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.