Farm Girl (5 page)

But Mother didn’t know much about children. She didn’t really want any and wasn’t happy when she found out I was coming. She wanted time to paint and do photography and other projects and not be bothered with children.

Dad was the third oldest in his family, so he had five or six younger than him. He practically raised Ford, who was fifteen years younger. As a young man out doing the farm work, Dad would have little Ford on his lap, riding with him on the horse- drawn machinery. He loved children and knew all about raising them.

But Mother treated me fine and we had fun together.

When I was real small she made a little table and covered it with oil cloth. This little table set under the window in the kitchen, and I’d sit there to eat and feed my dolls. Mother made clothes for my dolls, for my one boy doll she made a little pair of denim overalls just like every farm boy wore back then. She made all my clothes. She had an old sewing machine with a door that would shut. When I was little, I liked to hide behind that door.

Every so often salesmen would come to the house, and one time one came in selling Singer sewing machines. Mother bought that and they took her old one with the cabinet. The new one didn’t have nice wood sides or a wood door in front. These were the kind of machines you ran by pumping the foot pedal, they didn’t use electricity. She kept that Singer for as long as I can remember.

Every Sunday Mother cooked a big dinner and invited Uncle Ford. We’d have chicken or roast, with cake or pie for dessert. She made one dessert called prune pig. She rolled the dough flat, laid pitted prunes on it, then rolled it up like a jelly roll. She wrapped it in a dish towel and steamed it. It came out like a soft, white jelly roll. Mother didn’t make many Norwegian dishes, but she did make that.

In the Norwegian community someone would always get dried cod, or lutefisk, as hard as a board and three feet long, six or eight inches wide. Mother brought home lutefisk from the Norwegian community when her mother or Uncle Anton were still alive, because they liked it. She’d soak it in lye water until thick and oh, how it would stink. When cooked, it tasted just like it smelled. Dad didn’t like it, so after her mother and brother died, she no longer made lutefisk.

Paap was bread broken onto a bowl, and Mother would heat milk with a little flour to thicken it, then pour the milk over the bread and sprinkle nutmeg on it. I liked this for breakfast. It was good made with homemade bread. We’d often have pancakes and sausage for breakfast, or fried or boiled eggs. We didn’t have toasters in those days, but she could toast bread in the oven. Sometimes she bought Karo syrup for pancakes, or she’d make her own syrup with sugar and water.

She used to make cottage cheese. We always milked two cows, and there was a separator by the milk house. She would separate the cream and feed the skim milk to the hogs or chickens. She’d set some whole milk back on the cookstove, where it would get firm. Uncle Anton called that clabber, he ate that and thought it was so good. Mother liked the clabber, too, but I didn’t care for it. She used the clabber to make cottage cheese.

We made our own ice cream using milk that still had the cream. Mother baked cookies, cakes, pies, and we’d also have canned fruit for dessert. She kept Nestle’s cocoa powder to mix with milk, because that’s the only way I’d drink milk except for when Dad milked the cows.

I had a big tin cup that I took out at milking time, and Dad would squirt the milk right into my cup. I always wanted to be around when my Dad milked. I’d take what we called “the dish,” a pan with a lid and sides, and I’d fill it with milk to set by the barn for the cats. We had thirteen cats, and they’d meow and meow when they saw me coming with the dish.

At the house we’d throw stuff out back for the cats, and they’d sit on the back step meowing, waiting for us to throw something out. Mother never let the cats in. A time or two I’d sneak a kitten in, but she always found out and made me take it right back out.

Once there was a mouse in the kitchen, and Mother caught it with its tail under a board.

She said, “Go get a cat.”

I brought one in, but it was so scared to be in the house, in unfamiliar territory, he didn’t pay any attention to the mouse. Mother picked the mouse up by its tail and threw it out back so the cats could get it.

We always had a big garden and raised tomatoes, onions, carrots, green beans, corn and potatoes. The onions, carrots and potatoes went into bins in the cave and we’d eat them all winter. By spring we were eating pretty shriveled little potatoes.

We always raised watermelons, too. One year we had such a good crop, Dad put them in the wagon insulated by hay, and we ate watermelon until Thanksgiving.

In the cave would be big round crocks of sauerkraut Mother made during the summer, and dill pickles, sometimes ham or salt pork. There were shelves full of quart and half gallon jars with corn, beans, tomatoes, cherries, peaches.

To make sauerkraut, she had this long board about eight inches wide and 2 ½ feet across with two metal pieces that she’d slide the cabbage across and slice it, sliding it again and again until the cabbage was all sliced up. She put the sliced, raw cabbage in a twenty gallon crock jar, poured water over it and set the crock down the basement, weighting the top of the sauerkraut with a plate and a rock on top, then another plate or lid on the top of the crock so bugs wouldn’t get in. You didn’t add vinegar because it made its own as it fermented.

It stayed down there all winter, and it would be at least a month before it was ready. The cabbage would be limp and fermented, and Mother would heat it up to serve as a side dish with our canned meat.

Mother would cook the meat from butchering and put it in jars, processing it in the boiler for about an hour. We ate a lot of canned meat. When we went to town, our treat was bologna in a ring and crackers. Coming home from town, Mother sliced the bologna to eat with crackers. I thought bologna was so good and such a treat.

One time when I was living in Lincoln, a friend from high school came home with me and tried our canned meat.

She said, “How can you think bologna is good when you have this delicious canned meat?”

Dad and Uncle Ford kept hogs and always butchered a hog in the fall. I couldn’t stand to see the killing but I liked to be there afterward. They had a barrel full of hot water, and they’d stick that hog into the hot water after they killed it. A pulley was attached to the hog that kept it right at working height so they could gut it. I liked to watch the insides of the animal, I always stayed close and watched when they had it hanging by the pulley.

When I went to high school and studied physiology, I could remember about the intestines, heart and liver and got high grades in that subject.

We’d eat the heart and liver first. The other meat had to hang for a few days before you could eat it. Mother cut and fried the liver, and of course Uncle Ford got some to take home. She boiled the heart and sliced the meat off and we ate that with bread or crackers. We ate beef brains but not pork brains. Brains were cut, rolled in flour or bread crumbs, and fried. We never got tired of meat, we ate it three times a day.

One chilly day in November, I saw all the cats lying next to the barn in the sunshine, their paws crossed in front of them so contentedly, watching the butchering.

The next two days Dad and Ford cut off all the fat meat and Mother cooked lard. The skin would be put in the oven to bake for cracklings. Boiling the fat would be so dangerous. You’d boil it on the stove until it came to a certain temperature, and still boiling, it had to be strained then poured into jars.

One time my cousin Edna Wilson got in the way when her mother was pouring lard, and it spilled on her neck and shoulders. She had terrible scars from that. I had to stay out of the way when Mother cooked lard. I’d play outside with the dogs and cats, and throw the ball up against the barn and catch it, seeing how many times out of a hundred I could catch it.

One of my jobs was getting the cobs for the cookstove. The corn would get shelled with a shelling machine, the grain running out one side into a wagon and the cobs out the other. We had a big, wire fence woven into a circle that held the cob pile. Those cobs were really important because that’s what we burned in our cook stove.

I’d bring in cobs to put in the cob box between the stove and the wall, and they were right there ready to be burned. We used cobs all winter, and if we wanted to hold the fire when it was real cold, we had coal in the basement coalbin. We used everything we had, didn’t waste anything.

What we didn’t eat, we gave to the pigs and the chickens. I often gathered the eggs in a bucket and put them in the basement landing, where Mother sorted and divided them into the egg case, a box with folding cardboard dividers. One egg went in each division. You weren’t supposed to wash them because water would weaken the shells, but you could use a vinegar solution. Mother would wipe them with a cloth dampened in that solution to clean off the spots.

She had two egg cases, one held fifteen dozen and the other had two sides and held thirty dozen. Each case had several layers with a divider between each layer, a lid over the top and handles on the sides. About once a week she took them into town to sell or trade to Schneibers or Waldo’s store in Inavale.

Poor Mrs. Waldo was in a wheelchair with arthritis, her joints so stiff she couldn’t stand. Mrs. Waldo sat and took out the eggs, then Mother brought the empty crate home for next time. The store gave two cents more a dozen for eggs on trade, so Mother chose to trade her eggs for groceries. Her list had few variations—flour, sugar, Karo syrup, bologna, crackers, salt, coffee, baking powder, vanilla, Nestle’s drink mix. If I had money I’d buy candy, but she never bought it.

Norma Lambrecht’s mother had even more chickens than us, and Mrs. Lambrecht traded her eggs for good things to put in Norma’s school lunches. Things like bought bread, chocolate cookies and bananas.

Mother never did that, saying, “It’s not worth it, I can make bread and cookies for less than that.”

Once in awhile Dad went to the Amboy mill east of Red Cloud. There was a stream of water where the mill was built, a little dam where the water would go over the wheel to run the mill. Dad occasionally took wheat there to exchange for flour, but more often Mother bought a sack of flour in town.

One of my jobs was feeding the chickens. I’d get a bucket with oats or chicken feed, start at the hen house and throw the feed on the ground. The hens would come out and eat, pecking at the ground. I’d go toward the barn and all the way to the windmill, throwing out their food along the way. You couldn’t put it in a pile, you had to spread it around so the chickens could get at it because there were so many chickens, usually over a hundred. Every day I gave them about a half gallon of food, in addition to what Mother kept for them in a trough.

Anything that was work lost my interest pretty fast, especially if it was in the house. I had one drawer in my parent’s dresser in the bedroom off the kitchen. We always had the door to that bedroom open, and it stayed warm so I enjoyed playing there. One time I decided to clean out my drawer, so I dumped everything out on the floor.

When I started whining to Mother about the mess, she said, “You go out to play, I’ll finish it up.”

I can remember starting to cook something, maybe cookies or a cake, and when I’d have problems with it, she would tell me to run off and play and she’d finish it. She had worked so hard as a child, and she didn’t want me to have to work much.

When I was four or five, we went to our neighbors and they had a whole lot of eggs on a string—chicken, duck, bird eggs. I thought, oh, that’s interesting, I’d like to do that.

So the next day I went out to our hen house to gather eggs for my project. I hit them to make the holes, and the whole egg would break. I broke a dozen eggs trying to get the holes in each end. Mother came out and scolded me, and I ran away from her, out through the trees to the field where Dad was working with the horses.

I cried, “Mother is after me because I broke eggs.”

He sat me on his lap and laughed at that funny picture, me breaking eggs and Mother chasing me out to the field. When I calmed down, he explained that the eggs were valuable, she traded them for groceries, and if I wanted to make holes in them, I should talk to her. She’d show me how to do it, and then she could use the contents for cooking. He talked to me as he did a couple rounds in the field.

I felt so secure and peaceful being comforted in my dad’s arms while the horses took us round and round. After awhile, when it was time for the noon meal, he brought me in.

Later I learned how to punch holes in eggs. You hold the egg over a bowl, and with an ice pick you make the hole by pressing the sharp end gently against the ends of the egg. Then you blow it out over the bowl. Once I learned, I wasn’t interested any more. I remember stringing the eggs up once and being disappointed in how they looked, so I never tried it again.

Lucille with her playmates