Nostalgia at this time of the morning? Sure, why not?

For some reason I decided to go back and read some old blogs.  I know what it was!  I wanted to download the pdf. of all of them as I want to have a record when I turn toes up and the kids are remembering me fondly.  I started out just pretty boring and mundane, but as time went on I managed to actually hit my stride there for a while.  So rather than tax my tiny brain this morning, I give you one of my first that I wrote about my mother. 

 

Friday, September 25, 2009

My Mother

My mother shaped my life by example and a lot of her down home wisdom. I am going to tell you some of these at this point and what my thoughts at the time were.

1. "Get that pencil out of your mouth. You don't know where it has been." (Where did that thing go when I wasn't looking?")

2. " Do you want a lickin'?" (Oh, yeah! That is exactly what I want, a lickin'!)

3. " If Beth stuck her head in the fire, I suppose you would too!" (How is wearing my socks rolled down comparable to sticking my head in a fire?)

4. "Eat that mush! There are people starving to death in China." (Well, I sure wish they had this mush!"

5. "Get that coat on before you go outside and freeze to death!" (Wonder how long it takes to flash freeze.)

6. " Do not stick your tongue on that metal pole, cause it will freeze there." (Of course I am going to do that if I can just make it to the pole before I freeze to death.)

7. "Break this candy bar in half and give your sister the biggest half so you do not appear greedy." (Yeah, give the big half to her because she is greedy.)

8. "The early bird gets the worm." (And why do I want a worm?)

9. " Stop running around like a chicken with its head cut off!" (There is a visual I do not need.)

10. "Keep your legs crossed or some little boy will look up your dress." (And what will he see?)

11. "I am going to knock your block off!" (What is a block? Is that possible? Where will my block land and can I put it back on?)

12. "Keep eating and you are going to pop open!" (So that is what that belly button is for! To hold me shut.)



And there is not a day that goes by that one of her idioms doesn't pop into my mind and jerk me back to the straight and narrow. Today this would be called child abuse, but back in those days it was just called "doing the best we can."

I would not trade my roots for any other roots in the world. I came from good, hardworking, honest German and I am sure this has helped shape me into the person I am today.

Correct the dates on Reuben Bartholomew

There, Debbie, thanks for calling and drawing my attention to the mistakes on the dates. I do not know where I got those, but these seem to be correct now.  You were indeed the apple of your grandfathers eye in your little easter out fit that he had aunt Joanne make for you  and little red shoes that he bought.  I must have a picture of that for this blog.
And I know how to do it.  I have a thing that you feed the picture in and it puts it on a digital form on a flash drive.  I will get that to you soonly. 
For now, I am off to the city.  Enjoy your sharp mind while you still have it!  ;)

Rueben Floyd Bartholomew

This is my father. Well it is actually a picture of my father. It hangs on my sister Mary's wall and I just happened to see it when I last visited there. The last time I seen my father was in 1964. He was born February 3, 1893. He passed to another level on February 17, 1965. He married my mother, Christine Josephine Haas on January 19, 1935.  It was a second marriage for both. 

Mother had a daughter from her previous marriage who was barely a year old. My brother Jake was born on October 5, 1937.  He was killed in a car crash on October 31, 1965.  I was born on October 1, 1941  and I am not allowed to say when the other three sisters were born.  They are vain little things.  However, as matriarch of the family I am proud to be my age.  (Oh, do the math for crying out loud!  I am 70 this year.)  I never knew my dad as a young man since he was 23 years older then my mother.  I do know that when we lived in Nickerson, Kansas he farmed.  He always had horses and always a matched team. 

He share cropped with a man named John Britain.  His wifes name was Salina and they had a daughter and as I recall her name was Mary Ella.  I thought that was nice as it kind of matched with sister Mary and my Louella.  John Britain had been a carpenter and back in those days he held his nails in his mouth as opposed to an apron.  As  a result he had cancer of the jaw and had part of his face removed.  Guess it is kind of funny what sticks in a young kids mind, huh?

I also remember that John Britain would pick dad up and sometimes I could go.  John had a shack on his land which was located South(?) of the Arkansas River in Nickerson, Kansas.  I also remember he had a stove to heat water and he would put cocoa and sugar in a cup and then fill it about half with boiling water.  The rest he filled with canned milk.  That was hot cocoa.  The elixir of the Gods!!  Best stuff in the whole world to this barefooted ragamuffin.  Now I must tell you that since those days I have tried many times to make the same hot cocoa and failed miserably!  Why that stuff would "gag a maggot off a gut wagon!"  (Kenny used to say that, so blame him for that.)

I have since decided that I grew up in the post depression and World War II years and things were sure different then.  When I talk about the "good old days"  I am talking about abject poverty and a time when the wolf at the door was a very real thing.  When meat on the table was the exception rather than the rule.  When Carp and fried apples was standard fare and an egg was best saved for the hen to set on and hatch.  When a wonderful, beautiful Christmas was finding a coloring book and a red ball and an orange all for me under the tree my big brother had drug home from the school room the day before.  Back when a feast was prepared because many people brought a dish and we all shared.  Or Momma got tired of that old Rooster being mean and lopped off his head and he was soup de jour!

After the busy season is over here in my little corner of the world, I am going to drag out the pictures of days gone by and scan them and let you meet my brother, sisters and the old cemetary where most of them are.  Until then, I have my memories and a driving need to make Lotion, Body Butter and print out the Inventory List for the Weaving Sale.  But at night I can walk the furrowed fields of my mind and make notes on how to best present the days gone by.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life!  Better days ahead.

You can easily judge the character of a man....

I
 I found this on face book and it struck me as one of the truest things I have ever read.  To often in this dog eat dog I find even myself cow towing to the one who can give me the favors that I want.  But always it seems when I get caught up in the day to day existence and become embroiled in the fight for the almighty dollar, something will jar me back to reality.  Like this little rabbit!  Have you ever seen anything more helpless in your life?
 Having grown up in the country, not on a farm actually, but kind of was, we raised rabbits.  Or I should say Mother raised rabbits. That was back in the good old days when there were not all the nitrates and nitrites in the grain supply and it was a simple matter of letting the rabbits breed and then the doe would give birth and raise the babies.  Course we would eat them, but that is what you do on a farm.  But the period between when the babies were born and the landed on the dinner plate, we could play with them.  At first they did not have their eyes open and were completely helpless.
 Now, I must interject a little story here and this will no doubt make my sister Donna mad, but facts are facts.  We knew we were not supposed to  hold the little bunnies until their eyes were open and then we must be very gentle with them.  Well, Sister Donna really loved those bunnies and she held one a little tighter than she should have.  When she saw it was not moving she thought it might be sick so she took it and put it in a dresser drawer and covered it up with a handkerchief to keep it warm.  And of course when Momma came home, she knew one was missing and me being the good daughter showed her where it was.  I thought Donna should have been beat unmercifully, but mother used it as a learning experience.  Good mother's do that, you know.
 Oh, the little rabbit brings back so many memories.  We had chickens and they lived in a coop out back, but they were allowed to run loose.  One day there was a button with a string and the chicken pecked the button and the string stayed outside.  Course I was inconsolable.  Little note here; we were little ragamuffin kids running around with no shoes on and we tended to worry about some of the damnedest  things.  Much of my life was spent worrying about one thing or another, and I was the biggest tattletale you ever saw.  I used to get up on the chicken coop and jump off and try to fly.  I never could figure out why that did not work.  I had a dish towel tied around my neck and everything!  We ran up the road to Vincent's sand pit.  Since none of us could swim, we got in trouble over that one. 
 It was always great when school started cause the ladies at the church would make sure we all had dresses to wear.  And we all got a new pair of shoes.  That was rather a mixed blessing cause I did not like shoes.  Still don't.  But it was one of those necessary evils.  And we had to wear them until the weather got nice in the spring.  By that time we had usually grown out of them, but everyone passed theirs down to a younger kid.  Rather sucked that my older sibling was my brother.  So I did not wear shoes for the last couple months of school.  My God!  If we tried that now the teachers would be aghast.
 There were 6 of us little urchins and we all left our childhood behind with a different perception of the reality of the experience.  I never tire of revisiting my childhood.  As I recall, we lived in pretty much abject poverty.  We did not have indoor plumbing until we moved to Hutchinson when I was 16.  We heated with wood and pumped water in the kitchen.  We took a bath in a galvanized tub on Saturday night.  Seems like we had kerosene lanterns, but I recall electric also.  That confuses me.  We usually had meat on Sunday and Carp and fried apples was regular fare.  Oh, dear, let's don't go there!
 I have this little rabbit as my background on my computer so I can remember that I am not king of the hill and that there are people out there who really need me to be strong for them.  But you know, sometimes I just wish I were one who could let some one else fight the battle, sometimes.  I am getting better at it.

Well, of course this was a mistake on my part, but I think I will just leave it as it is.!

Yesterday was one cent auction listings on eBay.  So like the good little shop keeper I profess to be, I got busy listing.  Listed 17 items.  Strangely enough most of them were not even looked at, but two of them began pulling in the lookers right away.  I was kind of surprised to see that I had 78 views by the time I went to bed.  I was amazed when I got up this morning and the new totals were 358 on one and 347 on the other.  I just peeked and one is setting at 948 and the other at 957.  Less than 24 hours.  Since I am a fairly intelligent woman I immediately thought the counter was screwed up.  That is until I took a closer look at the titles.
  See when you list you are supposed to be very descriptive so people can readily type in a few words and find your item, or one like it.  My items are both completely worthless plastic bead necklaces, so I  wrote "3 strings of plastic beads worthless to the naked eye as well as to the experienced."  Sounds very descriptive and honest to me.  But what if I were looking for something else and typed in "worthless, naked, experienced".  I would no doubt come up with something else and would be very surprised to find myself looking at plastic beads.
  So there you have my lesson for the day in how to attract lookers to your listings on eBay.  Now I have had no bids so I am pretty sure that the people purusing my site are not looking for a necklace!  Funny the things that come out of our mouths without a thought until some one calls our attention to it.
  Just wanted to share that with you.

So this is a Pheasant Farm!

I think if you click on that you will see the captions and it will get big.  Course I have been wrong before and Google does have a mind of it's own.  That being said, this is a Pheasant Farm along Highway 50 in Western Kansas.  And I want you to know that I took these pictures while driving with the passenger window down.  Course there was no traffic and I had slowed to a crawl.
  Now I am no stranger to things like this, but I thought you might find it interesting.  See way back  before I moved to Colorado the kid's dad bought 10 acres in Deerfield, Kansas.  Now I moved to Colorado in 1977 so we are talking 35 years ago.  He had a vision at that time of becoming a host on a game farm.  I must say he did pretty good at it.  He moved onto the 10 acres and built a "Club House" along with Pheasant Pens.  I do not kow how many birds he had, but I do know how this worked.
  When Pheasant season was upon him, the "hunters"  would come up from Texas and stay in the Club House.  I think he did most of the cooking.  A real "Man Retreat" there!  When it came time for the hunt the allotted number of birds were released and the hunters shot them!  As the birds were cleaned, they began their "celebration".   The Texan's got their game and a great vacation and he made money.  It was a match made in heaven.
  I must interject here. How many of you have ever eaten wild game that was hunted and shot?  We are talking about a bird that while beautiful is about the size of a chicken.  They live in the wild and fly and run so they are very tough.  Might as well throw the wings and legs away.  They are shot with a shotgun.  Now those "BB's" travel into the bird carrying feathers.  So think about that a minute.  I do not know how much time I spent as a young wife spitting feathers at the supper table. But such was the lot of a frontiersman's wife and children.
  After Earl D. passed the kids remained on the land.  Or at least some of them.  The daughters.  They did try to keep the Pheasant business alive but only for a brief time.  The Club House was used for family dinners, but that got to be more work than fun so now it sets idle.  Kind of sad the way time marches on, isn't it?

Cesar Chavez as seen by Octavia Ocampo.

As you know, Cesar Chavez is the American Farm Worker who was a Labor Leader and Civil Rights Worker for the American Farm Worker.  Along with Delores Huerta he founded the United Farm Workers Union which gave collective bargaining rights to the men and women who work in the fields to harvest your food.

He was born on March 31, 1927 and passed on April 23, 1993.

Portrait of LaCausa

Please click on an image to enlarge the area so you can clearly see what I am talking about.

I want to give you a close look at this print which hangs in Sister Nancy's office.  It is by Octavia Ocampo.  It shows what at first appear to be human skulls, but upon closer examination you see the are human beings placed to look like skulls. The farm workers have long been the neglected in our country.  Would you work in a field in the blazing sun all day?  What if you had absolutely no choice?  Farm workers are some of the poorest of the poor and a hand up is not the same as a hand out.

  

The farm workers cause was a very long and while Chavez tried to keep it peaceful with his Ghandi philosophy, it did not always turn out that way.

I now leave you to study this print and see if you are as moved by this work as I was.  When you eat your salad tonight or your veggies tomorrow, think of Cesar and the millions of farm workers who are responsible for getting it to your table.