Wintery Night

February 2006

The rain of yesterday afternoon changed to snow when night fell. The ground was still warm enough to melt most of the flakes as they fell, so the snow didn't accumulate much. Isaac was hoping that the roads would be icy or that we'd get enough snow for school to be cancelled. But school in Christian County was "in session and on time" this morning.

Dennis went to work in the wee hours of the morning. He called me at 6:30 AM to say, "Careful!" He said that he came across some slick spots while driving to Fort Campbell.

South of Pembroke, he met a man walking toward him on the highway. He thought that was odd, but he didn't stop because he was going in the opposite direction of the walker.

Down the road a little farther, he saw blipping lights that turned out to be a volunteer fireman's pickup truck, stopped along the road. The good fireman (God bless him and all his kind!) was checking a car that had gone in the ditch.

Dennis stopped and told the fireman that he had met a man walking and that the man did not appear to be hurt. The fireman got out his cell phone to call the highway patrol, and Dennis went on to work.

All of that happened in the middle of the night while most of us were asleep. I didn't even have a bad dream, but that guy who was walking down the road probably thought he was having a nightmare.

Snowman With Hat

February, 2006

We rarely get a snow in Christian County, KY, that is just right for building snowmen. Keely and Isaac built this handsome fellow in 1994. My goodness. Isaac was only four then, and Keely was eight! Keely tells me that the snowman's hat was the ice from a cat water dish.

A Pileated Woodpecker Sighting

February 2006

Coming up the lane to our house this morning, Isaac and I saw a pileated woodpecker. He left a tree in the ditch, flew across the road in front of us, and landed on the side of a tree in Clarence's woods. He was quite a large bird. In fact, when the woodpecker took to the air, Isaac said, "What is that? A duck?"

We had a fairly good look at him. I'm certain that he was a pileated woodpecker, not a red-bellied or a red-headed woodpecker. I checked the range map for woodpeckers, and it's possible a pileated would be overwintering or even breeding in this area. It was a great thrill to see a pileated woodpecker for the first time ever!

This was the only pileated woodpecker I've ever seen anywhere!

Nursery Rhymes

February 2006

Daffy Down Dilly
Has come up to town
In a yellow petticoat
And a green gown.

Remember that one? When my children were little, I read nursery rhyme books nearly every day. This rhyme and many others gradually worked their way into my long-term memory banks.

I remember being in the tiny kitchen in one of our apartments in Germany. I was washing dishes, but Keely wanted me to read to her. She sat down on the floor with her nursery rhyme books, and I recited the rhymes to her from memory as she turned the pages.

The kids had a big library of storybooks, but the nursery rhyme books were always some of my favorites.

Grandma Nora's Basement Apartment

February 2006

My dad's parents (Grandma Nora and Gramp Hill, as we called them) divorced in about 1947. During my childhood, Grandma lived mostly in Ainsworth, Nebraska, but Gramp Hill lived in Missouri and then in Kansas.

Grandma Nora and Gramp Hill had a house in town, and it became Grandma Nora's after their divorce. She made it into two apartments. She rented out the ground floor, and she lived in the basement apartment. It was interesting, even exciting, to visit there because we didn't have a basement and besides, it was Grandma's house!

Looking back, I realize that the decor was very 1950's. Grandma had a dining table and chairs, a china cabinet, and a little writing desk that were all made of blonde maple. In her living room, she had cowboy lamps. The lamp base was shaped like a wagon wheel, and the lampshades had photographs on them of cowboys on horseback tending their cattle under a bright blue sky. Grandma had a matched set of smaller lamps, as I recall, and a larger lamp with a two tiered shade. All three of them had the western lampshades.

Grandma also had a gumdrop tree made of clear plastic. It had a gumdrop on the tip of every branch and extra gumdrops in the tray under the tree.

Grandma's renters had some things in the basement storeroom, including a big stack of MAD magazines. I read them every time we visited, taking great pains not to bend the pages. That was my introduction to Alfred E. Neuman.

One time, my little sister Charlotte and I spent the night at Grandma's basement apartment. Grandma tucked us into the twin beds in her guest bedroom -- one little girl in each bed. During the night, Charlotte woke up and became frightened. She cried, " I want my daddy, I want my daddy!" and soon Grandma came and took her to sleep in the big bed. In her later years, Grandma liked to tell that story. It pleased her that Charlotte had cried for her daddy -- he was Grandma's son, of course.

Grocery Store Music

February 2006

When I was a teenager, Mama and I were walking around a grocery store one day. A big band song was playing, and I made a derogatory remark about "grocery store music". Mama looked at me and laughed and said, "Oh, is that what it is?!" (That sort of music was popular when Mama graduated high school in 1940.) 

Now I'm in my mid-50's, and I notice that many of the stores are playing my music. I hear the Beatles all the time, the Beach Boys too, and many others. The other day when I was in the fabric store, Bob Dylan was on the muzak. (He never could carry a tune, bless his heart.) "That's Bob Dylan,"I said to the lady who was cutting my fabric. "Huh? Oh, really?" she said. I think she grew up before Bob Dylan. She looked more like a Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra person. 

 The Peddler's Mall flea market in Hopkinsville always plays music of the 1950's, mostly rock-and-roll. It's very cheerful. The toetapping rhythms put me in the right mood for looking at all that old junk in there. I'm sure that's what the mall owners have in mind.

I Like Hats

February 2006

When I was about 4 years old, I spent a few days with Grandma Barb and Gramp Sees (as we called him.) Grandma Barb took me to town and bought me a beautiful little hat. It was round and flat, made of white straw, with a ring of white daisies around the crown and long ribbon tails that hung down the back. 

I wore it on the train when I went home. Three other little children were traveling without adults, and the conductor assigned us to a set of facing seats. I suppose my hat was uncomfortable against the back of the seat. Anyway, I took it off, and one of the little boys sat on it and squished it. He also sat on my lunch bag and squished my marshmallow-top cookie! I still feel irritated, all these years later.

In the days of my early childhood (the 1950's) all the ladies wore hats to church. I especially remember the hats of Mrs. James Tapley, our pastor's wife, at the Church of the Nazarene in Ainsworth, Nebraska. She was young and pretty, and she had a hat for every outfit. One of her hats had a bumblebee hovering over a flower. I was enchanted with it. 

Even after hats were no longer de rigeur, my mother still kept several black hats which she wore to funerals.

I have a small collection of hats. I bought a couple of them at yard sales because they were pretty. They needed to be owned by someone who appreciated them. I wore one of them at Halloween last year and told people that it was my costume.

Windmill Song

February 2006

Settlers of the Great Plains often found that water was harder to get at their new homes than where they used to live. To solve this problem, inventors re-imagined wooden windmills as water pumpers for the Midwest. 

Instead of the giant wheels of Holland's windmills, the American windmills had a smaller wheel of wooden blades that turned to catch the wind. These machines could easily pump water from deep wells. The windmill rapidly became an essential piece of agricultural equipment and a key to a better life in the Midwest. 

The Aermotor, brought to market in the late 1880's, was one of the first all-steel windmills. With a revolutionary set of gears and a carefully engineered ability to respond to the slightest puff of wind, the Aermotor was a reliable and popular machine. It is still manufactured today.

 Dempster was another major windmill manufacturer, and there were many others. Windmills made by the hundreds of competitors in the windmill business can still be seen and enjoyed in the collections of Nebraska towns, museums, and individuals.

In old images of Nebraska, I notice that many citizens of Nebraska's small towns had windmills in their backyards, even into the 1930's and 1940's.

Every ranch child of the Nebraska Sandhills has the windmill's song embedded in his memory. It's a repetitive melody with the tempo set by the wind, a creak and a groan as the mill turns and the sucker rod moves, and an alternating gush and trickle as the water pours out. It was the soundtrack of my childhood.

As the windmill pumped, the fresh, cold water poured out of a horizontal pipe that extended a couple of feet beyond the edge of the stock tank. To get a thirst-quenching drink, we cupped our hands under the water flow and leaned over the tank to drink from them.  It was best not to drink at the moment in the pump cycle with the strongest gush of water from the pipe. That could instantly fill a nose with water.

The overflow from the water tank almost always created a windmill pond. The tank and pond supported a wetlands flora and fauna greatly different from the surrounding landscape. Waterbirds chirped around the edges of the pond. Frogs sang, and dragonflies hovered above the water. 

We had a windmill in the greater yard around our house, barn, and other buildings. Its tank was positioned to provide water to cattle on both sides of a fence that divided two pastures. My sister and I spent hours in my childhood, making aquariums in a quart jar with snails and moss from the windmill tank, and playing around the windmill pond. On a hot day, getting a bit wet was a bonus.

Grandpa Harry Sees had goldfish in the big wooden windmill tank in his barnyard. I think they were large, but probably not as monstrously huge as they seemed when I was little

By the 1960s, electric pumps had taken the place of windmills in the farmlands of Iowa and Illinois. My father had a small business in rebuilt windmill motors from Iowa. He became acquainted with a retired plumber from central Iowa. This fellow drove around Iowa's farmlands, purchasing unused windmills to restore. His son climbed the old windmill towers and helped him get the motors down. He preferred Aermotors, but he occasionally bought Dempsters, too. 

When the rebuilder in Iowa had a batch of windmill motors ready, my dad took the pickup and trailer and hauled them home. I think he advertised them in the local paper at times, but mostly, the neighbors all knew that if they had windmill trouble, Charlie Hill probably had a good rebuilt motor on hand that he would sell them at a reasonable price.

Now sun power is beginning to replace wind power. Solar panels can run a pump, and ranchers don't have to climb a windmill tower to service them. The windmills of the Nebraska Sandhills may fall into disrepair and disuse, just as they did in Iowa and Illinois a few generations ago. 

Life with Well Water

February 2006

The water for our house, here in rural Christian County, KY, comes from an old hand-dug well. It's about 3 feet across and 30 or 35 feet deep, and it is lined with big limestone building stones. It was probably dug in the early 1800s, or maybe even earlier.

When we first moved out here, the well was protected only by a piece of roofing metal laid across it. We were afraid the kids would fall into it! We put a fence around it immediately, and very soon thereafter, built a little house over it, installed a strong metal grid across the mouth of the well, and moved the water pump from our laundry room to the well-house.

To get a good well in this area, it's necessary to hit a water vein in the limestone that underlies the soil. Our Mennonite neighbor Willis brought a pocket watch on a chain one day and used it as a pendulum to dowse the water vein that our well is on. He says it is a minor channel of water but it connects to a larger channel 100 yards away.

Having our own well is an exercise in self-reliance. We don't have a monthly water bill and we don't depend on a public utility. If worse came to worst, we could drop a bucket into our well and get water. However, there are inconveniences. 

• When the electricity goes out, we can't pump water, so we store several 5-gallon containers of water for such emergencies.
• When temperatures fall below freezing and we're worried about ice forming in the pump, we turn on a light in the well-house.
•  Silt seeps into the well when we have heavy rains, so we have a water filter in the well-house that has to be maintained.
•  We usually buy our drinking water, but if we must drink well water, we add 8 drops of chlorine per gallon.
•  In dry weather, we use water conservatively so we don't pump the well dry! 

Today Dennis had trouble changing the water filter. As he tried to loosen and remove the old filter, a pipe joint suddenly popped a leak. That was the first problem. The second problem was that Dennis somehow cracked a section of PVC pipe while attempting to fix the leak. 

We called a plumber and paid him to come out and fix the whole shebang. The way things were going, it seemed the sensible thing to do.

Marcus and Emma Eaton, Homesteaders

February 2006

Marcus and Emma (Hart) Eaton

About 1899, my great grandparents, Marcus and Emma (Hart) Eaton, came from Marshalltown, Iowa, with their daughters Cora and Violet (my maternal grandmother), and homesteaded in the Lavaca area of Cherry County, Nebraska. 

With a population of 20 (according to the Nebraska State Gazetteer, Business Directory and Farmers List for 1890-1891,) Lavaca was the Sandhill version of a post-hamlet.  It had 2 blacksmiths and a general merchandise store that probably doubled as a post office, as well as a school and probably a church or two. It was located about 25 miles southwest of Merriman on the extreme western edge of Cherry County.  The Lavaca Flats lie alongside the Niobrara River. It's an area of level land with good meadows, and nowadays, some center-pivot irrigated farmland. 

According to the 1886 map of the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad. a rail line ran through Valentine and Gordon and on to Douglas, Wyoming. The Homestead Office was in Valentine. Marcus and Emma probably rode the train as far as Merriman, but I have read about people who got off the train at Valentine and walked many miles through the sandhills to their homesteads.

During their years at Lavaca, Marcus and Emma added two more daughters to their family, Almira and Letha. Marcus drove the twice-weekly stage to Gordon, and was a road overseer for the Lavaca precinct, as well as farming his homestead.

As the girls grew up, Marcus and Emma wanted them to have a high school education. They sold their homestead in about 1912 and moved to Gordon.* There, the three younger girls completed high school, and Marcus operated a livery stable. Marcus was a farm boy, and he had worked as a teamster in Marshalltown before they came to Lavaca. He knew a lot about horses.

Emma died in 1929, and in 1931, Marcus lost his daughter, Violet (Eaton) Sees to influenza. Marcus visited his widowed son-in-law Harry Sees and his granddaughter, Doris (my mother) frequently after Violet's death.  Doris described Grandpa Eaton as a tidy, well-groomed fellow. Both she and her cousin Maxine Young (daughter of Letha Eaton Young) had fond memories an all-day trip with Grandpa Eaton in his car to visit Wounded Knee, just across the South Dakota line from Sheridan County, Nebraska. 

  

Marcus and Emma are buried in the Gordon, Nebraska city cemetery, adjacent to the graves of Violet Eaton Sees, Harry Sees, and Harry's second wife, Barbara Weber Sees. The Eaton graves were unmarked for many decades, but in 2014, my brother, Dwight Hill (a great-grandson,) had a tombstone installed.

When I was a little girl, my mother pointed out a certain frame building in Gordon as her Grandpa Eaton's livery stable. The building had big doors -- beyond that, I don't remember much about it. When I was in Gordon with Keely and Isaac in 2000, I tried to relocate it, but I learned that it had been torn down.  

One other thing of interest about my great-grandfather Marcus Eaton -- he remembered that as a little boy in Marshall County, Iowa, he played in the buffalo wallows on the prairie.

* In about 1917-1920, Violet Eaton returned to Lavaca as a schoolteacher. While Violet was teaching there and boarding with a school family, she had the memorable experience of discovering a mouse inside her nightgown after she had put it on and gone to bed. (Good family stories should be recorded and retold.) In 1940-42, my mother (Doris Sees Hill) taught in the same Lavaca school. As part of her contract, she was given a horse to ride to school. Some in the community remembered both her mother (Violet) and her grandparents (Marcus and Emma.)

Emma (Hart) Eaton was born in Polk County, Iowa, 06 Feb 1865, and died 19 Apr 1929 in Gordon, Sheridan County, Nebraska. Marcus Eaton was born in Marshall County, Iowa, 13 Sep 1861, and died 03 Jul 1942 in Gordon, Sheridan County, Nebraska. Marcus and Emma were married on 19 Nov 1889, in Mitchell, Davison County, South Dakota.

Turkey Buzzard Stories

February 2006

 We have a lot of buzzards (also called vultures) in western Kentucky. When we first moved out here in the Kentucky countryside, the barns in the field east of us were standing empty. Buzzards roosted on the roof ridges nearly every summer night. They flew in at sunset, and as darkness fell, they cooed to each other with their vulture voices.

An amusing thing happened several years ago. We have a local landmark known as Pilot Rock. It's a big shaft of rock that juts up out of the hills and towers above everything else in the area. A lady about my age had grown up here and moved away. She came home to visit and decided to climb Pilot Rock, for old times sake. 

When she came back down, she told everyone about her peaceful experience on top of the Rock. "Oh!" she said. "It was so quiet up there!" She told us how she lay down and stretched out and watched the clouds floating by and the vultures circling in the sky. Her brother was horrified. "Good grief! You won't catch ME lying on the ground for long with vultures circling over me!"

Several years ago, the Kentucky New Era (our local newspaper) published a photographic essay about autumn at Pilot Rock. The photography girl had driven out and taken a few pictures of trees in their fall colors. In the text that described the pictures, she stated that there wasn't any life stirring except a dozen big hawks circling the skies. Ha! Everyone out here laughed about that. We all knew she had seen vultures, not hawks. 

A couple of weeks later we laughed again when the newspaper published a letter that someone from another state had written. He stated that he was certain the photographer had seen vultures, not hawks.

Most or all of our vultures here in western Kentucky are Turkey Buzzards. They are beautiful in the sky, riding the wind with their wings spread wide. Sometimes people mistake them for eagles, but eagles can be up to one-third larger than buzzards.

Counting the Dead Ones

February 2006

I've enjoyed online forums ever since we got a computer and the internet. I've especially enjoyed reading the Ranchers.net Bull Session Forum. Most of its members are cattle ranchers, and most of their conversations and photographs center on the joys and difficulties of ranch work and raising cattle.

I have some knowledge of ranching because I grew up on a Nebraska cattle ranch. My brother and sister-in-law still ranch in south-central Kansas. However, a lot of what I know about ranching is at least a generation old. Things have changed a lot since I was a ranch girl, and ranchers are using new methods and tools. Even on the most remote of ranches, technology advances and knowledge increases.

Some things don't change much, though! I'm reminded of that when I see photos of cows and their newborn calves in the springtime.

Seeing a picture of a mama cow and her baby makes me think of being a little girl, taking a ride through the pasture with my Daddy to check the cows and calves in the springtime. He always referred to those trips through the pasture as "counting the dead ones", which was his way of saying that he was braced for the worst, though hoping for the best.

Be Prepared

February 2006

The Boy Scouts take a lot of ribbing about their motto, "Be Prepared," but the truth is that boys who have been through the Scouting program are better prepared than many of their peers to confront and overcome difficult circumstances.

Here is my favorite Boy Scout, my son Isaac, at his troop's Court of Honor in December. He's speaking to the group. (I didn't like all the backs of heads that were in the picture, so I edited everything out except Isaac.)

I admire Isaac's ability to pitch a tent fast, but that's only a small part of what he's learned in Scouts. He has earned merit badges (worn on his green sash) in everything from automotives to woodcarving, and just as importantly, he has had many opportunities to develop leadership skills.

We have a great Scoutmaster, a retired Special Forces Army officer, who has taught the boys all about wilderness survival and map and compass navigation. He has both exemplified and taught the Scout Law along the way. Dennis has been active in Boy Scouts with Isaac, and it has been a wholesome and meaningful activity for the two of them to share.

Memorable Methodist Experience

February 2006

We have lived in Christian County, Kentucky, for about 15 years, and in that time, I have been in the First Methodist Church of Hopkinsville twice.

A young man from our church (Greg) belonged to the Boy Scout troop that First Methodist Church sponsors. We went to his Eagle Scout ceremony, and that was the only time I've been in the FMC sanctuary. I think I remember dark wood pews.

My other visit to the First Methodist Church was much more memorable. Not long after we moved here, I applied for a job as a teacher in the pre-school at First Methodist. They ran an ad in the newspaper, and I sent a letter and got an interview.

The day of the interview came, and I dressed up and went to the church. Two very proper ladies met me at the rear entrance. They showed me around the pre-school and explained the program. During the tour, it became clear to me that I was probably not the person they were looking for. Then they announced that they were taking me to a church luncheon that was currently underway, and that we'd eat lunch while they interviewed me.

We sat at a small round table with our plates of food, surrounded by dozens of people at their own little tables, all talking loudly. I was very uncomfortable under the scrutiny of my interviewers/lunchmates. It wasn't easy shouting answers to their questions about my philosophy of preschool education between tiny bites of food. I didn't want to be caught with my mouth full, and I was doing most of the talking. All the while I became more and more certain that I absolutely did not want the job.

Finally the meal and the questions ended. We shook hands, and I walked out the back door and across the parking lot. I felt weakened after my horrible ordeal. An involuntary shudder came across me, and I groaned mightily with mortification and anguish.

At that moment, I heard a voice from behind me ask, "Are you all right?", and it was one of my interviewers who (unbeknownst to me) was walking behind me to her car. "Oh, yes," I chirped. "I'm just fine."

I don't know whom they hired as their new pre-school teacher, but it was not the woman they overheard making Chewbacca noises in the parking lot after her interview.

Kids and Kittens

February 2006

I spent many happy hours with kittens when I was a little girl. We had a huge barn that had eight or ten big stalls for workhorses in the south part of it. We didn't use workhorses anymore on the ranch, so most of the time, the stalls were empty. The mama cats always had their kittens in the hay mangers at the ends of the stalls where the horses were fed.

The mangers were big enough that a little girl, (or even two little girls) could climb in and help a mama cat take care of her babies. When we were there to assist, no little kitten ever crawled about blindly, searching for milk and crying.

A mama cat broke the rules one spring. She had her kittens beneath the underslung, a big trailer that was used for hauling haystacks to feed the cattle. The underslung was parked for the summer and there happened to be a small pile of hay under it. There, the mama made her nest.

To visit those kittens, we had to scoot on our stomachs under the bed and framework of the trailer. When the nest was finally reached, we had to remain lying down, either on our backs or stomachs. It was a difficult situation, but we made occasional visits.

I crawled under there one day and forgot what a tight space I was in. I raised up too far, too fast, and struck my head sharply against a metal beam. It nearly knocked me out, and I lay there for a while moaning, with strange colors dancing in front of my eyes, until I could gather my wits and pull myself out of there. That was the last time I visited those kittens.

One time my sister and I were exploring a blowout where trash had been dumped many years ago. (This was in the Nebraska Sandhills, and people used blowouts as landfills back in those days.) There happened to be an old wood cookstove thrown into this blowout, and we were investigating it. Much to our surprise, there were a half-dozen little wild kittens living in and about it. They were terribly emaciated.

We went back to the house and rounded up some food for them, and when we took it to them, they climbed our pants legs to get to it. They were terribly hungry. Apparently their mother had abandoned them, or perhaps a coyote had got her. Anyway, it was a lucky day for those kittens. We caught them all and took them home with us.

My mother had a sweet story about a kitten experience when she was young. She dressed a cooperative cat in a doll dress and laid her in a nice doll bed she had created in a wooden box. Then Mama went to eat lunch. When she came back, she found that the cat (still dressed) had given birth to a kitten in her doll bed -- just one tiny brand-new kitten. What an exciting and wonderful surprise that must have been!

The kitten in the photos below (taken in 1994) is one we raised on a bottle. His name is Happy, and we still have him. He's a spoiled old rascal. He learned at an early age that he could get almost anything he wanted if he insisted. 

My kids could tell their own stories about spending time with kittens. One thing that just doesn't change much is the special bond kids can make with kittens.