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.
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