Ah, Daddy is off drunk some where and here comes the cyclone!

I do not know how long we lived on the Ailmore place, but I do not think it was very long.  My most vivid memory was one afternoon when Jake decided to work on a  car that was in the front yard. Cars were simple back in those days and if you had any mechanical abilities at all and could think of the concept of a motor, you could be a mechanic.  He was pretty sure that the gas line was plugged so he unhooked some line and told Donna to watch the other end and he would blow through it and she should let him know if air came through.  So she had it up close to her eye and he blew and gas shot out into her eye!  Oh, Lordy, there was more catawaulling going on than you could believe!  And guess what Jake got?  You are right!  A licking!  There was talk that Donna might lose her eye sight, but I guess they washed it out with something and she was fine.
Roy Keating lived very close there to us.  He raised pigs and those things were huge!  It seems like I was told that a pig will keep growing as long as it is alive and that is why they get so big.  Does not mean that is true, just means that is what I was told.  Dad was Mr. Keating's chore man which meant when Mr. Keating was not home that dad took care of the place.  That meant I had to go and gather eggs while dad "slopped the hogs."  Side note here...back in those days farmers kept "slop buckets" which held garbage, leftover or sour milk, and anything edible except bones. The bucket was carried out to the pigs every morning.  I was scared shitless of those big pigs.  And of course there was always the tale of a farmer or his child falling in the pig pen and the pigs eating the hapless person.  That rather kept my paranoia fueled!
The floods, the bull frog, the Barthold sisters, Mr. Keatings giant pigs, coal oil lamps, and I never remember snow or being cold there, so we may not have wintered over at the Ailmore place.  I do recall my dad taking us all to the Kansas State Fair once.  Maybe not all of us, but me, Jake and probably Josephine.  I recall the ride there.  We parked and entered the grounds.  We walked down the midway with the promise from dad that we could ride the ferris wheel later, but first he needed a beer.  We were not allowed in the hall and had to set on a bench outside the door.  It was hot and dusty, but ever the dutiful father, dad finally came out.   He got us an ice cream cone for our one treat on the way to the car to head home.  I can still taste that ice cream.  It was horrible and must have been something like pineapple sherbert.  When we got home mother greeted us at the door and that man got hollered at and screamed at the rest of the night for taking those innocent babies into a den of iniquity.  When he explained that we sat outside in the hot sun, that was more fuel for the fire.  Kansas State Fair does not hold any fond memories for me!
It was a few days later and dad was once more gone, God only knew where, but we were sure he would come home "plastered"  since that was what he did.  Nickerson had no beer joints so he had to go into Hutchinson which was 11 miles away.  It was one of those hot, sultry days for which  Central Kansas is so famous.  The phone rang and Queen Josephine answered.  Very quickly she ended the conversation and turned to us.  "Mother is on her way home.  A big storm is coming.  Get the tank pumped full fast."  Jake and I ran for the back door and the pump house. The sky did look terrible.  Soon a car pulled into the drive and mother jumped out and ran for the house.  Ed Crissman followed her.  She apparently had started for home and he picked her up.  The wind was picking up and it was a sure thing that no one was going anywhere  until this was over.  Mother called us inside and just as we reached the safety of the house, the pump house collapsed.
We covered the windows with blankets in case the hail broke the windows.  We all huddled in the center of the house while the wind blew, the rain fell, and we prayed that the house did not lift up off the foundation.  I do not know how long the storm took, but it finally subsided.  Like little forest creatures we opened the door and peered outside.  Ed's car was still there, but had lots of hail damage.  The haystack was gone.  All the buildings were gone.  Trees were uprooted.  The fences were gone and the livestock wandered the yard.   Dead chickens were all over the yard.  It looked like a war zone.  Ed Crissman decided to walk home since the creek was now flooded.  And then it was night.
Dad came home sometime in the night.  It was a somber little group of people that stood in the yard the next morning wondering where to begin.  There seemed to be no place to start.  We had caught the livestock and tied them  to a fence post where they stayed the night.  But now what?  The roof of the house was not going to keep out the next rain.  And there was my father.  The pillar of the family.  Hung over, sick, sorry, and all the other things that they sing about in country western songs.  And my mother, a beaten woman.  She had worked all her life to feed a nest full of kids and then  lost the nest.  It was devastating.  She still had the kids.  We still needed to eat and we had to have a roof over our heads.  And she looked at my father, and all she said was "Well, Rueben, I hope you have an idea, because I am done."
I found an article that mother had saved from the paper back then.  They called it a cyclone.  Cyclone is also described as a tornado.  I didn't figure it made a lot of difference what it was called, the results were the same.  Mother could have given up at that point and no one would have faulted her.  But I have found since then that there is really nothing to give up to.  There have been times in my life when I have felt like there just was not enough gumption left in  me to take that next step.  When I looked at my kids and thought this was as far as I could go.  When that happened I thought back to that ragged bunch standing in that yard and heard my mother say, "Well, Rueben...." I had no Rueben, but I did have a mother and my mother had a daughter that learned her lessons of survial from a very strong woman.  A woman who knew how to wring every bit of life out of the worst situations.  A pioneer woman who did not give up and stuck with her husband and knew when to tell him it was his turn and he knew she meant it.
Next time I show up here we are going to be on the move again!!  Get ready world, the Bartholomew family is about to be land owners!

Could have been on this one or that one.

This is what I call sharing!

Yes a cat on my lap is rather a handicap!

This is Icarus.  She is setting on the chair beside the computer.  I keep it there for her.  It is her chair.  She like to set and watch me work.  But she soon becomes bored and wants to set on my lap.

Ever try to type with a cat on your lap?  It is not easy.  It can be done, but she does not like me to let my attention wander from her.

Life is boring for a cat whose sole goal in life is to spend time on me 24/7.  In bed it is my shoulder.  Nap time in the chair it is my lap.  Usually the only way to get her away from the keyboard is to print something at which time she has her paw firmly implanted in the place where the paper comes out.  

So very soon she is in the middle of the keyboard which makes life rather difficult for me since I can not see either the key board or the monitor.  I do pick her up and firmly place her back on her chair which solves nothing since she is like a boomerang and is right back on the keyboard on my lap.

 Right at the moment I do not know where she is.  That is scaring me!  But I am just going to type real fast and hope for the best.

Yes, yes! I was a 60's flower child.

Woke up early this morning to think about things and decided that I grew up in the best of all times.  People who know me find it hard to believe that I never used drugs of any kind.  Unless of course we consider alcohol and tobacco, and I think those are both considered in that genre.  I was born in the 40's which was a time of war.  There was talk that I was actually fallout from Hiroshima or Pearl Harbor, but I think not since I was such a cute baby!
We went from peace after World War II to peace keeping missions in Korea, Vietnam, to war in   Iraq and are still a very warring faction and I am not sure where all we have troops now.  We went from a phone on the wall to a phone we wear in our ear.  We went from Frank Sinatra, through Elvis, the Beatles, Garth Brooks and now Miley Cirus and Justin Bieber are the current losers. We went from a black Model T through a lavender Corvette.  Poodle skirts gave way to mini skirts which were traded for culottes and now there are no fashion rules at all.  Baby boomers, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.   Birth control pills, floppy discs, Rubik's cube, a man on the moon and a woman in the space station.  Kent State, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and President Bush hates broccoli!  Do I need to go on with history?  No.
I just want you to grasp the picture.  Some times I like to think back and picture the first Indian who looked up and saw an airplane soaring overhead.  There is an old saying, "Time marches on!"  and one "Time and tide wait for no man."  I can attest to all of this.  We used to go buy a car from the lot on the corner for $250.00, put 19 cent gas in the tank and drive 150 miles to see grandma who inevitably lived on a farm usually in Western (insert name of state here).    Now we take out a loan for $25,000.00, put $4.25 gas in the tank, park our cheap little car in the garage of our house in the suburbs, and crawl on a plane for $650 and fly 2000 miles to see grandma who does not have time for us because it is bingo night at the condo center and she is in charge, but we can stay here at the house and pet her Labradoodle which is her latest designer dog.
The creek where we used to fish is no longer there.  It has been rerouted and is now a kayak course, but take your pole anyway.  You can set there and remember when you used to catch a cat fish and you could actually eat it.  Damn things glow now with radiation and I ain't eating that!  We can walk downtown to the "Historic area" which is now antique shops where I can buy a remenant of history for a price which is more than I used to pay for my car.  If I am really lucky I can find a friend my age and we can play "Oh, God, remember when we had to wear those awful shoes?"  And "Remember when mother used to gather up the pans because the 'tinker man' was due and he would patch the holes in them?"
I know you have a hard time thinking that was a good time, but it was.   It was back before any divorces and before I worked 3 jobs to survive and before I found out cigarettes were cool and a shot of whiskey sure took the edge off the lonliness and an aspirin was the strongest drug in my medicine cabinet..
 Back when we could walk out back, catch a chicken, "wring it's neck", pluck out the feathers and innards and have the biggest and best  pot of chicken and noodle soup in the world 2 hours later. Scraps of food were thrown out in the back yard for the chickens and the chicken would then lay an egg and the cycle continued.
 Back when school supplies included pencils and paper and a new pair of shoes for the winter ahead.  Back when the teacher was Miss Lauver or Mr. Bollinger, because teachers were respected and revered.  Clothes were handed down and when they were thread bare they went into the "rag basket".  In due time they were torn into strips, rolled into a ball and taken to the weaver lady who made them into rugs.  Wool clothes were cut into strips and mother crocheted them into rugs. Those were best cause they were thicker and softer.
Back when we walked to church every Sunday to save the car for an emergency or for when we went to see grandma and great grandma who lived in Plevena, a town of 102 people 24 miles away.
I would just ask that all of you out there stay in touch with your roots.  They are what makes you who you are today and they are unique to you.  You can look back and see all the things your parents did wrong while raising you, but try to remember that they were once young also and they were raised by a parent raising them who probably had no idea what they were doing either!  We all live and learn and some of us actually get to a point in our lives where we can say,

I did the best I could with the knowledge and the tools I had at the time so I forgive me!

Well, hello new neighbors! Looks like fun ahead!

And so with everything we owned on a hay rack and kids on top holding it down and  the old milk cow tied behind, we embarked on a new life clear across town.  Things would change here.  I was probably in the second grade by this time.  Josephine was 13, Jake 9, so I must have been 7 years old.  Mother was now cleaning houses and dad was still farming.  Josephine was in charge of us since she was the oldest.  Her job was to keep us alive, not bleeding and to clean the house.  I am here to tell you, that girl took this seriously all except the part about keeping us uninjured.  She damn near beat us to death!  And who do you think did all that house work?  Not miss "just figured out there were boys and she was a girl"!  We were banished from the house as soon as our work was done and not allowed back in to "dirty the place up" and besides one of her boyfriends was usually there and they were "baking cookies".  Eating the cookies too as near as I could tell, because we never got any.

The floors of the house were wood planks about 5-6 inches wide.  Not like the wood floors in the rich peoples houses that mother cleaned.  These had to be swept every day and everything in the house had to be wiped down with an oiled rag since the dust blew in every day as a matter of course.  Dishes were washed by heating water in a pan and rinsed in cold water.  The pump house was out the back door and Jake and I were in charge of keeping the stock tank full of water.

But we had better things to do than hang out at home.  Mr. and Mrs. Rumble lived up the road a ways and they sat on thier porch most days in the summer.  Mr. Rumble told me he would give me a whole dime if I would learn the words to "Buttons and Bows" and sing it to them.  I worked very hard, but never quite got it done.  They were wonderful people.

Across the road from us lived the Barthold sisters.  They were spinsters and school teachers.  I never actually spoke with them.  I did like to hide in thier forest and spy on them when they were out in the yard.  Once I even seen them setting in the chairs drinking tea.  And strain my ears as I might I could not hear a word they said.  So I made up lots of conversations.  I do not remember what they were, but I am sure they were wild!

Sometimes Josephine left us unattended and that is when we got our chance at the telephone.  Ah, it was beautiful!  It hung on the wall and  had a speaker that you spoke into and an earpiece on the side that was held to your ear so you could hear the other person.  We were on party lines back then.  This meant several families were all on one circuit.  Say you called Joe Blow.  It would ring his signal which was maybe 2 shorts and a long.  Ours might have been 2 longs and a short.  The point was, you did not pick up someone else's call.  And if you wanted to place a call and picked up the phone and heard a conversation you said "Excuse me, please." and quietly replaced the receiver.  That is unless you were 9 and 7 years old and bored out of your mind.  Then you could do a couple things.  One was to cover the mouth piece and listen in n the conversation.  Or you could act like you did not know they were talking and crank the handle that called the operator.  This would cause a very loud ring in thier ears.  And you could titter and then act like you weren't there.  Ah, but technology caught these damn Bartholomew kids every time.  Then there was trouble.  First Josphine whipped us with a strap for "making it look like"  she was not doing her job of keeping us in line.  Then Mother would follow up with a licking for not listening to Josephine and upsetting the neighbors and now maybe they were going to take our phone out and what would we do when no one could call her to come to work?  Not to worry about dad giving us the punishment because I am not sure he ever knew we were there.

I do not know when dad worked, but a pile of hay appeared in the corner of the yard.  Not the back yard where the cows and horses were, but in the front yard so anyone driving past would know we had hay.  Go figure.  But this gave us a hiding place when we hid and threw rocks at cars going past and "kicking up dust"   which in turn made our work harder.  Damn people from town anyway!  By the way, back then, cars were either black or a dung looking green.  That is how I recall it anyway.  Not sure what color came next.  Think it was white.

After the Rumble house and on the way to town was Bull Creek.  Most of the time it was just a creek bed, but in the Spring, Nickerson and that whole area was prone to flooding and that little creek could  do some damage.  See, the Arkansas is on one side of town and Cow Creek cuts through and intesects with Bull Creek.  When Spring rains come they all get out of thier banks and Nickerson is surrounded by water and travel is not happening.  Or at least that is how it was back then.  But when the water subsided and there was just a small bit of water running through Jake and I could go seine and catch crawdads.  We would get a few inches in the bottom of the wash boiler and then we cleaned them.  This was accomplished by ripping the tail off, pulling the shell off and then dropping them in hot grease and frying them.  A feast for a king.  Or it was back then  Do you know what a crawdad is?  It is like a lobster, but about 4 inches long and it lives in the mud.  I bought some at  Walmarts several years back and they were horrible!

Bull frogs also lived in Bull Creek.  Not for long though because Jake and I got the idea that we would catch them and we would take them home and grow them until they were big and then we could have frog legs.  Josephine did not appreciate our vision at all.  Especially when I showed up with one in my dress tail and opened it to show her.  Damn frog made a leap right at her and then proceeded to try to hide from her.  She stood over me with a broom and every time I missed the frog she smacked me.  The frog was fast, but with a lot of prodding from Josephine, I was faster and our dream crumbled there in that little unpainted house there by Bull creek when she beat it to death in the dust by the door with a shovel.

When I come back next time I will tell you about the cyclone that finished our stay at the Ailmore place.

New hydrant, old friend, blossoms on the tree

OK, I have been trying to get this out there for 3 days and can not seem to get my pictures to load.  You are just going to have to use your imagination and when I figure out where I am screwed up at I will post the pictures.  This is supposed to be a picture of a hole in the ground with water in the bottom of it.  Sad looking sight.  Well, there it is, but it is really big.  Need to fix that.
So several days before I had started draining the stock tank and started water running in which is how I keep it fresh for the geese.  When I noticed a problem with the filling process I pulled the hose out and no water.  That is always a bad sign!  And in keeping with my string of bad luck I watched the dollar signs flash before my eyes.  Or I could dig it out myself.  All it entails is digging down about 7 feet, crawling down in the hole, unscrewing the old hydrant, buying the new one, screwing it on, and refilling the hole.  Made my back hurt to think about it.  So I scraped together a small pile of money and called my friends, Clifford and Frank who own an excavation company and have access to power equipment and actually still like me.  And within the hour Clifford was here looking the situation over and arriving at a solution.  He had a worker who would dig it out by hand and I smiled.

And the next morning Cliff arrived early with Wayne in tow. I had already told him to bring his own shovels because mine were either lost or had no handles due to being left in the dirt and ran over several time. Same with the rakes, hoes and every thing I touch.

So here are the tool of the trade.  After much digging, a little cussing, a couple trips into town, the deed was done!  Of course Cliff thought this should be a good deed and I thought it should not be.  After much haggling we agreed on a price we could both live with and he toodled off into the noon day sun.

So I ventured up to the house and found my Apricot tree full of blossoms which I can not post on here because I have once more jacked with the programs and the photo's won't upload.  Has something to do with my pop up blocker or my default browser or the fact that my fingers poke before my brain is through thinking!  

Now yesterday I went to the dentist to have a tiny fragment of what appeared to be a piece of bone from when I had a tooth pulled over 2 years ago.  X-ray revealed that the root from said tooth was still firmly in place.  20 minutes of digging and several x-rays later she finally got all the root out!  That woman was good! Luckily I was numb from the neck up because I could hear cracking and other sounds in there.  She called me in a pain pill perscription because we were both pretty sure that was going to be sore and aching last night.  I woke up this morning feeling like a million dollars!  I love that woman.  Going to put her over on my Been There blog later this next month when I get the computer back to functionallity!

So let' just recap my luck of the last 6 weeks.:

Sewer routed out.

Hot water heater replaced.

Sump pump rewired.

Furnace fixed.

Tire on car replaced.

Hydrant replaced.

Jaw bone routed out.

As near as I can tell, I should be setting pretty good right now, but far be it from me to think I may be about to lose my black cloud.  Do still need to have this computer back functioning!  In the meantime I shall hold this in my thoughts:  

Look for the silver lining behind every cloud you see!

The Stroh place falls by the wayside.

I do not remember the layout of the house, but I do recall the yard.  In the summer time we were brown as little berries and spent very little time in the house.  Why would we stay in the house?  There was nothing there except our beds.  Television had not been invented to our knowledge.  When it rained the yard turned to a lake.  Well a giant mud hole might be a better description!  And just like a heat seeking missle we gravitated to the mud hole.  Since bath night was only on Saturday when we got muddy we could be sure that we were going to be crammed under the pump out in the yard and "rinsed off."    Life was dangerous for little kids.  Donna poked her finger at a turtle and the turtle latched on and did not let go.  The only solution for that was to cut the turtles head off and this caused his vice like grip to loosen in time.  Poor Donna.

I fell victim to the old gander which proceeded to give me a flogging that was one for the record books.  Mother did save me, to her credit.  The goose business and the fact that my brother Jake had whacked me over the head with a turnip when I was very small seemed to be my sole claim to fame in the Bartholomew household.  Dad farmed with a man named John Britain.  Mother drove the truck and hauled the grain to market, except for the year she gave birth to Dorothy.  Back in those days it was an unwritten law that when a woman had a baby she was to stay in bed for 10 days. I remember mother in bed and we were allowed to stand by her bed for 5 minutes every day and gaze at her and the baby.  We hated that baby that had made our mother have to go to bed for 10 days and maybe she would die.  But she didn't.

Life was good there, though.  We had the milk cow and every morning she was "staked out" beside the road so she could eat grass all day.  Then when it came time to milk her, we unstaked her and herded her along the road to home.  Some times she liked to just mosey along and we found that if we grabbed her tail, she would run home.  If we ran her all the way home, she would not give us her milk.  That got us more than one "licking".  A  licking did not entail the use of the tongue, it entailed the use of a leather strap.  I laugh when I remember mother saying on  more than one occasion, "Do you want a licking!"  Oh, yes, mother, you know I do!  I do not recall ever really wanting one, but I do recall getting them.  Today they would call it child abuse, but back then, it was called "keeping them in line and teaching them to be good."  I think we turned out pretty good and I never hated my mother for spanking me.  She never did it for fun, just to enforce what she said.  And I must confess, several times I heard my mothers voice issuing from my mouth, "Do you want a licking?  Do you want me to come in there?"

I recall one of the cows dying and we had to drag it to the pasture, soak it in coal oil,  and burn it.  That must have been when the anthrax epidemic happened.  I remember dad plowing with the horse and plow.  I remember taking him water.  I remember baby bunnies in the field.  I remember wolves howling at night.  I remember being afraid of a dog because he was stumbling around.  He had Rabies.  I remember my childhood and it makes me sad that it all ended, things changed and that era will never be again.  We walked wherever we went.  And when we left the Stroh place we put all our belongings on a hayrack that was hitched to 2 horses and it took the better part of the day to move across town.  We moved to the Ailmore place, which I think was a step up in the world.  It was a two bedroom shack on the other side of Bull Creek.  It was owned by a doctor.  There were trees in the yard and we would have a telephone!