Hoping for a Snow Day

 March 2006

As I took Isaac to school this morning, he was hoping for enough snow that school would be cancelled. It brought to mind a silly little thing I said when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, about this time of the year.

School had been let out for the day, and we students (all seven or eight of us) spilled out of the little schoolhouse with our lunchboxes in hand. It was windy and chilly, and the sky was almost colorless. I announced to the Horner girls in a voice of authority, "Look at that sky! It looks like we'll be getting some snow tonight."

In truth, I wasn't sure what the sky looked like when snow was imminent, but I had heard my dad say things like that, and it sounded good when I said it.

It sounded good because we children liked snow and plenty of it! We hoped for heavy snow so our teacher would cancel school for the day. The snow had to be deep because if the teacher thought she could even get close to the school, she'd call someone on the school board to meet her with a tractor and get her through the drifts to the schoolhouse.

Every chore in ranch life was made a hundred times more difficult when there was heavy snow, so our parents always hoped that it wouldn't snow just as hard as we hoped that it would.

Ink Bottles and Fountain Pens

 

I attended Duff Valley District 4 in Rock County, Nebraska in the late 50s and early 60s. It was a one-room elementary school with a pitcher pump, a flagpole, a swing set, outhouses, an old barn from the days when the students rode horses to school, and of course, the schoolhouse itself.

The desks in our schoolhouse were old enough that most of them had inkwells built into the upper right corner of the desk top. An inkwell is a cup that holds a bottle of ink and keep it from spilling while a writer is using it. 

Ball point pens had been invented by then, but writing with real ink wasn't  completely obsolete. Stores still sold little bottles of ink and the necessary ink pens. One variety of pen had an inner rubber bladder that held a supply of ink.  This was an innovation that allowed the pen to write for a while before it needed refilling.  The user filled the bladder by dunking the pen in the ink bottle and operating a little lever on the side of the pen. The filling procedure made a small interesting gurgle. 

I was never able to keep my hands clean while messing around with an ink bottle and pen. Sometimes there were spills. I made a big black ink mess on a page in my Social Studies book during my ownership of one manually loaded ink pen. I accomplished this behind the privacy shield of my raised desk lid because my teacher had already told me to stop playing with my pen and ink. 

I enjoyed fountain pens, too. A fountain pen got its ink from a plastic cartridge that was a little smaller in size than a triple-A battery. An ink cartridge was installed by pressing the pointed top end of the pen's nib into one end of it and loading the cartridge-with-nib into the body of the pen. 

The ink cartridges almost always leaked at the puncture point. The ink oozed onto the grip of the pen, and soon my writing fingers had black, red, blue, or green stains, depending on the color of ink in the cartridge.  

If I accidentally let the pen rest against the paper when I wasn't writing, an ink spot quickly developed. If I shook the pen, little drops of ink flew from it.  If I thoughtlessly rested my hand or arm on the wet ink, it smeared, and if I folded the paper before the ink was dry, it made mirror images of any wet letters. These things happened with both types of ink pens.

We students made plenty of messes with ink, but Duff Valley's teachers had a long history of ink accidents that they couldn't deny. The bottoms of the wooden drawers in the teacher's desk had dozens of blots and stains from decades of leaky ink pens and tipped-over ink bottles. 

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. 

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.

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.

Ruffles and Pleats

27 Jan 2006 

I bought a curious book at a thrift shop yesterday. It is the 1954 edition of Ladies' Home Journal: Book of Interior Decoration by Elizabeth T. Halsey. It's a large book, similar in size to what Life and Look magazines used to be.

When I opened the book and looked through the pages, I knew I had to buy it and preserve it as a historic document. The photographs give me a sense of déjà vu. Specifically, the book reminded me of a childhood visit to the Arthur and Mary Mallory home, somewhere in Iowa, in the late 1950s.

The Mallory Brothers (I think they were Arthur and Dwight) raised and sold Black Angus breeding stock. We were at their Iowa farm to buy bulls, and we spent the night with Arthur and Mary-- a most uncomfortable night, in my opinion. Mary Mallory's home seemed so elegant to me, a country child, that I was afraid to speak beyond a whisper. It was not a place where I felt I could relax. If Mary had ever had children, her house showed no sign of it.

The photographs in this LHJ decorating book are a visit to Mary Mallory's house, all over again. The slipcovered armchairs are color coordinated to the floor-length pinch-pleated draperies. Ruffled bedskirts match the ruffled pillowcases, and the bedspreads match the ruffled skirts of the vanity tables. The floors are carpeted wall-to-wall. If anything is homemade, it is the lace tablecloth on the dining room table. There's not a quilt or ragrug in sight.

I don't know the name of this decor style, but it wasn't the "mid-century modern," streamlined look that's often associated with the 1950s. This country child would still feel uncomfortable in it.

The Peterbang Kids

January 2006

Isaac and I were talking about the Peterbang Kids on the way home from town tonight. I don't know where my mother got their name. I don't know if the Peterbang story was a product of her imagination, or if it was something she remembered from her own childhood.

When I first learned about the Peterbang Kids, my family lived south of Johnstown, Nebraska. We had a blowout that we used as a landfill (as folks did in those days), and Mama said that the Peterbang Kids lived there.

The Peterbang Kids matched us exactly. They even had our names (except that their last name was Peterbang), and they looked exactly like us. The one big difference was that they were ornery and naughty, whereas we were sweet and nice. The Peterbangs loved to sneak into our house and do forbidden things and let us suffer the consequences!

When I was six, we moved to a ranch in southern Rock County, Nebraska. The Peterbang Kids slipped onto the very last truckload of stuff that was moved (according to Mama). And of course, they moved right into the junkpile in the blowout at the new place.

Even though I knew that the Peterbangs were imaginary, it was easy to imagine them living in the blowout. Many interesting pieces of junk had been thrown into the blowout over the years -- old cookstoves and broken chairs, rusted out pans and leaky chamber pots, bottles of all sorts, broken dishes, old magazines, snarls of wire, odd bits of broken machinery and every other thing you could imagine. There was plenty of everything that a Peterbang might need.

It was handy that they did make the move with us. When we did something naughty but not too serious, sometimes Mama laughed and said that she guessed the Peterbangs had been visiting again.

The years went by, and I became a teenager and then a grown-up, and finally, I almost forgot the Peterbangs. But when I had children, one of the Peterbangs found me again. It was the Peterbang girl who looks just like me. She was grown-up too, and she had a little girl and boy who looked exactly like my little girl and boy. Her children even had the very same names as my children (except that their last name was Peterbang, of course.)

The Peterbangs first found us in Berlin, and then they slipped onto the plane when we came to Kentucky. They settled in the gully in Clarence's pasture not far from the house. People had thrown a lot of old junk in the gully over the years, so they felt right at home.  And they certainly have caused a lot of mischief around here. Just ask my kids!

My Emerson Upright Piano

January 2006

Yesterday, on the 11th day of Christmas, I received one last Christmas gift, something I had specifically asked for. A piano tuner came to our house and tuned my piano. 

He also fixed two small things that were wrong with it -- a key on the far right that didn't make a sound and also the C key, an octave above Middle C, that didn't hold its sound. The damper on the C was broken, so he removed the damper from the highest of notes that have dampers and moved it down to that C. He will try to order a replacement damper from his catalogs of old piano parts. 

 Isaac felt vindicated and outraged when I told him the piano tuner had found the missing ivory key-cover inside the piano. For years, I thought that the kids had lost that piece of ivory, and Isaac remembers that I expressed my suspicion quite a few times.

As all piano tuners do when they work on this piano, he commented that it was in very good condition and had a nice sound for the age of the instrument. It's probably over 100 years old. The most recent patent date inside the piano is 1893. 

My mother bought this piano from a newspaper ad when it became apparent that I was practicing my piano lessons willingly and learning to read music. We had another piano before this one. My mother had tried to refinish it, and it hadn't gone well. When she moved in the new piano, my dad took the old piano to the blowout* and dumped it. I remember it lying on its back with its face to the sky. 

Over the years, this piano went from Nebraska to Missouri to Kansas with my mother and father, and after they passed away, I moved it to Kentucky. The kids and I had a memorable trip! We drove an excessively large U-Haul truck that was nearly empty except for the piano, dragging our car behind for 750 miles.We made the trip without serious incident, and the day that the piano took up residence in my living room, I know that my mother smiled. She bought the piano for me, and at last it was in my home. She would be glad that I got it tuned again at last, and she'd be pleased at how nice it sounds. *

In the Nebraska Sandhills, a region of grassed-over sand dunes, where I grew up, a blowout is a sandy depression or hole caused by wind erosion. Rightly or wrongly, Sandhill ranchers discarded their trash in blowouts. Trash in a blowout was a ranch history of sorts, with an odd assortment of well-weathered objects such as old cast iron cook-stoves, tangles of antique barbed wire, old bottles and cans, and skeletons of dead cattle. And a piano, in this case.