Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl (14 page)

Economics 101

“I don’t want to,” I whined, shifting from foot to foot and all but stamping the floor as I stood hunched over the sink.

“Those radishes are beautiful,” Mom exclaimed with a bright smile, ignoring my tone. Peering over my shoulder at the sink full of radishes I’d pulled from my garden plot that morning, she added, “It won’t be so bad, you’ll see.” Mom approached every chore as if there were nothing she’d rather be doing and she swept us along in her wake. Usually.

“I still don’t want to,” my whine turned to a pout.

“Well, you need to. It’s part of the project. So you may as well get it done.” Mom’s tone let me know she’d heard about all the whining she was going to. After planting a reassuring pat on my shoulder, she turned to rolling out pie crusts.

Slowly, methodically, I stuck each radish under the flood of cold water pouring out of the tap, determined that if I had to do this chore, at least I wasn’t going to do it fast. And I wasn’t going to enjoy it.

Earlier that spring all three of us decided to take on a 4-H garden project, so after Dad plowed up the 40– by 300–foot area that constituted the family garden, Mom helped us measure off plots for our projects.

From the time I was two, I’d helped plant potatoes, carrying my little pail of seed potato sections, walking next to Dad as he worked his way down the row. Each time he stepped firmly on the spade, slicing the ground, leaning forward on the shovel handle to pry the soil open a few inches, I bent down and slid a wrinkly section of potato deep into the hole, the ‘eye’ pointing up as the ground closed around it. Back and forth we went, row after row, planting enough to yield bushels of potatoes, enough potatoes to fill the bin in the fruit cellar, enough to last a year.

Each year as we grew older, my sisters and I were entrusted with smaller and smaller seeds, progressing from individual potato pieces the size of our little fists, to dropping three sweet corn kernels in each hole, to spacing shriveled lima beans and peas three inches apart in a trench, to filtering the smallest carrot and radish seeds along a shallow furrow. Each day after we planted the garden, we knelt on the sofa looking out the living room picture window, watching for the first hint of rows to validate our efforts. Anxiety ran rampant when the skies turned black and torrential spring rains threatened to flood out the rows. Hope returned when the sun shone again and tender shoots poked up through the mud.

As the summer wore on, our enthusiasm was tempered by the heat of the sun and the constant challenge of weeds. At the least little sign we didn’t have something to do, Mom offered up, “Go hoe the garden.”

The enthusiasm I’d felt for my 4-H project ran just this course. Meticulously, I’d measured out the rows, dragged the hoe to create furrows, dropped in seeds and tamped the soil firmly over them. “Am I doing this right?” I asked Mom before and after each row. She coached me at each step—“That’s just right,” or “Plant those seeds two inches apart,” or “Just feather the dirt with your hand to cover those carrot seeds”—as I crawled on hands and knees back and forth between the rows. At the end of each row, I stabbed a twig upright so I could tell where I’d been. When the seed packet was empty, I stuck it on the twig, a colorful flag reminder of what was planted in the row. I devoted the 10 x 15-foot space of my garden to radishes, carrots, lettuce, onions, peas and green beans, leaving space-eating plants like tomatoes, potatoes and sweet corn to the big garden.

With a sense of importance akin to what I imagined Dad felt when he did the farm records, I spread open the fresh, unmarked pages of my 4-H record book on the kitchen table. In neat little rows marred only by my hopelessly sloppy handwriting, I recorded the cost of seed bought in bulk at the Feed & Grain in Maquoketa, the dates of planting, the dates it rained, the dates to germination, the dates of harvesting, transcribing each entry in pencil and later re-creating the record in ink to take to the county fair.

What I had acknowledged only briefly and just as quickly dismissed at the start of the project, was the requirement that I sell some of the produce and calculate how much my garden would return on the investment if I sold everything. I could not fathom the face-to-face transaction required to sell my vegetables. The very idea of approaching someone, anyone, and asking if they wanted to buy something caused my stomach to go weak.

Each day as I walked the rows of my garden plot, watching the vegetables mature, I was alternately excited by the progress and faintly dreading the inevitable. There was little joy that morning as I washed the bright red radishes and rinsed the green tops. As clods of dirt clinging to the radishes turned to mud and trailed through my fingers and down the drain, I agonized.

“Maybe I could do it this afternoon?” I threw out a brilliant delaying tactic.

“No, you go this morning. I bet Edna would love to have fresh radishes for dinner.” Grabbing the dishrag, Mom wiped the flour off her hands, rummaged through the junk drawer next to the refrigerator and pulled out some rubber bands. “Here. Bunch them up with these,” she said.

Last time we were in town, I’d looked at radishes in the grocery store and saw they tied 10 in a bunch and sold the bunch for 15 cents. I tied up 12 radishes in each bunch, planning to sell them for 5 cents. As I looked at the still-wet, bundled radishes heaped on the drain board by the sink, I admitted to myself they did look pretty. Better even than those in the store. Still, I couldn’t get excited about selling them.

“But why would she want these radishes?” I persisted. “She has a garden. I bet she doesn’t even want any radishes.”

“I don’t think hers are ready yet. You had your garden in early. Now get going. And hurry back. We have to get dinner on the table.”

Scooping up the three bunches of radishes, I headed out the door. Mom had given me the choice of trying to sell the radishes to strangers in town or to our neighbors. I’d agonized over which would be worse, going to someone I didn’t know and being rejected or going to someone I did know and being rejected. Rejection was really the only possible outcome of trying to sell produce in a farm community like ours where gardens and fresh produce were as plentiful as the stars in the sky on a clear night. I decided being rejected close to home was maybe a little bit less horrible.

The lane from the highway to our house was on the property line between our farm and Miller’s. The lane split by the mailboxes at the top of the hill with half the lane coming into our place and the other half going to Miller’s. Edna and Bill were our closest neighbors in terms of distance and we neighbored back and forth. On May Day we fixed little baskets out of construction paper and filled them with violets to sneak over and hang on Edna’s door. She surprised us one year with a banana cream pie made with a vanilla wafer crust and topped with whipped cream. When our lilac bush was in full bloom, we always took Edna a bouquet. Dad and Bill agreed on who would do what and when on the fences that divided our fields. But since Millers didn’t have kids my age, when I did go there, it was usually trailing Mom.

With gray hair combed neatly in a roll that ringed her head and an apron protecting her ample waist, Edna reminded me of my Grandma Denter, a woman who always smiled and was not in the least scary. But she was still totally intimidating because she was an adult and I had to try to sell her something I was absolutely, positively certain she did not want.

As I dragged my leaden feet toward my first sales call, I stopped by my garden plot and considered how many other bunches of radishes were yet to be picked. Scuffing my bare toes in the dust, I sighed. The 4-H requirement was to sell all of one crop. I sighed again and groaned. At this point, I could not work up the energy to be grateful I did not also have to sell the carrots and onions and lettuce and peas and beans.

I trudged on, all the while rehearsing what I would say. Just past the mailboxes, I stopped. My legs and feet had begun to feel as heavy as blocks of cement. I looked back at our house and considered whether I could just go back and tell Mom Edna wasn’t home. My skin prickled with nerves. I looked toward Edna’s house and wished their dog Berle would race at me so I could run away. A white German Shepherd-sized dog, Berle wasn’t mean, but the way he and our dog Butch barked at each other, no one was ever completely sure. If Berle had run up to me, I could have turned back and Mom might have accepted that as a credible excuse. Looking around, I waited in momentary optimism for Berle to come around the barn. He didn’t.

I sighed, swallowed and plodded the rest of the way to Edna’s door. The sun was beating against my back when I knocked. For a split second I thought I might be lucky and she wouldn’t be home. While this wasn’t likely since Edna didn’t drive and it was close to noon, a girl could hope. No luck. I heard Edna come through the kitchen. I stepped back off the cement step as she opened the door.

“Why, Carol. Hello.” She glanced behind me, looking for Mom, and then turned a puzzled gaze to me.

Locking my knees and swallowing my reluctance, I opened my mouth and spilled everything I’d thought to say in one breathless rush: “Hello, Mrs. Miller. I wondered if you wanted to buy some radishes. There are 12 in a bunch. They are five cents.”

Edna looked at me for a moment, clearly puzzled. “Why don’t you come inside so I can get a look at what you have,” she said at last, opening the door wider. I stepped into the cool, dark of her kitchen and we sat at the table.

“Now tell me again what you have. You were talking a little fast and I didn’t catch it all,” she said as she set a plate of sugar cookies on the table and sat down herself with a cup of coffee.

“Thank you,” I said as I reached for a cookie. Between bites I explained about the radishes and my 4-H project. To my great astonishment, Edna bought all three bunches. She offered to buy more when I had them.

In about 10 minutes, I left with three nickels tight in my hand. “Thank you,” I called over my shoulder. I’d already said “thank you,” at least three times, grateful beyond belief not to have to go to another neighbor, or even door-to-door in town as Mom threatened I’d have to do next. I skipped all the way home, arriving breathless at the house to share my success with Mom.

“Good for you!” Mom exclaimed. “Now put the money in your bank so you don’t lose it and come set the table.”

“I’ll be right back,” I bubbled, the distress of making the sale forgotten. In my bedroom, I grabbed my bank and my savings passbook, tucked right under the bank, and bounced onto the bed where I pulled out the plug and dumped the money out onto the chenille bedspread. Adding money to my bank always began with counting every penny that was already there. One by one the coins stacked up until I had Seven Pennies, Nine Nickels (including the three from selling my radishes), Eight Dimes and Four Quarters. Two Dollars and Thirty-Two Cents. It was a fortune.

Flipping over on my back, I reverently opened the passbook and reviewed each entry, so tiny, so carefully scripted by the bank teller, entries recording each deposit, each addition of interest. I regarded the interest entries with total amazement. I did not deposit this interest money but there it was—a gift—swelling the balance.

The first conscious memory I have of money as something to have and let go of was in church. I was three years old, sitting on Dad’s lap. The minister finished the sermon and the ushers made their way down the aisle, handing the dark brown, wooden collection plates to the people sitting on the aisles. Each person dropped in an offering envelope or dollar bills and passed the plate on down the row.

As a plate came hand to hand toward us, Dad pressed a single penny into my palm, closing my fingers tightly around it. “Now, don’t drop it,” he cautioned in a whisper. “You put it in the plate when it gets to us,” he instructed, his breath carrying the lingering smell of the cigarette he stubbed out between the car and the church.

I was excited to hold that penny. It was warm and shiny. When the collection plate reached us, I extended my arm, turned my hand over and dropped the penny on to the pile of offering envelopes, bills and change accumulating in the plate.

It was over so fast, the possessing of that penny and the relinquishing of it to the church. Money was not handed out freely in our family. We worked for every cent. We budgeted how it was spent. Along with my first weekly allowance of 10 cents came a lesson in budgeting. Mom sat all of us girls down at the kitchen table with a tablet and pencil. Each budget session emphasized the rules of 10 percent for savings and 10 percent for the church. What went into savings stayed there.

The 15 cents I had just earned through my own labor, by selling what I had raised, created a sense of accomplishment unlike any I’d felt before. It did not cross my mind that I would spend any of this money. My cousins bought comic books every week and while I was antsy to get my hands on their Superman comics when we visited, I thought them unbelievably extravagant for spending their money that way. I would never part with my money for something so fleeting.

I rolled over on my side, propped my chin on my fists and looked at the tidy stacks of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Two dollars and thirty-two cents. With this much money, I would most definitely make a trip to the bank at the end of the month when Mom went to town for groceries. With this much money to deposit, my balance would be nearly $30. With this much money, who knows what I would be able to do someday?

With my first successful sales call behind me, I pulled, washed and bound more radishes. The initial dread of selling the radishes was behind me; now I had my eye fixed on the money I could earn in selling my produce. Jane and Sue pulled radishes from their garden plots, too, and at one point we had too many for the kitchen sink and opted for the bathtub. The tub was half full. Of course, Edna could not take them all, though she never turned us away when we knocked on her door. So one day the three of us loaded our washed and bound bunches of radishes in the car and Mom dropped us off at the trailer court on the east edge of Maquoketa.