Sure am missing Nickerson, Kansas

 Merle Haggard says it best.  https://youtu.be/TuwhpVde6NY The roots of my raising sure do run deep.  Growing up in Nickerson, Kansas was definitely a challenge.  Like all small town there was a right side of town and a wrong side, but it this case it was the whole "outside of town."  We lived "outside of town" only 2 blocks from the high school when I was very small. That was the "wrong side of the tracks."  When I started second grade we moved clear across town out by the cemetery.  That was also the "wrong side of the tracks."  Either place was a place we could listen to that lonesome train whistle blow.

I learned early to love that sound.  It meant the train was going some where and I knew it was far away.  When the train whistle subsided in the distance, the coyotes howled.  Occasionally a wolf would howl.  Coyotes made more of a yipping sound, but wolves had a mournful howl.  It was like they were trying to call the moon from the sky above.  Either one scared hell out of us kids and we waited for the howling to subside before we could sleep.

But as poor as we were, we knew we were safe in our beds.  To my recollection, I never knew my dad to own a gun.  He was in the Army in World War 1.  He was what I thought was a big man, but in actuality he was only 5'8".  It was not an unusual height back in those days.  I do not know why, but I am assuming it had something to do with what they ate back then.  The emphasis in those days was not so much on vitamins and minerals as it was on survival.  A cow was easier to raise than a head of lettuce.  But all of that is irrelevant.

I remember the first time we got linoleum in our house.  My God!  You would have thought we had died and gone to heaven!  We could walk across the floor  barefooted and not get a "sliver".  Slivers were little pieces of the wood flooring and could only be removed by a pair of tweezers and a needle held in the hand of our dear mother.

Closing the house up at night entailed closing the front and back inside doors.  There were no locks.  There was usually a hook and eye on the screen door, but they were used to hold the door closed when the wind blew.  Bad people did not exist in Nickerson.  I recall once coming home from school and there was a dog walking on my street.  It scared me to death.  I actually climbed up on the icebox so the dog could not "eat me".  Nothing ever changed in Nickerson and that dog did not belong on my street.

Occasionally someone would pass away (We never referred to it as dying.) and the hearse would have to pass the end of our street on the way to the cemetery.  Nine chances out of 10, we knew the body that was being transported because Nickerson might have had a population of 1,000 people if everyone was gathered in one place.  Needless to say, we had to stand quietly with our hand over our heart until the hearse had passed.  This picture was taken from the cemetery side, thus the words are backwards.

For whatever reason I keep retreating to my childhood I know it was my safe place.  One would think that at this late stage in life I could accept who I am, but I don't.  I love to hard, trust too easily, and my biggest weakness is that I am ever the eternal optimist.  But I forget the most important thing momma told me:

"You never know anybody.  You only know OF them.  You know what they let you see."

Thanks, momma, now I remember.

Catalpa Trees, Clothesline, and Muscovy Ducks

Now what do all three of these have in common?  Oh, I know!  There were all an integral part of life at 709 Strong Street.  They are also things we do not see much any more.  For instance, the clothesline.  Back in the day it was used at very least once a week.  The clothes were washed in a washing machine with an agitator.  Whites were first.  The hot soapy water was wrung out through a wringer and the clothes went into rinse water tub number 1.  The second rinse contained a drop or two of "bluing".  Now the bluing was a very important addition as it gave the whites a bare hint of blue which actually made them appear more white!  This was important in case anyone saw your clothes hanging on the line.  If the whites were not white you were going to be discussed around the supper table that night!

The wash water was always one degree below boiling when the wash was started.  After the whites came out, the light clothes were put in and that was followed by towels and such which was followed by darks.  The last load of clothes were dad's overalls.  If there was any water left at that point we could throw in blankets or rugs.

As each load came through and ended up in the basket, it was taken out to the clothesline and hung to dry.  There were more rules to the hanging of the clothes then even I can recall.  Underwear were to be hung by the waistband with the crotch facing any direction except the road as a pervert might see them and loose control!  If the said underwear had a hole, the item must be folded so the neighbors could not see it and know we were poor.  Shirts, blouses and overalls were hung by the bottom.  Dish towels were never hung by clothes.  Baby clothes were washed and hung very first as babies were delicate.

When the washing was all done, the drain hose was called into action and buckets of dirty water were then lugged to the back yard and dumped in an area that was designated as "the water dumping area."  This is when the Muscovy Ducks were in high heaven.  I do not know if you have ever seen a Muscovy Duck, but they are nasty.  They are usually white and black with a green sheen to the black.  The males are huge with a neck as big as my arm and the females are very small.  I seen them breeding one time which was enough for me.  That was nasty and I am not sure my perception of the Muscovy is not influenced by that experience.

Any way, they would get in the muddy water and root around with thier beaks, seeking God only knows what and that made them very dirty and seemed to make them very horny.  As I side note here, they are the only domesticated duck that (to my knowledge) can fly.  They also chatter to each other.  I hated wash day for that very reason.

Our kitchen had a "pitcher pump" and a sink for the washing of dishes and such.  The drain consisted of a pipe out the bottom that made a hard right angle and disappeared through the wall and drained into the back yard.  You guessed it!  Another hang out place for those damned Muscovy Ducks!

Ah, but my solice lay in the front yard.  In the front of the house by the road that ran by stood 2 tall Catalpa trees.  I have noticed in later years it is fashionable to top them short and they then have a ball on top.  Ours were "ala naturale".  They were both the same height and appeared to be twins, but they were vastly different.  The one on the left had lots and lots of little limbs and it was impossible to climb.

But the one on the right was my friend.  It had only smooth branches.  I would get a bucket and stand on it making it possible to reach the first branch.  I would grab it and hoist myself up, throw my right leg over the limb and survey my kingdom below.  From the bottom branch I would grab the next branch on the left side of the tree and work my way up the left side of the tree.  When I reached "my place" I would set on a branch (always the same branch) and be alone in my head.  At this point I was probably 25 - 30 feet off the ground.  I could see down Strong Street and up Strong Street and I could while away the hours dreaming of things and places I would someday see.  I lived a very happy life in my head.  Had I but known where my life would lead me I would have never come down from that tree.

Momma cleaned houses for the ladies in town and most of the time she walked to and from her jobs.  I always looked towards town and when I seen momma coming I would jump down and run to meet her. I do not know what we talked about or even if we did, but I loved my momma and for just a few minutes she was mine alone.  Of course when we reached the house I had to go get the little kids from Ory Ayers's house and momma was no longer mine alone, because those little brats were so needy!

I can close the door on that part of my life, but I can not make it stay shut.  I have heard it said that as we age we revert to our youth.  I do know people with Dementia and Alzheimer's lose short term memory first and I am thinking, maybe that is a good thing.  My childhood will always be my salvation.  It will always be the one place that I feel safe and when I die I hope I go back to Nickerson and Strong Street with my brother, sisters, and momma.

Yep.  That would be heaven!

Louella is still in there!

It is sad that after all these years I finally realized that the little girl on Strong Street is still in there and still hungering for acceptance.  I thought she would have learned by now, but she hasn't.  The saddest part is that she comes out at the damnedest times and I have to talk her back in.  Always craving acceptance and validation.  I think I may have read somewhere that we have to confront and comfort the inner child before we can be a complete person.  Maybe so.

The world sees the fascade that I present.  I tell it like it is.  I am dependable.  The "go to person" when something needs done.  I am honest to a fault.  I would give you the shirt off my back (as momma used to say) and the last dime in my pocket.  But under all that callousness and crap is still that skinny little girl back in Nickerson watching from the sidelines.  While the other girls went to the parties and cheered for the boys on the baseball team, I stayed inside and drew pictures on the black board with the "nerds."  We were drawing fins on Cadillacs before they were even thought of by the company!

I never doubted for one minute that my mother loved me.  Dad was a different story.  Grandma Haas and  Great Grandma Hatfield loved me.  They never kissed me or hugged me, but they fed me and smiled at me sometimes.  Touching didn't used to be a big deal back then.  I wonder why?  Aunt Mabel and Uncle Goll used to come see the grandma's from Coldwater and Aunt Mabel would let me rub cold cream on her face.  Once she sent me to Hinshaw's General Store to buy a towel so she could teach me how to do textile painting on fabric.  When I got it home and opened it up there was a brown "shelf mark" on it.  I wanted to take it back and get one without the "wear" mark, but she told me it was "good enough" for me.

And thus set the tone of my life was set.  I married a man because he was the one who asked me.  I stayed with him because that was what we did back then.  I had babies because that was the way it was.
When I divorced and was a single mother with no child support I survived.  And I married several times thinking that was the answer, but it was not.  I came to Colorado.  I divorced.  I married. I divorced and then I met my last husband, Kenny.  He did not know about my hungry inner child and he loved me for who I was.  When I opened up enough to share my childhood with him, he laughed.  And when I told him my first husband called me a "nickle bred gutter rat" he found that hilarious and began to call me  a "gutter bred nickly rat."  Life took on a new perception when I looked through his eyes.  But now he is gone.

So here I set crying over some slight that happened at church, or not having someone to hold my hand when I go walking, or wanting to run an idea by someone, and no one is there.  Nights get cold and lonely and very scary sometimes.  That is when I close my eyes and feel the wool blanket against my cheek and hear the coyotes yip in the distance and sometimes, the lonely scream of a cougar down on the river.

I guess it is all coming full circle.

Freezing weather, candlelight, and the barn?

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, I hear.  I spend a lot of time trying to figure mine out, but I have decided it is best to just go with what pops into it from time to time.  Take last night, for instance.  I heard about a candlelight vigil at the River walk in honor of the policeman and 2 civilians who died in the fiasco at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs.  It was advertised as unsponsored which told me it was a gathering of the community.  As it turned out, it was a photo op for a church that shall remain nameless, but that is all beside the point.  It seemed like a worthy endeavor, so I bundled up with 2 of everything on my frail little body and away I went!

Of course I went early since that is what I do.  My friend Janet showed up and we lit our candles, sung hymns, said a prayer or two.  Since all the cameras were finished rolling the leaders decided not to walk to the police station so we were dismissed.  Janet and I made a stop at Coyote Jack's store on Union where he made us a cup of hot cocoa.  (You will be hearing more about him in a later blog.)  I dropped her at her car and headed home.

I decided to take South Road even if it was icy and deserted and wild animals hang out there and jump in front of the car.  I just like to avoid traffic when I can and South Road was surreal with a soft snow falling.  For some reason, my mind wandered back to the barn on the Stroh place where we lived when I was probably 6 or 7 years old.  As I recall you came up the driveway to the house.  There was a detached garage to the right side where the kitchen was located.  Further to the right was a granary and a chicken house.  And closing the circle going back to the drive was the barn with a long low loafing shed(?).  I think that is what it is called.  But the barn was prominent.

Bear in mind that this memory is 68 years ago and much has been through this old brain, but as I recall I stepped into the barn through an oversized door that barns have.  On my right was a big wooden barrel.  Inside it was grain.  Directly in front of me was a stall for a cow to stand and her head was placed between two boards to hold her in place for milking. This was called a stanchion.   A pitch fork full of hay was put in the manger and she could eat while she was being milked.  Now milking was an art in itself.  The milking stool was a board with 1 leg.  The "milker"sat balanced on that while milking.  Now let me see if I remember that process!

First you placed the bucket under the udder.  Then you got yourself balance of the "stool".  Then you grasped a teat with thumb and forefinger where it protruded from the udder and  applied pressure as you "stripped" down to the end of the teat.  I know this is not sounding like anything is going to happen, but it does.  I am probably not your best source of "how to milk a cow not using a machine", but it does work and the milk squirts into the bucket, except some where in the process (and do not miss a beat or the cow will "hold her milk") you need to aim at the cat dish and fill it up because they are hungry.  Barn cats are profuse in a barn and necessary to keep the mice thinned out so they do not get in the grain.  Barn cats are that only.  They are not for petting or holding.  Most of them would just as soon rip your face off as look at you and you learn to respect their territory.  Come in, milk the cow, fill their dish and leave.   I think these are known as feral cats today.  And ever so often a disease goes through the colony and they all die, but be patient and more will magically appear.

There were several stalls for milking, but as I recall we only used the one and only had one milk cow at a time.  There was a hayloft up above that we were not supposed to go into because we might fall and break our neck, which, according to folk lore, happened a lot.  There were rooms in the back where the other cows (and God only knows what purpose they served) and the one horse could hang out when a blizzard was coming.  And in the spring we had to walk the fields and pull up poison weeds and burn them. 

The low part of the barn was used for whatever it needed to be used for at the time.  As I recall mother had geese and as I recall they were damned mean!  If I strayed (and I did once) into their domain the big gander would attack me and I had to be saved.  This is strange because I have 9 geese out back that love me.  They have never attacked me and 3 of them let me pet them.  I think that gander was just plain mean for the fun of it.

So this is what I thought about on the way home last night.  If I could live my life in reverse I would go back to that place.  It was where Donna stuck her finger in a turtles mouth and John Britan said it would not let go until the sun went down.  It was where Mary set in the mud puddle and Dorothy was born.  It was my brother in overalls and my sister got her first pair of glasses.  It was the big yellow tomcat eating the baby chick.  It was mother going to "club" and dad coming home drunk.  It was my childhood and my roots.  I want to go back there next summer and see if that house is there.  I want to listen and maybe here the kids at play.  Back to the days when someone took care of me.  When I was cute and loved.  Or at least that is how I remember it.

I like it better in the past!

Debbie, the wee tyke, called me after my blog of a week or so ago.  She thinks the cure for my writer's block may be in my past, since I write about it most often.  I think she may be on to something.  I sure enjoyed life back then when mother was the one who had to worry about putting food on the table and clothes on my back.  Not much fun when the burden is on my shoulders!
So I shall start way back as far as I can remember.  That would be before I started school.  We lived on the Stroh place on the edge of town.  That is where mother used to go to "Club".  I thought "Club" was a complete waste of time since it was a bunch of old ladies (They were probably 30 years old, which sure does not seem old now!) sat around and visited and exchanged recipes and patterns.  Us kids had to be clean when we went and I never knew why because we just sat on the floor and listened and tried to stay awake in case someone actually said something.  To my recollection, that never happened.  Then we would go home and we could get dirty again.
Oh, I do have to interject here what "getting clean" entailed.  Now try to visualize those days back then.  We had no running water; hence no water heater; hence no warm water.  Water was pumped on the back porch or kitchen, whatever that was.  Water was heated in a boiler on the stove for our baths.  Hair was a different matter.  That had to be washed about once every two weeks.  The way this happened was mother would catch us one at a time.  Our hair was wet in a basin of warm water and then suds up to get all the whatever was in our hair out.  That felt good!  Rinsing, however, was a whole new ball game.  Mother then tucked us under her arm and put our head under the pump where the water came out onto our head.  This took the cooperation of one of the bigger kids who liked to pump fast in hopes they would get done soon.
Now I do not know how many of you know just how cold water is when it is being pumped up from depths of the earth, but I am here to tell you, it is damn cold!  We were rinsed until mother could make our hair "squeak" when rubbed against itself.  That meant the soap was all out of it.  Then we were plopped unceremoniously onto the floor and told to go outside and dry in the sun.  Haircuts were given by a lady who lived nearby and she came to the house with her "hair cutting bowl."  This was placed on our head and she pulled her scissors out of her bag and trimmed anything sticking out from under the bowl.  Of course we all looked pretty much alike when the lady left.  Since our clothes were made out of flowered sacks that came full of flour or grain and had the "Gooch's Best" label imprinted on it, the little Bartholomew kids were pretty easy to pick out in a crowd.
Other memories of the Stroh place are coming to mind like there were a couple older half brothers that wandered in occasionally.  Apparently my father had been married previously and had 5 children.  Two of those children, a boy and a girl, had died of sand pneumonia.  Eventually the wife then died and the 3 boys were placed in an orphanage.  Richard was adopted.  Earl was adopted.  Gene was not adopted, but did go to a family named Banks where he stayed until adulthood.    Gene and Richard served in World War II.  Earl apparently  did not.
Earl married and had 2 boys and 1 girl.  Gene was married briefly to a woman named Louella and had a son.  His name was Billy (probably William Eugene Bartholomew.) I would love to find that boy.   Gene turned to a life of crime by forging someone else name on checks and seemed to fit well into prison society.  I know he was in prison at least three times.  He used to write me long letters and tell me how this time he had seen the error of his ways and when he got out this time, he would stay out.  The last time anyone seen him was when he was let out of a prison in Kansas and disappeard into thin air.  That was probably 50 +  years ago.
Richard suffered from "shell shock" after he came home from the Army.  When he would come for a visit, we would take him to the Arkansas River and drop him.  He would disappear into the underbrush and that would be the last we heard from him until we picked him up in exactly one week at exactly the same place.  Guess that was his way of coping with life.  Richard and Gene have both been dead for many years.
Anyway, these brothers used to pop in occasionally, but they were 20 years older than me so I was never close to them.  Brother Jake was a different story!
Well life is calling me to do something about my own life, so I will try to return tomorrow and tell you more about the Stroh place.