A Farm Girl's View From the Past

My sister, Esther, was only 20 months younger than I was. We were inseperable when we were growning up. Since we lived on a farm, we went to a one-room schoolhouse. We lived about three miles from the school. Every morning we had a routine that makes me wonder how we ever got to school on time. First stop was just across the railroad tracks. We usually got cookies to eat while we visited with the farmer and his wife. The next stop was enthralling to us. The farmer was blind and had a rope tied between his house and the barn. We watched him walk to the barn and then watched him milk his cows. Our last stop we talked with the farmer and his wife and got some more cookies. Our trip got a little faster because I got a bike. It was way to big for me, so I had to ride it standing up. Poor Esther! One night after school I got a brainy idea to take her on the back of my bike. I felt sorry for her because she always had to run along beside me. Well, we were going down a hill a little too fast and had a bad wreck. I ran home, crying all the way. Esther came home dragging the bike behind her. We were in the third and first grade. That ended my trying to take her and she happily ran beside me until she got her own bike.

One of the things you learn growing up on a farm in big family, is responsibilities. Everyone has chores to do and no questions or criticisms were ever given. One of the chores we were supposed to do every spring was to clean out the cellar to have it ready for tornado season. It was the dreaded chore because you never knew what you might find. For instance we might find a rattlesnake, spiders, a raccoon, a rat or a mouse - yuck!
One spring we waited too late to clean our cellar. You guessed it, we had a tornado on our farm. My dad had been watching the sky all morning (we should have gotten a clue from what he was doing - duh) when all of a sudden he yelled for all of us to go to the cellar. We didn't want to go in because we hadn't done our job. We had no flashlights because we hadn't replaced the batteries. We didn't have a Coleman lamp because we hadn't replaced the oil. Being in the dark during that tornado, wondering what we were sitting with, was the longest ten minutes of my life. "Be sure your sins will find you out." The tornado uprooted trees, blew out windows and made a big mess of our yard. We had lots of bonfires that summer. My dad had wanted to move a windmill from our south pasture to closer to our house. The tornado moved it for him - right side up!!!

Another adventure with Esther was that of taking the railroad tracks to town instead of walking to town by roads. We weren't ready to go to church one day so my dad left us at the farm and we had to walk. It was much safer to do that back then. So . . . Esther and I decided to try to go to town by way of the railroad, thinking it was a faster way to town. There was a long trellis bridge over a deep gorge. We were half-way across it when we heard a train. We didn't think there was enough time to go back where we came from or to finish crossing to the other side of it. We climbed under the track and held on to one of the poles for dear life. Trains are very loud when you are under them! When it crossed over we climbed back up on the track and we were so deaf and scared we couldn't hear. We had to literally pull our fingers off the poles and we were such a mess with all the creosote. But to my knowledge my mom and dad never knew what we did. Do you suppose they could tell just by looking at us? I doubt that we were very clean for church that day.