“When I think of my childhood summers,
I remember lying in the grass, hands behind my head,
feeling the blades dig into my fingers. I studied the clouds.
I joked with my friends. None of us wore watches. Mitch Albom, Author
I remember that too. Especially the lying in the grass on the front lawn of my Grandpa Thompson’s country farm outside of tiny Eleva, Wisconsin. My brothers and I would do that as the night time darkness crept in around us, before we were called into the non-electric farmhouse that had been home to mom and her dozen other siblings in the 1920’s through the forties.
There was something especially good about feeling that cool grass under us (until the mosquitoes chased us away). It was mesmerizing to watch the twinkling stars appear overhead. My two brothers and I rolled around, talked, tickled and teased each other, and it was a good place for us to be. That is for sure.
Each summer in the early 1950s, once school was out, we returned to grandpa’s farm for the summer time. Mom was there to help with the hand-wringing weekly laundry, the bread making that rose in large dish pans and baked in the wood stove and the general cleaning and house upkeep, and gardening including lots of canning which provided for my grandpa and his brother through the winter time.
We had chores as well, bringing the cows home to milk, collecting the hens’ eggs, berry picking and not coming home until all the buckets were filled to the top. Yet there was lots of open time for field trips (literally in grandpa’s fields), playing in the grainery (don’t know how safe that was!), the hay barn, the mud puddles (we always went outside in the rain), walks, down the two-tire track road to collect the mail, and further yet with fishing poles in hand to fish for minnows in the creek for bait for the adults’ bigger fishing trips on the lakes.
When grandpa traded in his harnessed pair of working horses for a grey and red Ford tractor, my brothers and I learned to drive that too, had a few incidences of falling off the hay wagon, and sometimes caught the breezes at the top or near to the top of our favorite “stepping-ladder” pines that grew behind the farmhouse. The wind made a special sound when you got high enough. I continue to be grateful to the guardian angels that kept our treks safe from falling.
Thrashing time was the best time of all. When a group of neighboring farmers shared the one thrashing machine between them, and traveled to each farm to bring the crop in. The farmers’ wives came along to each farm home, and prepared the best meal you are ever going to have, fresh baked from the oven from meat entre’ to fresh cooked vegetables and breads, topped off with the best fruit pies of the season and one large communal meal of hungry field hands and hubbies. (and us!)
Regular time lunch times always featured grandpa Thompson listening to the price reports of grains, hogs and things on the old-time radio, which was set just below the newest “modern” addition to the kitchen — the ring up the operator in town party line telephone. The operator who plugged in the switches into the board. Sometimes, we would (when no one was around) quietly lift the phone to see if we could gain some gossip on the party line neighbors, but usually we got caught by either the person we were listening to or the arrival of mom. Grandpa finished his lunch time with a nap in his naugahyde brown recliner in the large open kitchen corner, falling asleep with the newspaper falling over his chest, his glasses perched on his forehead, his eyes closing wearily and a soft snoring sound sifting into the room.
Since milking time came early, bed times did too. Usually preceded by a kerosene lamp-lit kitchen with a few card games at the oil-cloth covered large kitchen table. If it was a special occasion, we moved to the sitting room and dancing would spontaneously erupt as grandpa grabbed his violin, my uncle added his juice harp, and one of my aunt’s played the piano.
This life was like a cross between Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and Laura Engle Wilder’s life on the prairie.
We would return to small town life in Sycamore Illinois in late August, regrouping with our elementary school age friends, knowing that ours was a little bit different summer than the one they experienced, but one not to be traded in for anything.
Napkinwriter 