Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl (18 page)
Read Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl Online
Authors: Carol Bodensteiner
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
Fire had destroyed the barn full of new-baled hay by the time we got there. The fire department arrived in time to keep the fire from spreading to any of the other buildings and now they were still spraying water, pulling down what was left of the charred roof and poles. For many hours neighbors drove tractors dragging chains through the smoldering hay to make sure the fire was out.
Spontaneous combustion, I heard the men say as I ran back and forth from the house to the barn with the sandwiches and thermos bottles of coffee Mom and Grandma made as fast and as easily as if they’d been planning all week to have several dozen visitors. Somehow in all that new hay, the men stacked a few bales that weren’t completely dry. The moisture made heat as the hay dried. Heat trapped in the middle of the stack built up until it spontaneously started the dry hay bales on fire. All that work, the new hay barn, all up in smoke. Anxiety and excitement mixed up inside, giving me a painful stomach ache. Watching Dad, I could not see past the soot and rivulets of sweat running down his neck to how he felt.
The next day some neighbors returned and worked with Dad to clear away the rest of the burned-down building. There was nothing left of the hay to salvage.
That afternoon, when she was sure the fire was out, Mom brought us kids down to the barnyard. On any other day, we would have raced ahead, but now we clung to the safe haven of Mom’s side. Almost afraid to look, we edged around her to stare at the remnants of charred beams and sodden hay bales. Mom stood shaking her head, her lips in a tight line, her hands resting on her hips, the hem of her cotton shirtwaist dress rippling in the breeze. As worry crinkled around in my stomach, I looked up at her. What did this mean to us? I didn’t know.
After a bit, Mom reached down and picked up a piece of charcoal left by the fire. She stared at it for a few moments, then smiled at me, “Artists use charcoal like this to draw with. You could give it a try.” I looked down at the charcoal and up at Mom. Then I knew it was all okay.
Over the course of the summer, Dad built another hay barn to replace the one that burned. And by the end of the summer, the new barn was filled with hay. What this cost or how he came up with the money or where the hay came from, I don’t know. I do know there was no insurance. Dad and Mom didn’t talk about things like this around us kids. They just managed.
I spent many days that summer trying my hand at charcoal drawing. It did not take long to learn that charcoal drawing, like other kinds of drawing and painting I’d tried, was not a talent of mine. Those failed artistic attempts left me with a sense of loss and a smoldering creative yearning that rekindled time and again over the years.
As a child I saw limited options. Art was drawings. Over time though, in part because of that summer, I came to realize that creativity takes many forms and charcoal can be used for writing as well as drawing.
My folks swept away the ashes and built a new barn. It took me considerably longer to replace one creative dream with another, to let go of my interest in drawing and to replace my paintbrush with a pen.
Epilogue
“You know you’ve been gone from the farm a long time when you get nostalgic about milking dairy cows,” my sister said, shaking her head as she read one of my stories.
I chuckled. I guess that’s right. Only time can soften the memory of getting up every single day at 5 a.m. Only time can turn milking cows into an event you joyfully anticipate. Only time can make you remember with fondness the cows that kicked in irritation whenever you attached a milking machine, leaving bruises all along your forearms. Only time can erase the feel and smell and taste of a manure-caked, rain-soaked cow tail slapping you in the face. Well, actually you may never forget that!
It’s true my memories are made more beautiful by a golden glow that shines brightly on the positive, while shading the negatives with forgetfulness. But all the stories I’ve written are true, to me at least.
When Dad and Mom retired from the farm in the early 1970s, they asked me if I wanted to take over. Married for four years, with a child of my own, my life and career on another track, I said no. I return to that decision again and again, sometimes with regret, playing little ‘what if’ games in my head. More often I accept the reality of a husband who would never have been content in farm life. But always, yearnings tug at my heart. The farm life I lived with family close and values solid, always pulls me back. To me as a child, life was simple and pure. And I saw that life as best. It gave me the foundation to become a productive adult.
I carried my ability to work hard, to be independent, to overcome challenges, into a successful career in public relations. I rechanneled my desire to be an artist from painting to writing. Most important, my family—parents, sisters and grandmothers—and the family values they taught helped me raise a good son into a fine man.
A wonderful childhood could not shield me from the tough stuff of life, particularly a painful divorce after 13 years of trying to hold my marriage together. But it did give me the tools, over time, to learn and grow from the experience. And I married again with optimism and a willingness to learn from my mistakes.
To this day, I enjoy creating something tangible with my hands—a farm-instilled value. Any day in which I bake cookies or dig in the garden or clean the house or trim the hedge is better than a day when I while away the hours reading. My husband and I garden, and I can and freeze the produce, but I acknowledge I will never keep up with my mother. At 91, she still put in a garden and ended the summer with fruit cellar shelves lined with pints and quarts of vegetables and fruits and meat she cans herself.
Someone asked me if kids growing up on farms today could have the kind of experience I did.
I hesitated. I wanted to say, sure. Kids still work on farms with their parents. Farm kids still absorb solid values working on the land.
But I stopped. After thinking about it for a moment, I had to say, no. Farm life as I experienced it is slipping away by the day. A farm of 180 acres—the size of our farm—would be hard-pressed to support a family these days. Today’s farmers manage thousands of acres instead of hundreds. In the late-1950s, some 1.8 million dairy farms dotted the landscape of the United States; dairy farmers were considered the backbone of the country. By 2007, that number dropped to 65,000.
The world has changed more than the 40 years that have passed since my years on the farm.
By the time I reached high school in the 1960s, the pace of change had accelerated. The Russians launched Sputnik and the space race shifted into high gear. Instead of a test pattern at midnight, television airs news 24/7. We watch wars fought in real time. The Internet and cell phones often make it easier to interact with someone halfway around the world than a family member in the next room.
So, no, even farm kids live in a radically different world than the one I experienced.
I also have to think my parents were unique. I still don’t know how they made us see work as a gift. Whether in the barn milking the cows, in the garden planting radishes or potatoes, in the basement butchering chickens, they were there and we kids were there, each of us involved, each of us important, each of us truly valued.
I have only to close my eyes and breathe in to remember the smell of a field of new-mown hay, flex my fingers to remember the feel of a calf sucking as it learned to drink, open my ears to the sound of my mother smoothing over a cooking mistake. Then I remember my dad sitting on the feedbox petting a yellow tomcat and I want to go sit by him again and talk about the work that has yet to be done.
Carol Bodensteiner left the farm when she went to college, but she has remained close to agriculture all her life, first as a farm magazine editor and later as a public relations counselor to the agribusiness industry. Her essays have been published in numerous journals. She and her husband live on an acreage near Des Moines, Iowa.
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