“Frosted Mornings”

The thermometer this morning read eight below.  We’ve had a few of those this winter.  It’s nice to crawl out of a warm bed, furnace running, hot water at the turn of a knob, coffee already brewing.  One of the reasons I appreciate those things, however, is because I remember other mornings that were much different.

My Great Aunt Mick and Great Uncle Olin’s farm outside New Hampton, Missouri, was always one of my very favorite places to visit.  That’s where I was first on a horse—before I could walk—and riding not long after.  My first memories of the smell of hay and horse sweat and manure, iced tea on a wrap-around porch, picnics on the lawn with thirty or forty relatives, chasing my first puppy around the yard and chickens around the barn…these and others all seem to be there.

I also remember pumping iron hard water out of the well in the front yard, and my lip sticking to the pump handle when I got too close one morning.  I always avoided the tin cup for those reasons.  Don’t know why the damned handle got me.  That wasn’t the only pump on the place.  Aunt Mick’s kitchen had “running water,” if you pumped the handle connected to the sink.  Hot water meant filling a bucket and setting it on the fuel oil stove.  And, yes, going to the bathroom meant putting on your coat and boots or using a chamber pot.

Staying overnight in the winter was like a camping adventure.  Usually there were three or four of us in one of the big feather beds on the second floor.  By the time all the blankets and quilts and comforters were piled on, there must have been a foot of layers weighing us down.  We woke the next morning to our breath frosted on the outer layers and sometimes frost on the walls.  Getting downstairs to the stove was skating stocking-footed across the wooden floors, bumping down the stairs, and trying to avoid tables and chairs and lamps on our way to the kitchen…only to realize we REALLY needed to use the outhouse!

Eventually we thawed out and sat down to “farm fresh” eggs (gathered early that morning), thick slices of bacon (butchered in the barn, smoked on the farm with apple wood cut from the orchard), and cold, creamy milk squeezed from the cow a couple of hours earlier and cooled on the front porch.  I’d love to have that breakfast again!

I wonder what kinds of memories my sons and grandchildren will have of “the good old days”?  It’s hard to imagine that they will reminisce about such drastic differences from one home to another or even changes in their lifetimes, but we didn’t know what was ahead for us then, either.

Beam me up, Scotty.