It is morning!

Click here for the music! 

I seem to function best back in the 1940's.  It was the tail end of the depression and we had nothing, but that is where I was happy.  Maybe not so happy, but secure.  I was safe.  I think that was what draws me back to that era.  We were together in a 2 bedroom house with a wood stove in the dining room, front room, and in the kitchen for cooking.  We carried water from a pump out back until we finally got a sink and pump in the kitchen.  

A coal oil hurricane lamp in the middle of the dining room table gave us light to do our home work.  My fondest memory is setting at that table with a red Chief tablet and a fat pencil  printing my ABC's.  I wrote about that years ago and a wonderful lady, Linda Kelp, who is Michael McQuire's cousin sent me  4 Big Chief tablets from her home up north.  I still have them!  I do not use them.  I wrote on one page of one tablet where they came from and that is all.

It is sad some of the things I do and the things I hoard!  My cupboards are full of cottage cheese containers because I can not bear to throw them away!  We did not have them back then.  I do not know when we became a nation of disposable everything.  I remember when the city dump was a designated area outside of town and that is where people took their tin cans.  Everything else was reused.  Today we call it recycle, but mostly it just goes in the trash and is hauled to the dump.  I understand it is then pressed into a big block and either buried or dumped into the ocean.  I do not see either one of those solutions as being permanent!  Burning it pollutes the air we breathe, so you tell me!

Well, once more I have gotten off track!  I started this wanting to tell you how safe and secure I was as a child even though we had very little in material possessions, and end up wanting to clean up the world and save it for our children.  This old age is not conducive to stringing and article together to a cohesive conclusion!

So, I guess I will make a pot of coffee and start my day with the local news followed by the national news, neither of which I can do anything about!  I am better off just listening to Merle Haggard sing me back home (click that).

Peace and love!

Hot days make me remember Momma.

Seems we are enduring another 100 degree day.  I can hear the central air and feel it blowing on my legs.        Makes me wonder what we did back home on Strong Street.  I do not even remember us having a fan.  I can remember going to Bull Creek and wading.  I can remember running down a sandy road to a sand pit somewhere.  I knew how to swim up until the time I was 15 years old and I fell over an underground ledge in Sterling Lake and had to be resuscitated.  No more swimming for me.  I did go to the YWCA and take swimming lessons just long enough to learn how to save myself.  I have never overcome my fear of water, but I have learned how to live with it.  I do not get myself into a situation where I am going to need to do the roll over on my back and float technique.  I just stay out of the water.

So what did my dear mother do to cool off on hot days?  Back in those days she cleaned houses for ladies in town.  She walked to work and then walked home.  Pretty sure she did not stop off at  the sand pit for a dip.  I can recall laying by the window and hoping for a breeze.  That did not happen often.  I remember in 7th grade she had a hysterectomy and she had a bed in the front room.  Seems back then if you were ailing or had an operation you could not recuperate in your bed, but had to be in the front room in case company came.  You never entertained in your bedroom.  It was for sleeping, not visiting.

For those of you who do not know, Kansas and Colorado are different in the way the temperatures fluctuate.  See, here in Colorado, when it starts getting evening and then night, the temperature goes down.  Colorado is not real humid so nights are cool.  In Kansas, the only thing that happens at night is it gets dark.  If it was 90 in the daylight, it is 90 in the dark   And humid!  On a hot day you can climb out of the shower and never know when you got dry.  And that towel you use might as well be tossed in the hamper because it will be sour before it ever air drys.

We cooked on a wood stove so that was added heat.  We did heat the wash water outside in a 3 legged kettle.   When we moved to the big city, that thing was left behind because we were going where there was hot and cold running water and we would never need that again.  Man I wish I had one of those today!  Don't know why, just wish I did.

We did not have dogs growing up.  I know we had a cat because momma had a canary and the cat ate it. A chirping canary can still send me into flashbacks.

I do remember setting on the front porch a lot.  We had two big Catalpa trees out front that shaded the house and gave us something to climb.  The bottom branches were worn smooth from our climbing.  Besides that the beans were what we used for cigarettes when we were playing movie stars.  That and climbing on top of the pig sty's next door and jumping from one to the other was our sole entertainment.  Momma had a fit when she found out we were doing that.  She told us in no uncertain terms that we were probably going to be "et by a hog."  But we weren't.  Would I do that today?  Hell no!  And there was a BlackWidow Spider that lived behind the door of the chicken house.  That could have bit us, too.  We did learn to recognize the web which crackles when you poke it with a stick.  The male is small and the female eats him or feeds him to her babies.  That is creepy.  Oh, and when the Preying Mantis mates, she eats his head.  Learn a lot growing up country.  Glad I never picked up any of those habit.

For now.....

709 North Strong Street, Nickerson, Kansas, Home of the Bartholomew family!

Father was quick to respond to the glove thrown down and the challenge from Mother.  The next day he walked into town and when he came back, we were landowners.  Seemed some guy on the other side of town had an old house on an acre of ground that he would sell for nothing down and $10.00 a month.  Total price was $700.00 sealed with a handshake and a promise.  So, the hay rack was turned back over on it's wheels, backed up to the door, and our worldly possessions piled on the bed, kids scrambled up on top, cow tied behind, horses hitched to the front, mom and dad on the springboard seat, reins flipped and "giddy up!" called across the backs of the horses and away we went.
Our new home was beautiful!  In front were 2 Catalpa trees.  They were magnificent!  Their leaves were huge!  Long beans hung from them.  We were told they were not edible, because we could see hope of a meal in anything that was green with the name "bean".  We did find in later years that when they were dry, we could smoke them.  My first lesson was to be sure and blow out the fire first and I learned that by sucking raw flames into my throat.  Bad news!  But back to the house.
Dad pulled the hay rack across a broken side walk and we unloaded our possessions onto a cement porch with an actual roof.  We could not take anything into the house yet as we did not have the proper floor coverings.  Since this was our very own place we must put linoleum on the floors.  The kitchen stuff, which included a scrub board, two galvanized tubs, a boiler tub, the pots and pans, and the grease barrel along with the slop jar, were  put on the back porch.  The 3 legged cast iron kettle was placed carefully out in the back yard near the pump, but far enough away from everything else that a fire could be built in it to heat the water.  It was a central part of life back then.
As soon as everything was unloaded, dad drove into town and purchased the rolls of linoleum for the front room, dining room and the front bedroom.  The linoleum came stored in big cardboard rolls.  The three rolls probably cost a total of $15.00 but were a mark of pride in our new home.  They were unloaded and placed in the room they would go in to start "relaxing."  That was accomplished by carefully cutting the cardboad wrapper off and leaving the roll to warm and relax.  This took several hours.   It came rolled up backwards so we would have no clue what it would look like until it was ready to unroll.  Mom and Dad knew because they had seen pictures of it at the store.  This is how it worked.  The roll was placed with the edge where it would start.  There was much measuring, because it could not be moved without tearing it once it was in place.  When it was ready mom got on one side and dad got on the other and they would unroll a little, then let it relax while they went to the next room.  By evening they were flat on the floor and we could then bring in the beds and our belongings.  The new floors were wonderful and smelled to high heaven of asbestos, tar, crosote, and every other carcinagine known to mankind.  Little fiberglass and a few other things, but they were so pretty and clean!
The sofa was brought into the front room and then the big square  asbestos covered in tin was placed under the chimney.  This was also new.  The cast iron stove was carried in and placed in the center and the pipes attached to lead the smoke to the outside.  The wood box was placed behind the stove and we were good to go.  The kitchen held the wood cook stove.  A two stove house!  The wood cook stove was very fancy with a reservoir to hold water.  There were 6 seperate burners which could be picked up and wood added to just that portion.  The wood cook stove was only used on week days.  Sunday we cooked on a two burner stove that was powered by propane.  That kept a more even heat which we needed to fry chicken.  Sunday was always fried chicken.  Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and cream gravy.  Usually opened a can of green beans and biscuits were a staple.
So with the new floor laid and the beds set up and wood carried in for the next days cooking, we toddled off to bed.  We were tired but  sleep did not come easy.  There was much to discover about our new home.  There were buildings out back.  I had seen a place for the chickens and ducks, a granery, horse tank, a barn and of course the out house.  When I come back the next time, we will re-examine the "out house and look down into the cellar.
For now, the Bartholomew family was home at 709 N. Strong Street in Nickerson, Kansas and we even had a number painted on one of the posts that held up the roof of the porch.  What more could a girl possibly want?

Peace!

Sleepin at the foot of the bed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tkEotkyjHU 

Remember this guy?  This song and "Out Behind the Barn", "Got Company Comin'".  Everyone of those songs hits a chord with me.  We grew up pretty much in abject poverty, which made us right there with everyone else.  We had just come out of the big depression and things were changing.  Dad farmed with John Britan which wasgood because John had a tractor and 40 acres across the river.  Dad had horses because he did not trust that new fangled stuff.  We wanted to go some place, we walked.  Laundry was done on a scrub board before we graduated to the wringer washer.
We had a two bedroom house and there were 6 of us kids.  That made 8 humans sleeping in 3 beds.  Dad had his own bed.  Mom shared with Mary and Dorothy which left us 4 older kids on one bed.  I do not know where Jake slept, but I think he had a pallet on the floor.  Not with us girls, that was for sure.  There was no such thing at our house as privacy.  We had an "out house" and that was pretty private.  Well not really, cause it was a two holer.  But there was a latch on the door.  I often wondered if the latch was to keep me in or some one else out.
I can remember 2 wood heating stoves and one wood cooking stove.  Lord, when it was winter and the wind whistled through the cracks in the walls there just was no keeping warm.  We would hunker down under a pile of quilts, but they were not the pretty ones I have now.  These were what ever we could piece together to cover the old wool army blankets that seemed to pile up over the summer and fall.  Those things were made of something that does not ever  rot, wear out, shrink away, or stop scratching.
The amazing part was, if someone were traveling through and they stopped at our house, there was always a place for them to sleep and a meal for them to eat. Looking back I seem to think that the hayloft out in the barn was the warmest place we had and I think sometimes us kids slept out there.  I do remember when Jimmy Dickens was singing these songs that I could not imagine any other kind of life.  That was just how it was.
Of course, now I am older and look back it was terrible times.  No human should ever live like that, but we did not know any different so we just played in our little piles of dirt or climbed the tree, or chased the chickens and hid from what ever we were afraid was going to carry us off, like the gypsys out North of town.  I was always scared to death the gypsys would get us and to this day, I would not know a gypsy if one grabbed me!  And what would they want with me any how?
Well, I just wanted to tell you about the Jimmy Dickens songs.  Guess this is one reason I only listen to County Classic Radio.
Got to go take a nap.  I have made myself very sleepy thinking of the good old days.  You know what?  I would not trade one minute of my early years for a mansion on the hill.  they are what made me who I am today, and I am just pretty pleased with myself most of the time.
Have a good one.

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