath the topsoil. There was scraggly grass lawn from the driveway nearly all the way to the pump house. In retrospect, the dairy parlor in the barn was even or higher than the cistern in the pump house, so in previous years, the dairy parlor must have been fed by a spring above the level of the barn. The drinking cups for the cattle just wouldn't work any other way, unless water was somehow pumped or hauled to a cistern or tank higher than the dairy parlor.
To the left of this long yard stood two parallel arbors of purple grapes, each about fifty feet long. Luscious bunches of purple grapes grew by the bushel basket full on these vines.
The house was accessible either through a front door, which led onto a long, narrow cement porch with no rail, a back door which opened to a primitive indoor porch, or a door which opened into the kitchen from a deck on the north side.
There were two outhouses in the yard on the east side and a third small shed for holding garden tools. The yard was filled with mature walnut and elm trees, a few quite close to the house. About a hundred yards further east were the remains of an old basement, which was about one third full of bottles, cans, and other refuse.
The deck and the indoor porch both led into opposite sides of the kitchen, which had a bay window looking north toward the pump house, pond, and barn and the hills above them. The view was beautiful.
From the kitchen, one walked through a doorway into a dining room with nice windows which looked to the south, across the road to a bunch of fields, a ditch, an orchard, and a large bald hill and the high ridges beyond all of these.
To the right, another large entryway opened into a living room with a huge picture window which looked west at the road approaching from the direction of town, bordered by large fields on either side.
The other side of the dining room led to a small bedroom, the only one downstairs, which belonged to Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee. They had two twin beds in there, a small desk, and a dresser.
A stairway went from a little landing in a corner of the dining room and up the west wall, next to their bedroom. At the top and to the right was a nice upstairs bedroom above that of Lill and Lee's.
A hallway led to another even larger bedroom which was above the kitchen. The hallway continued on through a door, turned left through a kink which would later become a tiny bathroom, and into a bedroom which was directly above the living room.
Another doorway led from this bedroom into a space the size of the large living room below. A door led from this room into an enclosed stairway that went down and opened onto the deck.
This upstairs bedroom and living room became the private quarters of my mother and me.
Lill and Lee had difficulties with the water coming down from the pump house from the very start and I seem to remember Lee and even my uncle John digging the pipes up and trying to clear them or thaw them. This problem was remedied very early when Lill and Lee had the space between the porch and their bedroom framed in, weatherized, and turned into a more modern bathroom, complete with vanity, toilet, and bathtub. A well was drilled just outside their bedroom wall and the water heater and pressure tank were placed in the basement.
The outhouses and little garden shed were torn down and the pits filled in.
A toilet, tiny vanity, and stand up shower were crammed into the kink in the upstairs hallway. A person coming down the hall from the two upstairs bedrooms had to open a door, walk through this bathroom, turn left immediately and walk through another door into my mother's and my bedroom.
A wall was stubbed in to cut the living room in half and a kitchen was installed, complete with a sink. It was state of the art for 1952!
I think my mother must have found a secretarial job at Camp McCoy because it was with Lee and Lill that I spent my days. Lill quickly filled the house with all her furniture and antiques and my mother put all of her possessions, which pretty much consisted of our clothes and a bookcase containing her prized volumes. That was literally all she owned. Even the bedding probably belonged to Grandma Lill.
I would run around the house getting into mischief all day and when my mother got home she would let me pore through her books while she unwound on the sofa in the little living room. She had a hardbound copy of Dante's Inferno which was filled with elaborate and dark drawings showing what it was like in hell. There were people being herded, by demons, single-file down a narrow stair cut into a rock wall to the fiery regions below. There were skinny, depraved, near-skeletons of sorrowful, starving people reaching for apples that were just out of their reach. There were drawings of people being tortured by demons with pikes, repeatedly having been poked and stabbed while standing in flames. There were people standing in water with their ankles chained down and only their chins above the rising water.
I was fascinated by them and they probably traumatized me forever.
Lee would be given these little day-planners that were, in essence, a book about the size of a paperback but not as thick, that amounted to a calendar for the year. There were lines on which to print appointments and such. He would give them to me because he had a great big desk blotter that was actually a calendar and he used that.
I took a pencil and padded around the house, scribbling on all of the little lines. It kept me busy and I'll bet Grandma Lill insured that he got me another when I had filled all the lines with curly scribbles. I wouldn't stop until it was full. Otherwise I was tipping over her lamps or knick knacks. One day I was fooling around with a little table she had placed in front of the living room window. She had a lamp that was filled with colored water, and it fell off and spilled all over the carpet, which was light green, and had just been put in.
She just sat down on the sofa and cried.
An indelible splotch remained in that carpet, right in front of the picture window that looked down the valley. She had to put a throw rug over it because the stain would not come out.
This was the situation when my grandparents moved to the farm. In addition to getting the house updated and livable, Grandma Lill immediately began gardening on a huge scale and Grandpa Lee began farming and pasturing beef cattle in cooperative partnership with a neighbor.
I was told by my mother that Grandpa Lee moved Grandma Lill and the family all the time. He always was making a deal. I don't remember a thing about it, but the day came when he sold the house on Cottage Street. I have some fragmented memories of a large upstairs apartment, so I am not certain that they went immediately, but the next big venue was the "farm".
The farm was located south of Sparta on the way toward Norwalk on Highway 71. About six miles south of town, there was a little community hall on the right. The road that crossed the highway at that junction was Farmers' Valley Road. Taking a right on it bent you back toward the city of Sparta. Turning left took one to the "farm".
Farmers' Valley Road was gravel which was graded after the spring thaw and perhaps one more time during the summer. The car would raise a rooster-tail of dust unless it had just rained. In that event, the limestone gravel dust became very slippery. The road was like a roller coaster, rising up and dipping down as it traversed a number of small hills. Because it was graded, the road had a "washboard" surface and if a car traveled at more than twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, it would begin shaking, and it was possible for the driver to lose control and be shaken off the road and into the ditch.
Slightly more than two miles brought one up over a little hill where the road curved as it went over, along about a quarter-mile straightaway to a big white farmhouse on the left with a tin roof.
The house was quite rustic when Lill and Lee moved there. Lee was all excited for the new adventure but I am told that Lill cried, missing her beautiful house in town.
I will describe the house in depth because it became a sanctuary for all of Lill's and Lee's daughters as they recovered from divorces, as well as for their son John after he returned from his stint in the army and was going to college.
As one turned left and into the dirt driveway, it went over a little ditch that went through a small corrugated culvert beneath and petered out as it went west along the road. What little drain water emanated from the house came only from the sink and the ditch was quite sufficient to soak away this "gray" water.
The driveway made a right up a little rise to a rather primitive garage, very rough in construction, with support posts made from thin logs which were still round. The outside was covered with some tar-paper siding that had grey minerals adhered to it. There were two stalls capable of containing a car but only one was used that way. The car fit in very snugly and it was always better just to leave it outside if weather permitted. There was a wooden stairway in back for access to the loft of the garage, which was used for storage.
A long grainery, the newest building on the property, stood opposite the bend in the driveway. It had about four bins, separated by walls, for holding shelled corn or soybeans, then gave way to a long open section with a large opening for machinery to go in and out. An old Alice Chalmers tractor was parked in there and a huge old fashioned hay loader stayed in its parking spot spot forevermore, since the time had long passed that hay was loaded up on a wagon loosely.
On the side hill north of the grainery sat a full sized barn. The uphill side of the barn had the large sliding door so that a wagon could be backed in, but the hay lofts were all empty except for a layer of loose hay on the floor. Trap doors with ladders and a chute led to the first floor, which was a decrepit dairy parlor. There were old rusty stanchions and manure troughs. At each stanchion was a rusty drinking cup with the lever still inside.
A shallow pond lying east of the barn in the direction of the house was fed by springs in the hill beyond it which was scarred by a small shale pit. On the other side of the pond and uphill was a small pump house, the size of a modern day bathroom. There was a cast iron wood stove in there and a square, concrete pedestal with a round cover under which was a cistern which collected water from the same set of small springs which filled the pond.
Water ran down from this cistern to the house below through an inch-and-one-half iron pipe buried only a foot to a foot and a half beneath the topsoil. There was scraggly grass lawn from the driveway nearly all the way to the pump house. In retrospect, the dairy parlor in the barn was even or higher than the cistern in the pump house, so in previous years, the dairy parlor must have been fed by a spring above the level of the barn. The drinking cups for the cattle just wouldn't work any other way, unless water was somehow pumped or hauled to a cistern or tank higher than the dairy parlor.
To the left of this long yard stood two parallel arbors of purple grapes, each about fifty feet long. Luscious bunches of purple grapes grew by the bushel basket full on these vines.
The house was accessible either through a front door, which led onto a long, narrow cement porch with no rail, a back door which opened to a primitive indoor porch, or a door which opened into the kitchen from a deck on the north side.
There were two outhouses in the yard on the east side and a third small shed for holding garden tools. The yard was filled with mature walnut and elm trees, a few quite close to the house. About a hundred yards further east were the remains of an old basement, which was about one third full of bottles, cans, and other refuse.
The deck and the indoor porch both led into opposite sides of the kitchen, which had a bay window looking north toward the pump house, pond, and barn and the hills above them. The view was beautiful.
From the kitchen, one walked through a doorway into a dining room with nice windows which looked to the south, across the road to a bunch of fields, a ditch, an orchard, and a large bald hill and the high ridges beyond all of these.
To the right, another large entryway opened into a living room with a huge picture window which looked west at the road approaching from the direction of town, bordered by large fields on either side.
The other side of the dining room led to a small bedroom, the only one downstairs, which belonged to Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee. They had two twin beds in there, a small desk, and a dresser.
A stairway went from a little landing in a corner of the dining room and up the west wall, next to their bedroom. At the top and to the right was a nice upstairs bedroom above that of Lill and Lee's.
A hallway led to another even larger bedroom which was above the kitchen. The hallway continued on through a door, turned left through a kink which would later become a tiny bathroom, and into a bedroom which was directly above the living room.
Another doorway led from this bedroom into a space the size of the large living room below. A door led from this room into an enclosed stairway that went down and opened onto the deck.
This upstairs bedroom and living room became the private quarters of my mother and me.
Lill and Lee had difficulties with the water coming down from the pump house from the very start and I seem to remember Lee and even my uncle John digging the pipes up and trying to clear them or thaw them. This problem was remedied very early when Lill and Lee had the space between the porch and their bedroom framed in, weatherized, and turned into a more modern bathroom, complete with vanity, toilet, and bathtub. A well was drilled just outside their bedroom wall and the water heater and pressure tank were placed in the basement.
The outhouses and little garden shed were torn down and the pits filled in.
A toilet, tiny vanity, and stand up shower were crammed into the kink in the upstairs hallway. A person coming down the hall from the two upstairs bedrooms had to open a door, walk through this bathroom, turn left immediately and walk through another door into my mother's and my bedroom.
A wall was stubbed in to cut the living room in half and a kitchen was installed, complete with a sink. It was state of the art for 1952!
I think my mother must have found a secretarial job at Camp McCoy because it was with Lee and Lill that I spent my days. Lill quickly filled the house with all her furniture and antiques and my mother put all of her possessions, which pretty much consisted of our clothes and a bookcase containing her prized volumes. That was literally all she owned. Even the bedding probably belonged to Grandma Lill.
I would run around the house getting into mischief all day and when my mother got home she would let me pore through her books while she unwound on the sofa in the little living room. She had a hardbound copy of Dante's Inferno which was filled with elaborate and dark drawings showing what it was like in hell. There were people being herded, by demons, single-file down a narrow stair cut into a rock wall to the fiery regions below. There were skinny, depraved, near-skeletons of sorrowful, starving people reaching for apples that were just out of their reach. There were drawings of people being tortured by demons with pikes, repeatedly having been poked and stabbed while standing in flames. There were people standing in water with their ankles chained down and only their chins above the rising water.
I was fascinated by them and they probably traumatized me forever.
Lee would be given these little day-planners that were, in essence, a book about the size of a paperback but not as thick, that amounted to a calendar for the year. There were lines on which to print appointments and such. He would give them to me because he had a great big desk blotter that was actually a calendar and he used that.
I took a pencil and padded around the house, scribbling on all of the little lines. It kept me busy and I'll bet Grandma Lill insured that he got me another when I had filled all the lines with curly scribbles. I wouldn't stop until it was full. Otherwise I was tipping over her lamps or knick knacks. One day I was fooling around with a little table she had placed in front of the living room window. She had a lamp that was filled with colored water, and it fell off and spilled all over the carpet, which was light green, and had just been put in.
She just sat down on the sofa and cried.
An indelible splotch remained in that carpet, right in front of the picture window that looked down the valley. She had to put a throw rug over it because the stain would not come out.
This was the situation when my grandparents moved to the farm. In addition to getting the house updated and livable, Grandma Lill immediately began gardening on a huge scale and Grandpa Lee began farming and pasturing beef cattle in cooperative partnership with a neighbor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)