Five Little Girls and a Farm
When our family moved to Roseburg we lived in a rental house until my parents bought a fifteen-acre farm. It was quite a feat on Dad’s millworker wages but the former owners, the Chandlers, held the papers on the home making it more affordable.
The property featured, the house, a woodshed and a barn all on the same knoll, there were fruit trees in the same field as the pump house, but the pasture was not visible from the house. The pasture was a grass field that was to dry for hay for the cattle on the farm and lastly there was a shale pit that had a couple of old rusty car frames in it.
The other buildings were a garage with an attached breezeway, a woodshed, and a play house. On the little hill at the top of the property was a laurel tree, its bark was easy to peel off and underneath was soft enough to carve, “I Love You” in a heart shape with the initials of me and my boyfriend, when I finally had one.
Mom was overwhelmed with five children. I think it was because she had so much responsibility as a teenager, being my Grandma’s right hand. Mom called the little hill with the Laurel tree her "thinking place," which she needed as a result of having five daughters.
I called my older sister, "Grace the Trailblazer." I used to study her high school albums to learn grown-up things, which I had to do because my position in the family was the "responsible one." Sophie was Dad’s favorite, Leslie the star and clearly Mom’s favorite, and Elsie, unfortunately, was the family’s scapegoat albeit she was our little sweetheart. Author and theologian Edith Schafer described a family as a mobile, each one affecting others, that analogy certainly described us.
I have some really sweet pictures taken around the property of our two-story farmhouse painted white with green trim. Our black dog was usually in the background of pictures which include, our barn, and the back pasture. Another was Leslie and I standing by a dwarf peach tree, yet another was me standing in front of a hollyhock that was taller than me and another of me holding my little suitcase filled with scratch pads and pencils. Maybe I was destined to be a writer. I even have a picture of Mom and her sister Molly, their arms full of garden produce.
One Easter morning all five of us were squeaky clean, wearing new dresses, shoes and white ruffle-edged socks. We took a picture of us all lined up in front of the piano. Grace and Sophie were standing on each end of the piano bench and Leslie, Elsie and me sitting on the bench. Grace was seven or eight, Elsie not quite a year old, and the rest of us all ages in between.
We created quite a stir when we were out and about, the five of us standing together like stairsteps. It must have looked like Mom had a flock of ducklings all around her. People smiled or made nice comments. One day when we were shopping at Montgomery Wards which had a bathroom that was only a display complete with a toilet, three-year-old Elsie used it to go potty! We left that store as fast as we could.
Mom was driving to Florence at the coast to see my sisters and my aunt Molly and we came upon a mudslide blocking the highway. We were all so disappointed, but there was a gas station and a little store attached. The store’s chest freezer had a big variety of ice cream on display. The five of us knew the treats were not in Dad and Mom’s budget but a man shopping noticed us looking fondly in the freezer and bought each of us our choice of ice cream sandwiches, fudge cycles, popsicles or frozen ice cream cones, his kindness really saved the day.
My sisters and I had our own way of doing dishes. Grace, my oldest sister usually found a reason to be gone for a while and Elise my littlest sister loved to play with the dish soap bubbles, meaning both of them took forever to get the job done. I liked to do dishes with one of my two middle sisters, Sophie or Leslie, we had the same attitude which was, "let’s get the job done so we could do something else more fun."
We had two milk cows, Goldie a Guernsey, and Blue an unusual breed. Dad or Grace milked Goldie and I, Blue. I considered her my very own cow. Dad used to tease me by saying “So-o Blue.” It made her switch her tail, slapping me when it went back and forth. It was harmless and made him smile.
Dad went to the auction and bought five piglets that he carried home in a gunny sack, but they all squirmed out when he got home. They ran up to an old apple orchard which had lots of apples on the ground so of course the piglets were in hog-heaven. Our whole family was running in circles trying to catch them, eventually, we did.
We had organic food before anyone used that term. We had steers that were sent to the meat processing plant, the meat mostly ground into hamburgers. We had fresh farm eggs, I had to reach under the hens to get the eggs she didn’t want to give up... the rooster was proud, puffed up, and a little scary, and we had milk and cream churched to make butter.
We also had our pets the black dogs I mentioned before, cats, and a mallard hen duck named Gizmo. She had a broken wing that the veterinarian made a splint for, but she still couldn’t fly, she just waddled around usually spending her time around the tub under the water pump in front of the woodshed.
When it was time to butcher chickens, we did so at the house directly below ours. Mrs. Z. wrung the chicken necks and Dad and Mom chopped off their heads. I thought they were both cruel but at least their death came fast.
The chickens were cut up in our kitchen, I was repulsed by the smell of singed feathers and the sight of their innards. I made a trade-off with Mom that I would clean the house on that day. It was a wonderful thing for me to be protected from all the sights and smells and sounds by closing the door between the kitchen and dining room and making the rest of our house neat and tidy.
We had a big garden of green beans, carrots, lettuce, beets, tomatoes, corn, spinach, and squash Fruit trees were in the back of the property just before the pond including cherry trees, three kinds of apples, pear, and peach trees, my favorite. Mom, me and my sisters worked together to do the canning, then we lined the jars up in a fruit cellar in the front of the basement. After school, we'd get a healthy snack, something we canned. I ate half of a quart jar of peaches, tomatoes, or pears. We canned green beans too but they weren’t the best to eat cold, instead we ate them for dinner.
The front and back yard had lots of flowers, violets, roses, and lilacs which I was allergic to. We had two spirea bushes, their white flowers were perfect for making bouquets. We had anemones and four-o-clocks which really do close at four in the afternoon. I'm sure they opened up at 4 too but I wasn’t sure because I was asleep in the early morning hours.
I loved to go with Dad to the Farm Bureau downstairs where the baby chicks were kept; I loved the sight, and feel of them and their soft chirps. I can recall the sweet smell of molasses and that we kept the animal food there too, covered oats for our milk cows, and pig slop, which actually didn’t have any smell. but mixed with potato and carrot peelings, spoiled tomatoes and corn cobs it made tasty meals for them. Upstairs, the side porch had plant starts and seeds for vegetables and flowers. Inside blue blue-bordered crock pots, pressure cookers, and fancy kitchen supplies all lined the shelves. They were fascinating to me probably because we didn’t have any of them.
My sisters and I loved to ride our bikes down the hill all the way to the main road. We skinned our knees and got little bits of gravel embedded in them, they became sort of like a fun trophy.
We had plenty of time to play to roll sow bugs we called them, rolly bugs, because they curl up to protect themselves. We'd send them down a little incline to the shale pit, or listening to a killdeer protecting their nest, we nibbled on the sweet-tasting fescue blossoms, picked Queen’s Anne’s lace flowers, or made chains with bulrush reeds. It was good, healthy farm fun.
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