Farm life, relatives and then some

When I was a little girl I helped my daddy in the barn. I didn't help much but I pretended to. It kept me from having to help my mother in the garden.

We were definitely a farm family with ugly brown shoes tucked inside our overshoes and chores to do every day.

I liked feeding the calves best but didn't much care for helping with the chickens. We had a banty rooster that sometimes chased me all the way to the house.

My sister was sick a lot of the time so she didn't have to worry about many of the things I had to do.

I was a student at a country one-room school. All the students were farmer's children at ease with each other and not minding our old-fashioned clothes or country ways.

One event I will always remember: At Christmas the teacher sent the big boys out to find a Christmas tree from a farmer's land while we girls made the pretty decorations for the tree.

My school was lucky to have an organ. I was the organist with my vast musical education of one half hour with the music teacher, sometimes every week, sometimes not. Her payment each time was 50 cents. I hope that music teacher didn't starve.

Like many rural schools ours was consolidated with a larger school district when I became a fifth-grader. There, we country kids learned to adapt to change.

It wasn't easy to pretend we didn't hear the city kids whispering about our clothes or the lard cans our mothers put our lunches in. I thought mine was pretty. Its sides shone like gold.

As a teenager during summer vacation I had a shock. One afternoon I was alone in the house when some people came to the door. They were relatives from Canada. If they had called Mother to let her know they were coming, she hadn't told me.

What does a teenager do with a house full of people she doesn't know? Especially, when she's more at ease talking to a cow. I had an idea.

"Éxcuse me," I said. "I need to make a few phone calls."

With my back to these people I pretended to have several conversations and at last Mother came home from wherever she was hiding.

My next interview into the world of society came when my grandmother's cousins arrived from Ohio. The husband in this group had the habit of rubbing his hands at the dinner table, supposedly to remove crumbs, even when there weren't any.

My mother put a number of wrinkles on her face each day while frowning at me while I frowned at him. I couldn't stand any more of that, so I sweetly asked to be excused from the table. I went outside and chased that banty rooster all the way to the chicken house.

Did I ever grow up? I don't know. I've been too busy to find out.

Luella Dow is a Cheney-area author. She can be reached at [email protected].