Growing up “country bumkin” style, Part 2
When we moved out to the farm, 3-1/2 miles east of Goessel—I was one-year old—our house had running water at the kitchen sink and a big clawfoot bathtub on the second floor, but no other plumbing. There was a cistern just a few feet away from the kitchen door, and a pump to draw up the water. I remember Mother using a wringer washer on the porch and hanging clothes on a large clothesline. I try to imagine my parents, with three young children, leaving Newton where they had lived most of their lives, and moving to the country where... oh, did we mention? There is no indoor toilet.
Our toilet was a fancy two-holer. Why on earth would anyone have built a two-holer? As if two people would ever go use the thing at the same time? I never understood that. But after I became “a big girl,” I would creep downstairs in the night and wake my daddy for him to take me out to the toilet. (This I know ONLY from stories told!) As the story goes, I would get out there with daddy holding the flashlight, and as soon as I touched the cold seat I would tell him I couldn’t go because it was too cold. I don’t think I did that too many times before a kettle appeared in our utility room.
The big two-story farmhouse we moved to was in my dad’s family, my grandfather’s brother. It had an attic that I never did venture into because you would have to walk on the beams or you’d fall through. Inbetween the beams it was just lath and plaster and insulation. Even so, things were stored up there, with boards laid across the beams. When we kids got older, we learned the attic was where Christmas gifts were stashed because no one would go up there but my dad. I wasn’t then and I’m still not comfortable in a creepy attic. Or basement, too, for that matter. Our basement also creeped me out, but we were thankful to have a tornado shelter to go to several times.
I don’t remember how old I was when my parents remodeled the house to add a bathroom with a tub/shower. Prior to that remodel, our big two-story farmhouse was jacked up onto beams and a full basement dug out. Then an addition was put on to the kitchen to add a utility room, with a washer and dryer to make mom’s life easier. By this time I had two more brothers.
For most of my young childhood, there was no heat upstairs for us kids. I had a large featherbed and would put my jammies on downstairs beside the heating stove and then run up to dive in under the featherbed. Later in my life, another propane heating stove was installed on the second floor, and then winters weren’t so dreadful. In summer, the upstairs was window air-conditioned, as in “open the windows and let the air in.”
I had a momma cat named Smoky that let me do anything with her as long as she got to be with me. I could drape her around the back of my neck like a fur collar when I went bike-riding. I also dressed her up in doll clothes and put her in my dolly stroller, got myself all gussied up in some “dress-up clothes” plus an old pair of my mom’s high-healed shoes, and clop, clop, clopped up and down the long sidewalk that connected the farmhouse with the barn. Smoky was also my patient when I put on my “nurse dress” that a great aunt (who was a nurse, herself) had sewed for me because I was going to be a nurse.
All those dreams of becoming a nurse went by the wayside early one morning when my dad and brother were in an accident that, according to how the pickup truck that Dad was driving looked, it was a miracle they both survived. Mom got a phone call and got me and my younger brother up and we went to Goessel where my Dad and brother were hospitalized. I took one look at the big purple plum that was my brother’s eye and I slid down the wall I was standing against. I still cannot go into an emergency room (ask my sons!) or see someone in pain or bloodied with a wound without getting woozy. And that aspiration of becoming a nurse? Nope...not gonna happen.
Come back next week for what you’re hoping is the last installment of this archeological dig in the dark corners of my memories. I do believe I am nearing the back wall.
