Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl

Growing Up Country

Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl

Rising Sun Press

Des Moines, Iowa

Carol Bodensteiner

© Copyright 2008 by Carol Bodensteiner

www.carolbodensteiner.com

All rights reserved. No part of this document may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means

(electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise)

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by Rising Sun Press

A trade paperback edition of this book

was originally published in 2008.

First Rising Sun Press electronic book edition published 2010

Cover design by Sally Cooper Smith

Author Photo by James Fidler

Text set in Adobe Garamond Pro

Rising Sun Press

92 NE 64th St.

Des Moines, IA 50327

www.risingsunpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007935171

ISBN: 978-0-9797997-3-0

A version of “Making Hay” first appeared in the

July/August 2007 issue of
The Iowan
as

“The Fragrance of Iowa Summer”

For my mom

who encouraged me

in more ways

than she ever knew

And for my dad

who taught me

to work hard and do it all well

Acknowledgements

This narrative is an account of events as I remember them. The names and identifying characteristics of some people appearing in this book have been changed. I acknowledge with gratitude the support and encouragement all of the people who made this book possible. Those who read my stories, improved them and assured me that others would also want to read them: Susan Neely, Sue Caley, Sheryl DeMouth and Mark Lunde. My writing buddies—Mary Gottschalk, Diane Glass, and Mary Nilsen—who read and reread, advised and critiqued, serving as teachers, fellow students and friends on the road to completed manuscript. My friends in the dairy industry who kept dairy farmers and dairy farming top of mind and close to my heart all these years. Those ‘other parents’ and ‘other siblings,’ the members of Salem Lutheran Church. My son, Lance, who always says to me, “If you want to do it, you should just do it.” My husband, David, who also grew up on a farm and was thus an invaluable technical advisor as well as a supporter through all my ups and downs. My sisters, Jane O’Leary and Sue Denter, who were my constant playmates growing up and who confirmed that, yes, we really did carry milk when we turned ten. And most of all, my thanks must end where it all began, with my father and mother, Harvey and Ruby Denter, who instilled in me the values I live by, who loved me without reservation.

Contents

Prologue

Country Hospitality

Sunday Dinner

A Cow Story

Mulberry Pie

The Harvest Auction

Turning 10

House Chores

A Dangerous Game

The County Fair & The Teddy Bear

Options

I Bet You a Million Bucks

Laundry Lessons

Another Cow Story

Economics 101

One Christmas

Making Hay

Ashes

Epilogue

Prologue

This land does not belong to our family and it has not for three decades. After my parents sold the home place, my contact with the land of my childhood was limited to catching the first glimpse from the highway when we topped a hill, pointing it out to my son or husband as we sped by on our way to the town where my parents have lived since. I have not set foot on the farm in ten years, but I drop in today on a whim.

As I climb out of the car, I am greeted by the familiar—the warm smell of manure hangs rich on the air; the clear call of a cardinal plays across the silence; a hilltop breeze caresses my face. Leaning back against the car, I breathe in the place.

The man who now farms the land greets me warmly. I know him. His parents were neighbors when I was a kid. When I was 14, I baby sat for him and his older brother and sister. This man lives and works on the farm, though he works the land of other farms as well. His wife works at a nearby hospital.

I wait while the farmer, sitting on the bench outside the back door of the house that was new when I was five, pulls on manure-caked boots and speaks with pride of the many acres he farms. He stands, settles a sweat-stained seed corn cap on his head, the bill angled to shield his face from the sun, and we head toward the barns. On the way, he acknowledges with an apologetic half-gesture that the farm isn’t kept up as well as when my dad owned it.

I nod. “You have a lot on your hands.”

As we walk, I look around and am saddened. The aging barns stand humbled by peeling paint and missing boards. Beef cattle look out of place to my eyes as I recall the once state-of-the-art dairy barn where we milked our cows. The farmer and I find neutral ground, talking about a barn taken in a wind storm, a now useless pit silo built by the man who had the farm before him. Inevitably, our talk turns to weather and planting crops.

“If it’s okay, I’d just like to look at the fields,” I say, grateful when he has to leave me to check on a cow calving in the barn.

“Sure,” he says. “Look around. I’ll catch up with you later.”

Walking toward the west, I step across the mud puddles of a wet spring and remember squishing my bare toes in similar puddles. I don’t know what I think I’ll see in the field, but I am drawn there.

I put the buildings so wanting for care behind me and stand in a pasture where I used to chase butterflies. Closing my eyes, I tip my head back to catch the sun, stretching out my hands in an unconscious plea. I am open to memories rising out of the earth, pulsing through my body with a force so unexpected and strong, I struggle to stay balanced.

I see my sisters and me chasing across the field, vying to see who will make it first to the wooden steps of the stile spanning the fence, who will be first to reach the one-room schoolhouse where I took the first eight years of my schooling. I see a tree with low limbs that I remember scrambling up just in time to escape a marauding cow. The hills where Dad took us in search of a lost cow and her new calf rise up before me. The blackberry brambles where Mom urged us to fill pails with berries she would bake into pies tug at my memory. I remember carrying milk and making hay, butchering chickens and planting the garden. All that work! Putting kids today to work like my folks did us would cause people to gasp, ‘Isn’t that abuse?’ In truth, at the time, the work seemed more like play.

This land of my childhood releases sweet, long forgotten memories and brings me back home. Home to the farm. Home to my family. Home.

Country Hospitality

“How about a little lunch before you go?” Mom smiled at Uncle Frank and Aunt Minnie, as she stood up and headed for the kitchen. Seeing me curled up on the floor reading by the heat vent in the kitchen, Mom looped me into helping get lunch on the table. “Carol, run get a quart of peaches.”

Aunt Minnie rose to follow Mom. “Let me help you get it on the table.”

In the few seconds it took me to run down to the fruit cellar and back up the stairs, Mom had put a pot of coffee on to brew, laid out lunch meat and cheese with homemade bread for sandwiches, arranged a tray heaped with dill, sweet and beet pickles, and was filling a bowl of cottage cheese. At Mom’s direction, Aunt Minnie lifted the good plates—the ones from the set of pastel pink dishes Mom received as a wedding present in 1942—out of the cupboard and placed them around the kitchen table. She found the silverware we used every day in the drawer by the sink.

Even though the dining room table was at the other end of the kitchen, we only used it when we had company for Sunday dinner. Lunch was at the kitchen table where we ate all of our family meals.

I handed over the quart of bright yellow peach halves Mom canned in thick syrup and brought out to serve guests. Flicking off the seal with a can opener, Mom poured the peaches into their special pink bowl, the bowl that matched the good dishes. As she motioned me to fill a plate with brownies topped with a sprinkle of sugar, Mom slid a large silver serving spoon into the peach bowl and called out, “Lunch is on the table.”

Mom could put a full meal on the table faster than I could form the idea of a meal in my mind.

“Lunch”—a meal served anytime between breakfast and dinner, dinner and supper, or supper and bedtime—looked every bit like a full meal but wasn’t served hot. Lunch was automatic when we had guests, whether the guests were invited or not.

Relatives like Uncle Frank and Aunt Minnie dropped in to visit on Sunday afternoon. We had lunch before they left. Friends showed up to play cards on Friday night. We had lunch before they went home to bed. Women came for a Homemaker’s meeting, Mom served lunch. Even if our guests had eaten a full dinner or supper meal only hours before, we still served and guests still ate lunch. And it wasn’t just us. When we went visiting, we were served lunch. Any visit by anyone to our farm, any visit by us to any other farm was occasion to set the coffee pot to perking on the stove and to bring, at the very least, a plate of cookies to the table. This was farm hospitality.

Beyond satisfying any real or imagined hunger pangs our guests might have, serving lunch provided an unspoken signal that it was time for people to go home so we could go out and do chores or go to bed. No one ever missed the hint that it was time to leave. How could you be offended when your hosts sent you on your way with a full tummy?

Nor would you refuse an offer of lunch. The general rule was that if lunch was offered, you settled in at the table, shared neighborhood news, and ate.

It’s fair to say that not all lunches were created equal. Visiting some neighbors and having lunch was a treat akin to getting candy at Easter, the food was so amazing. An older neighbor who lived a couple miles east of us topped the list in this category, and what she served was even more amazing to me because of her stove.

Edna Hoffman cooked on a wood-burning cookstove so big it filled the end of her kitchen. She fed the fire in the cookstove with pieces of wood her husband George had split from logs and piled in a wood box near the stove. Though electricity was available in rural Iowa by the mid-1940s and most families had abandoned cookstoves at that time, Edna swore by hers and kept it as long as she was on the farm, well into the 1970s.

That cookstove offered a fascinating array of doors and burner lids. Flames danced behind each door, under each lid. A small cupboard above the burners was a warming oven, a cozy place to remove the chill from plates, to keep a side dish hot while other dishes cooked, or to rewarm dinner rolls. Mom gazed with envy at that warming oven each time we visited Edna’s kitchen and remembered it fondly decades later.

Only a cookstove expert like Edna could manage the variable heat of open flames to turn out culinary magic. One time she presented a Baked Alaska combining white cake topped with ice cream that hadn’t melted even though it came right out of the oven beneath a mountain of meringue tinged a perfect brown. Another time, light-as-air cream puffs came out of her cookstove. Filled with ice cream, topped with fresh red raspberries, and drizzled over with chocolate syrup, those cream puffs were as good as any dessert I’d eaten up until then or have since.

We visited other neighbors more often and with mixed results when it came to lunch. It was on one of these visits that I learned an important lesson in hospitality.

Bob ’n Tot Richardson were neighbors we saw frequently because Dad rented hay ground from them. I think they were also some sort of shirttail relation, but even though Mom explained repeatedly how this person or that person in the neighborhood was related to someone else, I could never keep it straight.

I never thought of Bob ’n Tot independently of each other. Dad never said, “We’re going over to Tot’s,” or “I need to go see Bob.” It was always, “We’re going to see Bob ’n Tot.”

Bob looked like a smaller, older version of Dad. He wore the standard farmer uniform, dark blue denim pants and a light blue chambray shirt, a blue or red farmer’s kerchief folded in his back pocket. I bet when he emptied his pockets, he dumped out nails and change, pliers and a pocket knife just like Dad carried around.

Tot was a short woman with salt-and-pepper gray in her brown hair. Though she repeatedly tucked her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, strands worked their way loose, flying along in her energetic wake.

Tot’s house was a refuge for ailing baby birds and animals of all sorts. There were chickens in the yard and in the spring we’d often find baby chicks being kept warm in her oven.

At our house, our dog Butch could come into the kitchen but no further. Other than the periodic parakeet or goldfish, Mom and Dad allowed no other animals, so going to Tot’s house was a journey into the unexpected.

One time Tot had a baby robin she was nursing back to health. We watched as she fed it a tiny piece of raw hamburger. Then a fresh raspberry. “Isn’t that the damnedest thing?” she chortled as the robin opened up its beak wide every time she brought it a little food. The next time we came to visit, I asked about the robin. Tot’s smile turned into a frown. “You won’t believe it,” she said. “One day that robin flew over to the toilet. I guess it wanted a drink. It fell in and drowned.”

“Oohhh,” I moaned. “What did you do?”

Tot shrugged practical shoulders. “Flushed it down.”

It was usually more interesting to visit when the neighbors had kids our age. Then we’d be off exploring their barns and checking out their animals. But even though Bob ’n Tot never had kids, I still never much minded a visit to their place. Bob ’n Tot were the only people I knew who raised sheep. On each visit, I wandered past the sheep pasture where I worked my fingers through the curly tight, gray-white wool on the back of one of the sheep crowded by the fence. For the rest of the day, I marveled at the curious lanolin oily softness that coated my hands.

One day Dad needed to talk with Bob about the hay ground, so we all piled into the Chevrolet sedan and went along. After a stop to check out the sheep, my sister Sue and I followed Mom to the house.

Tot was at the door to greet us even before we knocked. “Come on in,” she urged, opening the door wide to welcome us into her kitchen while she held Coco back with one foot.

A little brown, yappy Chihuahua, Coco raced around the house like a crazed lunatic, his eyes bugged out, toenails clicking, skinny legs sliding on the kitchen linoleum. We edged into the kitchen, giving Coco a wide berth. An irritable bundle of nervous energy, Coco would like as not bite any hand that came close.

“Coco, be quiet!” Tot scolded as the dog careened by. “That damn dog,” she added, shaking her head as though there was not a single thing she could do.

Tot talked a hundred miles an hour and she was the only woman in my acquaintance who swore. And she let it rip just like a man. Mom never, ever, let a swear word pass her lips. Whenever Tot swore, which was every time we saw her, I watched Mom out of the corner of my eye, waiting for a reaction. Mom never even twitched.

“You girls take a look at what I have on the porch,” Tot pointed us toward a box bathed in the sunshine streaming through the window.

“Kittens!” I said as Sue and I crouched by the box where a mother cat lay with five baby kittens latched to her teats. “Look! They don’t even have their eyes open yet.” Even with their eyes closed, the kittens found their way to milk and lay flexing their paws, kneading their mama like she was bread dough.

“Can we hold them?” Sue looked up at Tot and Mom.

Tot bent over our shoulders. “Better not. They’re too little yet, They were just born day before yesterday. You can touch them, but just a little.”

I trailed a finger along the back of one of the mouse-sized kittens with fur that felt like silk. Sue did the same. “They’re so soft,” I crooned.

“Better leave them alone now,” Mom said. “You’ll make the mama nervous.”

“The men will be awhile,” Tot said. “I’m going to put the coffee on. Why don’t you girls go in the living room and see if there’s anything there that interests you.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Mom warned.

Now how conflicting was that advice? Find something interesting, but don’t touch it. We’d been in Tot’s living room before. Mom didn’t have a lot to be worried about.

“Look at the dog hair,” Sue whispered when we rounded the corner from kitchen to living room. It was obvious Coco had free access to the furniture. Every inch of every chair and the couch was covered with fine, brown dog hairs.

“Shh,” I touched a finger to my lips. “You don’t want her to hear.” We worked our way around the living room, looking at knickknacks on the TV and shelves, but touching nothing, an assignment that held our interest for about two minutes. Eyeing the dog hair, we didn’t even consider asking about TV. Neither of us wanted to sit down.

It did not take long for us to find ourselves back in the kitchen where we slid onto kitchen chairs. The red plastic seats were cool against my legs.

Mom and Tot sat sipping steaming coffee from brimming cups as I watched with envy. I looked forward to being old enough to drink coffee.

“Have a cookie,” Tot slid a plate stacked with date cookies across the table to Sue and me. Then she popped out of her chair. “Say, would you girls like some hot chocolate?” Tot was up rummaging in the cupboards for a pan before we could answer.

“That’d be great.” I perked up. I loved hot chocolate. At our house, we only had hot chocolate in the winter. This would be a treat. Maybe Tot would have marshmallows, too. Miniature marshmallows would be fun.

Tot bustled around the kitchen making the hot chocolate. Meanwhile, I tilted from side to side on my chair, enjoying the feel of peeling the skin of one bare leg off the plastic seat and then rocking over to peel the other leg off the seat. I looked at Sue; she was doing the same thing. When we giggled, Mom put her hand on my shoulder. Behind her smile we heard meaning. We sat still.

Pretty soon, Tot set a cup of steaming cocoa in front of each of us girls. I stifled a sigh. No marshmallows. “Thank you,” Sue and I said at the same time. We’d been taught well.

I lifted the cup in both hands and brought it close to my lips. It was too hot to drink so I blew little puffs across the surface, just the way I saw Mom blow across a just-poured cup of coffee. Sue did the same thing. The liquid was dark brown and smelled deliciously chocolate.

I took a little sip. And almost gagged. I glanced at Sue; she had a sick look on her face. I looked at Mom, who had seen our reaction. The look in her eyes said, “Don’t say anything.”

Tentatively, I lifted the cup again. Maybe it got better as it cooled. But it didn’t. My throat locked closed as the bitter liquid crossed my tongue and headed toward my stomach. What was this stuff? And how was I going to drink it?

Tot sat back down at the table and picked up her coffee cup. “How is it?” she asked, looking right at me. Perhaps I was not as green as I felt.

What could I say? Panic rose in my throat along with bile from the sip of cocoa. “It’s good,” I squeaked, forcing a little smile. Mom nodded at me and visibly relaxed.

Tot smiled and went on talking with Mom about gardens and canning. While they talked, I tried to figure out what had gone wrong with something as simple as hot cocoa. Sue nudged my leg with her toe. I peeked at her out of the corner of my eye, saw the panic in her wide, brown eyes, shrugged my shoulder a half-inch and looked back at my cup. We were trapped. I thought again about marshmallows. They might make it better. But I was afraid to ask. And what was I going to say?
This cocoa is terrible and maybe marshmallows would save it?

I took sip after painful sip from what had become a bottomless cup. Maybe I could say I wasn’t thirsty after all. Maybe I would throw up. Maybe I would get sick and die. But I couldn’t NOT drink the cocoa either. So I drank. And with each sip, my throat tightened, feeling more and more like the year I got the mumps and could barely swallow at all for two whole weeks.