"She must be taken to the Doctor's."
So I drove six miles to his office.
"The Doctor won't be in till 1:30."
Home...bread ready to put in the oven...dinner to get and back to the Doctor. No Doctor in. So home again. Seven more loaves of bread to bake and a cake, a few pieces to be washed and supper to get. Then the first pleasant thing of the day happened. Jerry came to the kitchen and sniffed the air. "Spice cake and apple sauce. Glory! How long before we eat?"
Supper and then Daddy must take Little Girl to the Doctor. O, for more good Doctors in the country! That is what we need!
Dishes washed, little ones in bed and I got out my account book for this was August thirty-first, my day of reckoning. I must balance my book and give an account of myself to myself to see wherein I had failed.
My cooking amounted to one peck of potatoes for every week day (a peck equals approximately 20 pounds.) My baking, 119 loaves of bread with 272 biscuits just to fill in, 20 cakes, 112 little cup cakes and 48 quarts of fruit canned. Just 28 times I had cleaned a floor and 16 times I had washed clothes. No power washer to help, either. Only the old fashioned Armstrong and Elbow Grease combination...with Me for power. I had made eight dresses and cooked 37 meals for outsiders.
If you Farmer's Wives, who read this, ever get the blues, doubt your worth, and begin to feel yourselves failures, take an account book and keep track of your work for a week or a month. I believe this is the only way to show yourself just where you stand. August first I was tired and considered myself a failure. But I kept track of my work and on August thirty-first, I was still tired, but joyfully so. I no longer considered myself a failure but rather a "working partner in a going concern." Try it once and see.
The house was quiet. There passed under my window two boys. One was repeating a little rhyme. I listened and then said it over and over to myself. I decided that whoever wrote it must have known me and my family. It so perfectly fitted us:
"Early to bed, early to rise,
Work like fun and economize."
And thus ended the month of August.
I think that Loretto Green was some amazing woman! She married at 18 and her husband was 20. Loretto had her last baby at the age of 43. She and her husband had 15 children in all--four boys and eleven girls. Sadly, she had a daughter named Loretto, too, that died the same year she was born (perhaps at birth?) I think this little one would have been her third child and first daughter.
In the 1940 census her little "Farmer John" is not listed. Loretto said that this boy was a favorite of the doctor, so he must have been sickly to some degree. He would have been 16 or 17 years old at this census and there were many older children still home at this time. Did he die? Oh, I hope not! but I can find no other records for him.
Loretto Green died just one month short of her 92nd birthday. Just imagine how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren she was blessed to have!