Showing posts with label True Life Story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label True Life Story. Show all posts

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SORROW & COMFORT; February & April 1912

The first letter below is one of the very few sad letters that I have come across in The Farmer's Wife magazine.

It might come as a surprise to some people, but references to God, Jesus and the Bible were common place in The Farmer's Wife magazine. Although the publisher and editor were both Christians, that was not the only reason. The God of the Bible was accepted in everyday American life 100 years ago. It is more than a shame that He is usually banned in our present day. As a society, I can't see that we are any better for the change. lah

Dear Farmer's Wife:

Santa did not find us at all this Christmas, for the first day of November we buried our youngest daughter, 16 years old. We were at so much expense, we could not have Santa.

Will some of the sisters remember us in our sorrow and sadness? Let me hear from all the sisters, it will interest me and take the worry off my mind.

Signed,
C.S. Ireland, Ohio


Dear Farmer's Wife

Mrs. C. S. Ireland has my deepest sympathy in the loss of her beloved daughter. It is indeed very hard to part with those who are so dear to us on earth. But dear sister, your little daughter is far better off than we are. My precious mother was called home when I was 15 years old and my little brother five years old and I am satisfied that she is much happier than we are. That has been 16 years ago, but I do get lonely and long for her, yet, any times. What a comfort it is, dear sisters, to know that if we live a devoted Christian life here upon earth that in the future we will all be united with those who are so dear to us. I have only one little girl of 10 years and am bringing her up to love and worship God. I think it is such a pity to see multitudes of homes where God is not reverenced at all.

Signed,
Mrs. W. B. T., Tacoma, Wash.

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THE GREEN RANCH IN THE DESERT, part 4 of 4; by Thoda Cocroft (1919)

Betty met me at the door in a dainty gingham. "How do you like it?" she asked.

It was a radiant home, spotlessly clean, bright, comfortable. When dinner was served on radiant linen with bright silver and the boys came in clean and shaven, and told me the story of how the miracle came about, I was speechless with wonder and admiration for the splendid Saxon woman, their sister.

It was long before I learned of the struggle in all its detail. There had been so much that was strange and new and difficult for this woman-rancher to put up with, lack of comforts and facilities, and exasperating difficulties to be adjusted. Then there were the ever-present crawling things! "How did you ever endure them?" I asked. I was lounging on the comfortable couch in the living room staring up at the ceiling and suddenly I exclaimed, "Why, Betty, look at the cocoons on your ceiling! There are millions of them!"

"They're empty now," she replied quietly.

"How in the world did they get there?"

"Oh, that was the caterpillar pest," she replied nonchalantly. "It only lasted two weeks. We had just moved in but the roof wasn't finished. There were cracks about that wide." And she indicated a half inch with her fingers. "We were still waiting for the shingles."

"Tell me about it!" I insisted.

"Oh, they dropped through the cracks," she calmly replied. "You see the cottonwood trees near the house were covered with them. They hatched in the spring and crawled everywhere, dropped from the trees to the roof and through the cracks. The boys were used to centipedes and didn't mind common caterpillars! Sometimes they would drop into the food. I drew the line when they dropped inside of my clothes. I was so nervous I thought I couldn't stand it but they started to spin cocoons and in a little while they were all gone."

She laughed at my gasp of terror. "Oh, it never could happen again," she said. "The roof is thoroughly shingled and every inch of the house is screened."

"The rattle snakes used to bother me a little in the beginning," she continued. "But I got over that as soon as I learned their habits."

This stoicism was incredible to me. I had never dreamed of these "minor annoyances" as Betty called them, coupled with the other obstacles she had to conquer.

"Why you're simply wonderful, Betty!" I cried. But Betty refused to take ever so little credit for the making of the glorious Rancho Verde.

Some weeks ago before Peace was declared a few words came from this courageous Saxon woman then in France. A caretaker had been employed for the ranch. The three brothers and herself were all in the service. Irv, in the artillery, Sid, in the engineers, and Art already cited in the newspapers for "conspicuous bravery" in bringing down enemy planes. Betty was serving in the operating room of a hospital near the front, working sometimes forty eight hours at a stretch without relief, sleeping in almost air-tight boxes to keep out the poison gas and waking with blue lips and a throbbing head to go back eagerly to duty.

"I don't mind the fatigue," she wrote, "but when they bring in the poor boys, many of whom will never walk again, and many of them blind for life--a cold terror creeps up into my heart and chokes me. What if I should find one of my boys--one of my "three musketeers," among the dead and wounded? I long for the deep quiet and sunshine of Arizona but I can't go back again without my boys."

Peace came and in time there was a jubilant fiesta in the low green house on Rancho Verde for the "three musketeers" and their wonderful sister are at home again in the oasis they brought to pass on the shifting sands of the Arizona desert.

The end.

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THE GREEN RANCH IN THE DESERT, part 3 of 4; by Thoda Cocroft (1919)

She managed to cook dinner in the rickety cook house the first night she arrived, but the screens were full of holes and buzzing insects swarmed around her as she stood over the hot stove. The filth of the adobe house and the crawling inmates drove her that night to a bed in the open. The following morning she surveyed the general chaos and disorder, and contemplating at the same time the change, outward and inward, in her brothers, she shook her head.

Then all the sturdiness and energy of her Saxon forefathers surged up in her breast. Pluck and determination asserted themselves. "Hopeless?" she said to herself with a smile. "We'll see!"

First she must persuade the boys to begin to build immediately but they were reluctant to waste time on what they considered non-essential labor and they replied in the Mexican spirit of postponement that was slowly creeping over them, "Manana--Manana,"--tomorrow--tomorrow.

But Betty said briskly and firmly, "Today! boys, today!" She was even sharp about it.

So they began to discuss plans, skeptical at first and indifferent, but when Betty talked eagerly about a sleeping porch and modern plumbing and a porcelain bath, they swung about.

Building operations began. Another Mexican family was employed and Betty gave thorough instructions in the art of laundering. Carlosa was taught to rub and rinse and rub again as she had never seen it done before.

When Art returned from Los Angeles with the porcelain fittings for the bath room, the house was almost ready. One of the workers spread the word that running water and a modern bath were to be installed and news spread. Mexicans and whites alike flocked to "the green ranch" to inspect the novelties. That was the only bath in the desert for ninety miles around! Sink and stove were put in the kitchen and an open fire place built in the living room. Bright cretonnes were bought for curtains. Betty was busy hemming towels and tableclothes and poring over catalogues for inexpensive rugs.

In all this, the crops and land and pigs had not been neglected. Work was severely scheduled. Each day one of the boys devoted his entire time to the land. Betty herself cared for the chickens, and the boys gloated over fresh eggs for breakfast with crisp hot biscuit and clear coffee.

Hours before dinner, they would anticipate the feast ahead and they no longer appeared at table dirty and unshaven. The penalty was bread and water if they did.

Some months later when the success of the desert venture was assured and full property rights to the land had been granted, I visited Rancho Verde, the green ranch indeed. When our car neared the edge of the mesa, Sid pointed to the green valley below. "There she is!" he said proudly. The miracle had come true. There was the wonder oasis, great fields of blue-green alfalfa, acres of sturdy maize, and stretches of sudan grass. The long low house was painted green and from the roof a bright American flag was waving.


To be continued...


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THE GREEN RANCH IN THE DESERT, part 2 of 4; by Thoda Cocroft (1919)

It was necessary to go back to Los Angeles for new parts and they drew lots for the trip. Art drew the lucky straw and his brothers decided they must accompany him. They would leave the "Mex" in charge of the place.

It was a dreary Rancho Verde that greeted the three boys on their return. Devastation and wreckage were on every side and no sight of the "Mex" or Chiquita.

A casual visitor from Palomas told them that the Mexican had gone off on a drunken fiesta and never returned. With the place unguarded, stray cattle broke through the fences, trampled down the ditches and roamed at large over the ploughed land. Someone had stolen most of their food supply as well as farming inplements.

But the plucky lads went at it again, put the pump in working order, irrigated the land, planted seed and as if by magic, a crop of green alfalfa appeared.

It was time for the pigs now; cattle would come later. So a shipment of pigs arrived.

December in the desert is divine. The purple Mohawks beckoned alluringly. "Hunting trip for a week," Art proposed. Before their holiday was over the rains began. When they came back to the ranch, the lowland in the river basin was filled with water and some of the higher land was already soggy. And still the torrents came down and the treacherous river arose.

It was near ten in the evening two nights later. The 'dobe house was on high ground so they had turned into dry beds, but suddenly Sid pricked up his ears at a new sound. Above the noise of the torrent came the squeals of frightened pigs. He knew what had happened.

It broke," Sid yelled. "She's coming a mile a minute!" The three boys piled out to save their drowning pigs from flood.

They spent the entire night swimming and propelling a hastily constructed raft across the seething waters and each trip added one more pig to the howling collection on the mesa.

Before morning the three boys shivering in their wet clothes, cut, bruised and exhausted, gathered on the dry sand of the high mesa and counted twenty-five out of fifty pigs.

"The game's up," they agreed. "No use. We might as well quit right now."

But they had not counted on the sister back home who had followed them through every hardship and discouragement of the last eight months.

Betty's job was in San Francisco where she was head nurse in one of the largest hospitals in the city. When she read her brothers' brief story of the flood, she packed up and departed for the Arizona ranch. The boys needed her and she knew she could help them.

The floods had subsided when Betty arrived. In the dry Arizona air the ground had rapidly absorbed the excess moisture. In a half-hearted way the brothers had prepared new alfalfa crops, but their courage was at low ebb and Betty knew she had come none too soon.


To be continued...

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THE GREEN RANCH IN THE DESERT, part 1 of 4; by Thoda Cocroft (1919)

In the spring of 1914, three boys from California sought their fortunes in the deserts of Arizona. One was a civil engineer, one an agricultural engineer, the third, a youngster in college.

The Desert Claim Act of Arizona giving land to settlers who, at the end of three years, had irrigated and cultivated their respective claims, looked good to the California trio. They had a limited capital to invest and energy and get-rich-quick schemes in abundance.

For weeks they traveled over desert lands, searching carefully and in the region of the purple Mohawks they pitched a temporary camp. Surely this great, sweeping plain with its border of Yzetta grass and the jagged purple-red mountains held the promise of the fortune they were seeking. They drilled for water. It was salt. They drilled again--another more distasteful chemical was mingled with the salt. Yet again they drilled; again, salt and strange smelling minerals. With heavy hearts they struck camp and started out again on their search across the desert sands.

At last, in the Gila River bottom near the little town of Palomas, they found an abundance of pure water and good soil. Someone had made a venture here a few years previous, irrigating the land by bringing water from the Gila River two miles distant but each winter the treacherous river changed its course and one year the rancher was left high and dry with no water for crops and cattle.

The boys took possession of an old adobe house the former owner had left, hired a Mexican laborer, named the claim Rancho Verde, and went to work.

The first problem was the water supply. Digging wells in the desert was not a simple task. The sand slipped in as fast as they dug it out but after weary days and weeks of hard work the pump was installed and the first flow of water was overwhelming in its abundance. The boys knew they could turn their desert claim into an oasis of miracles! So they turned their attention to clearing the land.

They worked faithfully burning out sage and mesquite and in three weeks ten acres were cleared. Another month elapsed before the soil was ready for irrigation.

The engine was started. No water.

"Must be something wrong with the pump," grumbled Sid.

"I give up!" burst forth Irv.

Art climbed down into the well, investigated, and came up with a gloomy verdict. "Sand in it. We got to pull the whole thing to pieces."

Five months of life in the adobe house had not been conducive to courageous spirits. The boys had invested in lumber for a house but there were no spare minutes to build. So the three ranchers put up with centipedes, scorpions and occasional tarantulas that roamed at large around the one big adobe room. The wife of the Mexican laborer did the cooking and their stomachs somehow became accustomed to the greasy chili con carne and tortillas prepared by the corpulent Chiquita.

In the beginning the young ranchers had their suspicions about the cleanliness of the food that Chiquita produced, but after a strenuous day's work they had to eat whatever there was.

They had suggested in the beginning that Chiquita wash for them each week but unfortunately washing was one of the arts in which Chiquita was not versed. She carefully rubbed the red dirt into underwear and linens. Greasy food, dirty clothes, a dark, scorpion ridden home had told slowly on nerve and spirits. Sand in the pump was the climax!

To be continued...

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FEET ON THE EARTH, Part 2 of 2; Dr. Poling; 1939

Greer is 125 miles from the railroad, and the mail comes in three times a week. The only telephone connection with the outside world is by courtesy of the Forest Ranger. I haven't seen a newspaper for five days and I am a little anxious concerning foreign affairs; but yesterday and again today I caught my legal limit of trout, and as I write, the Little Colorado is singing loudly just outside my window. Across the deep canyon, the towering yellow pines have marched right into the heart of the moon. The quaking aspens, sister trees to the white birches of New England, are spectral fingers in the silvery light. I am strangely content. One of the year-round residents, whose family built Greer's first cabin forty years ago, remarked when a visitor complained about the remoteness: "People who want their mail more than three times a week shouldn't come here anyhow."

Well, there are still some things more important than the news--which is, of course, saying a great deal. The men and women who cherish the pioneer traditions of America and who live on the soil--East, West, North or South--are at times a vivid reminder to those of us who come from the cities that a man's life "consisteth not in the things he possesseth." Sharlot M. Hall, who was born on a Kansas farm and who, when twelve years of age, rode a Texas pony behind the covered wagon of her parents down the Santa Fe trail to Arizona territory, has written this philosophy for life into a single, noble verse:

"Greatness is born of greatness,
And breadth of a breadth profound;
The old Antaean fable
Of strength renewed from the ground
Was a human truth for the ages--
Since the hour of the Eden-birth,
That man among men was strongest
Who stood with his feet on the earth."

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FEET ON THE EARTH; Part 1 of 2; Dr. Poling; 1939

We came to Greer, Arizona, ten minutes ahead of the thunderstorm that ushered in the 1939 rainy season. The little Mormon community, at an elevation of eight thousand feet on the shoulder of "Old Baldy" in Arizona's White Mountains, had been praying for this storm. Our arrival was accepted as a good omen. The lad who rode on the running-board of our over-loaded car and directed us to the commodious log cabin that was to be our August vacation home told us what the rain meant to vegetables, grass--and fishing. The latter was our chief concern but, knowing what the coming of seasonal rains means to the great Southwest, we were enthusiastic over the promise of bumper gardens and good grazing.

When we offered our guide the money we thought he had earned, he was embarrassed, but he definitely declined the coin. "No," he said, "that's all right. But if you need worms, I dig them--forty for 10 cents." Right there the West began!--no gratuities and a clear distinction between neighborliness and a reasonable charge for services rendered.

A little later the boy's father, who runs the general store, sold us a "fricassee chicken" for $1.25. He didn't figure the weight, and he apologized for the price. It took me back to my boyhood, when the neighbor who specialized in these same "fricassees" would say, "Twenty-five cents--and you catch her." To this day I have difficulty in figuring poultry values by weight, but that six-pound Mormon hen was worth the price.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 13; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

When I was married I said that at forty I would be ready to die. "By forty," thought twenty, "the thrills of life will be gone. One settles down to a humdrum existence. One's husband decides by that time, no doubt, not to love that old frump any more." Now, looking through the doorway of forty I have no fear of entering. Never has life looked so alluring. Never, I believe, have I meant so much, as partner and comrade, to my husband.

Scoffers there are no doubt, who may say that I have written in effervescence of spirit, that my joy is ephemeral. I know there will be hot, discouraging days this summer at whose end, after hours in the garden, or over a hot cook stove, canning vegetables I picked, I will fall into bed exhausted. Yet deep within me is the conviction--of which, perhaps, I can convince no one--that though my body die, my joy in this farm will go on forever.

By those to whom soil, sunlight and fresh air are but names, by those who love city joys, no enjoyment will be found in these lines, for the source of my thrills can be to them but incomprehensible incidents.

I ask only the disgruntled farmer--who is a farmer at heart--to count his blessings before giving all power to the dollar sign and bowing down to the town man's salary. For that salary, before town demands, is but paper fed to an ever hungry fire, while the average town man, like the average farmer, gets no more than a living, and not so much of a living at that.

In much that I have said, or all, I may be wrong. Too often I have been so to lay any claim to infallibility. This I know:  That every moment I lived in town I was hungry for country sights and smells and sounds; and once more I am content, now that I have my family back in overalls.

The end.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 12; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

As to fresh food! I have always said that, no matter how small my income, (and heaven knows it has been small enough) a good share of it must be spent for milk and butter that my children could have all they wanted of these commodities. But no one knows how hard it has been many times in town when I have seen them, undaunted by any market price, consuming great quantities of both, not to cry out, "Oh, go easy.  Go easy."

Now, when I go into my pantry where there are pans of milk covered with thick yellow cream, though I know that milk is costing both time and money, I am filled with gratitude.

Then there is peace. In town often I went into my garden early, so fresh after the sprinkling my husband had given it the night before, to try and imbibe some of the peace there, to store up a little equilibrium against the day's irritations. I never got there early enough. Invariably somebody's automobile would begin chortling and choking, frightening away the song birds. Its gas would taint the fresh morning breeze. Cars would tear madly down the highway, or an early milk wagon would pass. So now when I stand on my back porch, soon after dawn has lifted, and look over the plowed field--a velvet brown oasis in a green desert--and hear only the birds singing, or a rooster crowing; inhale only the fresh mountain air, heavy with perfume of wild azaleas, well--I could more truly worship God there than in any church I ever entered.

So much for our joys and blessings. So many of them still remain unlisted. Especially these two:  fresh air and sunlight. Whenever I go into a building where there are ventilators, or read an advertisement for a product that is better than sunshine--those gifts with which God is so lavish--I wonder what God is thinking. I think of a certain Bible verse:  God has created man honest and upright, but man has sought out many inventions. While I may recognize the need of such inventions, a sense of defeat comes to me. God arranges it so that man must work for his bread ( or has man arranged that, too?) but to even the laziest and most undeserving He would give air and sunlight. Yet how few have its full benefit!

And I believe that we are meant to be creatures of free air, free soil and free sunlight; that the sun must seep deep into our bodies, the soil must send its magic up through our limbs, that the freshest of air must reach every part of our lungs if we would be the whole creatures God intended. Whatever we do to confine ourselves hampers our powers rather than enlarges them.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 11; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

Meanwhile I am not idle. Cooking, washing, ironing and feeding a family of six--to say nothing of the mending--is no snap. Right now I am enjoying it.  I go around with a tiny thrill in my heart as I make my house tidy, and I never did that in town.

I am an advocate, then, that a woman's place is in the home? Yes, if she has work there that can be done better by herself than another. Duties neglected there can not be made up by good done outside. And in no place should a woman's work be more in the home than on a farm.

I mean:  If a woman does all the work for a sizable family--which includes gardening and canning--she has done enough and should not be asked to do more. There are times of need when a good farm wife will want to help out. I have worked in a hay field, driven the horse for the hay fork, and many other things when need was urgent and I had no sons to do that for me. But a farm woman should have no regular outside work. She is no more proof against weariness than other women, and all work and no play makes her as dull as it does Jack. She should have time to read and to relax. No family gains whose mother comes to the table too tired to give them mental as well as material nourishment. Many farm women try to do a man's and a woman's work, but I do believe that they can not do both, without one or the other suffering, and too often it is the home that does. Just the other day I read this: It takes such a small amount of effort for the country woman, with her wide serene vistas, her delicious fresh food, to be the healthiest, happiest woman in the world, and at the same time the least tired. So truly I believe that.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 10; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

There have been times, too, when, driving home in my horse and buggy to work and a late supper, I have envied the town woman sitting on her cool veranda, her day's work done. That feeling always disappeared, however, the moment I felt the country breeze on my face; and again recent days have taught me that most town women work in one way or another, as hard as farm women, though perhaps, they call it social life.

There is that other kind of work that town women do, I mean in Women's Clubs, P.T.A.'s and all uplift movements. I speak of them with highest respect. They do much good and those who work in them, according to their intent, gain much from them.

As for me! I prefer down right labor. I feel as though I never want to go to a bridge party again and stretch my face to a polite smile. Nor wear a dance slipper, nor shop for a fancy dress. (Yet, oh! how I revel in a new supply of house dresses!)

It is not that I do not like fun, nor people. I love an evening at cards with friends. I dote on picnics and good theatres. I love to take people riding in my car. I have always been passionately eager for friends; so much so that I go almost to any length to have them, even to changing, or trying to, my personality.

But, now, somehow, I want my friends to please me, to measure up to my requirements. I do not want to say, "Yes, I love to read poetry," when I don't, just because the person inquiring does. I want friends who can enjoy this farm with me.

Lately I read that every one should have an island--such as had Robinson Crusoe--to which she could retire occasionally. I want to make this farm that island. For a little while I want to live away from the worrying, hurrying world and to forget it. I do not even want to read the newspapers. I know that Hoover is still president, that Lindy is still having a hard life with reporters, and I'm glad that I'm just a common person.

Perhaps this deterioration. Perhaps I have lost ambition or am shunting duties. I cannot think so. Right now it seems that I am getting more from the soil than the world can give me. And who knows but that, in time--like things that grow from the soil--from my sojourn here I can give four worthy citizens to the world; and what I can give to the world is always of more importance than what I get from it.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 9; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

Just a while ago, on my way to the garden to help with the resetting of some plants, I paused on the porch again, to look over the valley. A recent rain had intensified every color. Grey clouds, too, darkened the land with their shadows. Against the reds, the browns and the greens, the wet rocks stood out like mounds of dark velvet. Over all, broken only by song of birds or brook, was that hallowed stillness that comes after a rain, as though every inanimate object paused to breathe a prayer of gratitude for the drink. It was all so clean, so fresh! I found myself wishing I could say this beauty, as one sings a rhapsody. There came a feeling, too, in that moment on my porch, that no matter how hard one must work, could she, in raising her head from her labors see such beauty, that were enough. I felt pity for all who, pausing in their work, must gaze upon city walls.

Which brings me to the clean, cool fact that I do not believe that any one can live entirely away from soil and live fully. No story of mythology so appeals to me as that of the giant who lost his strength when held away from his mother, Earth. Only so did his enemy conquer him.

Some believe that the nearer one lives to the soil the more he degenerates. That which lies upon soil often decays, true. But the tree, whose roots go deep into the soil, the grass, does not. Nor does anything when there is an upward reach.

I, myself, never work with soil without a quickening heart beat. I seem to feel the pulse there that needs--as the air, the radio--only right forces to bring beautiful things into being. One gives into its care flower seeds and their beauty delights the eyes, their bloom fills one's home with fragrance. One plants vegetable seeds and the increase feeds his family. One gives it labor and diligence and patience and the harvest nourishes the soul.

The color of soil in New England is different from Iowa's.

"That looks like dirt," I exclaimed, as my husband mixed with the soil he was putting around the plant I held for him, a black substance he called mulching."

For Iowa soil is black and rich and beautiful. Yet the changing browns in the soil here are beautiful, too, and must be as full of good for those who put their faith and work into it.

Now don't form the opinion that I live in some kind of Utopia if your idea of Utopia is a place where there is no work to do, no problems, a place of self gratification , for this is just the opposite. On any farm there is work and trouble. (Nor do I know of any place where there is not.) I admit that the trouble with farm life is too much work and too little money.  That  condition, too, exists in town.

There has been the time when even I, loving farm life as I do, thought spring, for the farmer, signified hope; summer, work; fall, hopes blasted; and winter a time to be existed through to meet and begin again the perplexing circle. While I admit the need of money and the right of the want of it, I could meet a meagre harvest now with clearer vision, conscious of my spiritual harvest. Then, too, recent days have taught me that plenty of town people are poorly paid for their labor.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 8; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

The sound of the hammer and saw came to my ear the other day when I drove into the yard from town. Walking down through the wet grass, following the sound I came to the hog house. Even before I got there I heard them laughing and talking. Putting my head through the small window I found them, father and son, making a pen for a sow and her new babies. They immediately became eager that I should know how the room was to be apportioned, and began explaining. I hardly heard them for I could not help thinking, as I watched them, that they were having as much fun, or more, than if they were playing golf together.

And how I enjoy our only daughter! Singing as she makes cookies, swearing me to secrecy as she concocts some delicacy with which to surprise the boys, asking me riddles as we make the beds! "I never knew," once she looked up from her dusting to exclaim, "how much work there was just keeping a house clean." I am glad that she has this opportunity to learn. That opportunity was available in town, I know, but there it was such a tug to keep her with me against the enticements that her friends offered.

As to our neighbors! We have been invited places. "And we really must go and get acquainted," we keep insisting. Yet when evening comes--no, not because we are too tired, but because we are too deliciously content to stay at home--we resolve to go next time. So we sink into deep chairs around our own fireside. While I read Heidi, or one of the Alcott books, to the whole family, my youngest son and daughter, squatted before the fire, sew on the family buttons. Only the crackle of hemlock breaks into the story, or the sudden excitement caused by the rescue of a spark that has jumped over the fire screen.

Perhaps this is selfish. I only know I'm jealously eager for an opportunity, for a little while, to get acquainted with my family. The pity is to me that so many parents are unaware of the fun they can have with--or give to--their children just in companionship.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 7; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

Helping Dad feed the calves in the warm coziness of the barn, helping mother take a biddy off the nest with her new chicks, their eyes eager, their tongues busy with questions; pitching down hay for the cows all by their "lonesome"; learning the worth of expert workmanship in no matter how small a task; to me such lessons in kindness, in care of something beside themselves that are available every hour of every day on a farm are invaluable.

When they will play there is the most helpful play. Picking wild flowers, playing school on the grey rocks, building dams in the brook, making maple syrup and trying to sell it! They made a raft, too, from which Bud slipped into the pond. He can not swim, but he caught hold of the edge of the raft and pulled himself to safety.

Then the bag swing! I stood watching my oldest boy fasten it to the highest peak in the barn. He stood on a ladder that stood on a plank supported by his father's shoulder and a six by six, the top of it braced against a rafter. It looked so precarious.

"Mercy!" I protested. "What if it should slip!"

"Then it's good-bye me, he laughed, yanking a knot in the rope.

Yet somehow it's not scars to their bodies I have ever feared, if only I can keep their minds clear!

As I finished up the kitchen work that night I could see them, through the wide door of the lighted barn, swinging. Their happy voices came to me through the warm night. They swept me back to the days when I myself had leaped from the leafy branches of a tree to such a swing. Stuffing the dishpan out of sight I went out to them.

"Let me try once."

They looked quite shocked for a moment; then quickly grew eager.

"Yes, let mother swing. Get off and let mother try. F'r gosh sakes, Bud, get off the swing, I said."

I stood on the ladder a long time, bag in hand.

"Go on mother, go on."

And, finally--

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 6; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

The other day, looking out of my upstairs window, I saw my second son and his friend over by the shop, both working most diligently. So intent were they upon their work that they jumped when I asked, "What now, boys?" and held out the gingerbread.

That gingerbread got scant attention for a few moments, as the boys eagerly told me that they were doing; making an "A" coop to be ready for a new hatching of chickens. They explained every inch of that coop to me, their eyes agleam as if they were telling me of the most exciting movie.

"But I thought you had gone to a scout meeting," I said.

"We did. But we hurried home--"

Hurried home from scout meeting to work on a chicken coop! When I left them they went back to saw and hammer, letting the dog gobble up their gingerbread. (It was good bread, too.) But I carried a thrill in my heart. Don't you see? Just the thing I wanted! Making play of their work, using their surplus energy constructively.

On the way to the house I saw my oldest son,--or could he be mine, this brawny blond, as tall as I--astride a load of dirt, driving a lovely team. In undershirt, he wore a most disreputable looking hat, and there were big patches on his trousers. But the gleam in his face as he managed those horses put another thrill in my heart, and when he saw me he let out a wild whoop and flung his hat into the air. Just moving a pile of dirt from one place to another, but don't you see? More than our cows and our pigs we were growing manhood.

I paused on the porch before going in. Far across the pond, on the opposite hillside, I saw my husband, running the tractor. Behind it were fastened the disk and the harrow. Over and over the plowing he went, changing, as he went, the color of the ground behind him--as when one rubs for hand over velvet--from a dry brown to a wet darkness; circling the green oasis that is the bottomless well, trying to free the land of what, in Iowa, we call quack grass.

"See the man working," one might have exclaimed. I, smiling in my heart, thought, "See the man playing." For I knew he felt exactly as my children felt on Christmas morning as they went round and round the dining room table and under it, pulling a train of "choo-choo" cars by a string, with the added joy of accomplishment.

Sitting behind him on the harrow I knew were our youngest son and daughter. They were helping, too, holding the harrow teeth in the ground with their weight--but, my! That fun they were having!

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 5; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

We never dreamed of Massachusetts. Yet here we are, I on my mountain top--one that is broad enough, however, that our cows are in no danger of being part of a landslide--and he, rebuilding a run down farm. Not his own, but he's planning buildings, studying fertilizers, going cautiously, challenging both brawn and wits, that these New England hills give back their best to us.

It seems like something I've always been waiting for, this country. From the moment I wound up the mountain to my home, the far awayness of everything, the sleepiness, made me wonder if this might not have been the original habitat of Old Rip, instead of the Catskills. If these New Englanders could go to Iowa, they might return and see their land with new eyes. Not that Iowa is not beautiful, with her broad black acres criss-crossed with baby corn as pie crust used to stripe my mother's cranberry pies; with young oats covering the earth like a velvet green carpet.

Yet the broad stern acres seem to challenge one. Here the land--not the people, for no people could be kindlier than Iowans--seem friendlier. Beauty is so riotous. It lures one away from work. It seems to say, "Relax, we will take care of you--"

Still, how a living can be wrung from these rocks I have yet to learn. As I coast down the mountain these homes that crowd close to the pavement mystify me. I want to go inside, know the people. In Iowa I did not feel so about the homes I passed. There, I knew the spirit. Here I have yet to learn it.

Skeptics may wonder if the realization of my dream equals the dream itself. I only repeat:  Life is one thrill after another. My youngest son leaping down the garden path, arms and legs at all angles, as he goes each early morning, to feed his baby chicks; my husband and sons surveying in the pasture, or the sound of their voices coming to my opened window  as they work in the garden below me; the whole family gathered around "Dad" by the stove as he tries to feed warm milk, with a spoon, to a chilled baby pig, each child jealously eager to do his bit, hold a spoon, a cup--! Farming is such a family affair, and as such, it is the source of my thrills.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 4; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

We began talking--if we'd ever stopped it--of getting back on a farm. He hunted for farms that were for rent. Once he took me to see "a good opportunity." It meant our oldest boy driving twenty miles to high school every day, or boarding in town and I was not moving to a farm to leave the boys behind me. I wanted them where they could be under the wing of real fathership. I vetoed that.

Nor was he sure that he wanted to make the break. Were he alone he would have been carried back to a farm as surely as drift wood is carried to shore. But he hated to plunge us into uncertainty. Farm conditions--well, you've heard of them. And we did have an income--which might as well have been called an outgo.

As for myself, I felt this way:  Were I set down in the middle of a great city with him, where he must earn his living with his head, I fear our living would be of the meagerest. Were we shipwrecked on a desert island it would not be long, I am sure, until we were living in ease, and such luxury as the island afforded, so great is his resourcefulness when put up against difficulties of the soil.

Yet we let that spring pass, and the summer--

But in the fall--he'd been secretary for our county fair for many years--when I saw how that fair gripped him! He worked with farm people again, grappled with farm problems. Overnight he became different. He worked sixteen hours of every day, or more, without in the least wearying. His elasticity returned. And happy!

"That settles it," I insisted, watching him "cease to live" after the fair. "Next spring we go on a farm. We've got to manage it."

He wrote letters while I prayed that some way would be found for him to do the work he loved to do. Which did the work? Both, perhaps, for God helps them that help themselves.

It has always been a dream of his to rebuild a run down farm, even when we lived on one of Iowa's most modern farms. For a long time he looked away from Iowa's high priced farms to the deserted farms of the East. Grazing beef in New York, or raising hogs in the South. As for me, of all farming countries, Norway or Sweden--where they tie their cows to a tree to keep them from falling out of their pastures--has appealed to me. Farming in the mountains!

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 3; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

My husband was not happy in town. He took an insurance adjustor—a dandyfied looking personage who winced at the sight of a hog lot—into the country one day to settle a lightning loss.

“Lord!” ejaculated the immaculate one, trying, unsuccessfully, to pick his way through mush to the busy farmer. “If there's one thing I hate about the insurance business it's wading through manure.”

I can imagine my better half as he laughed at that. “That's what I like about my job. If it weren't for this occasional wading through manure I'd quit the insurance business tomorrow.

Inelegant as that remark may be, I like it. It revealed so plainly that his contact with farmers, while he sold insurance, was his only freedom. “That man ought to be back on the farm,” I assured myself for about the millionth time, as he repeated the story.

I have never known so perfect an example of resistlessness as my husband is. He takes each day as it comes and does the very best he can with it. He never gets angry, nor too discouraged to smile. After twenty years of living with him I marvel more and more at his sane, clear way of looking at life.

But he was different in town than he ever had been in the country. His vibrancy seemed to have gone out of him. He had to hound himself to his work. He was always coming home from his business trips into the country with “Saw a dandy farm today a fellow could fix up with a little money.” The only time he seemed his real self was when he fussed with the chickens he insisted on keeping, or worked in the garden.

“Funny,” he'd say, as he packed down the dirt—oh, so tenderly—around the tomato plants as I handed them to him, “how so many fellows want white collar jobs while I've got to work with my hands.”

Never could any one make a vegetable garden a spot of beauty as he did; smooth black ground, long even rows of growing green, all closed in with vines and rose trellises. How our gardens flourished!

The more I thought about it the less I could bear to have this uncommon man, the roots of whose heart went deep into the soil, so what common men were doing—struggling for a mere living—while I grew more and more certain that by doing the thing he loved to do the living would come.




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BACK ON THE FARM; part 2; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

"Mother, where can I go, where can I play, what can I do?" Such questions pommeled us continually in town. Small wonder. We lived bang up against a dusty highway, packed tight between two houses, one containing an old couple, the other a lonely old man. Luckily, the old man was deaf. The couple were not. They had raised one family of boys on a farm and were entitled to quiet. But how could I keep it so? Our sandpile, where the children of the neighborhood gathered, was under their dining room window. One day the children were having a hilarious time--in the hammock. Mrs. G--- complained. I did not blame her. Mercy, I wanted quiet myself. But what could I do about it with--well, about twenty children. I sent them to the other side of the house--the deaf side--but there was nothing to do there. A neighbor farther on had an apple tree, though. Soon she called me on the telephone, most righteously indignant: "You're children are in my apple tree, eating all my apples."

So that's where the gang had gone. I called them home. I did not scold. Children have to do something ; the blame is to grownups who don't provide the right something. I simply explained; I was always having to explain. Perhaps I took all the children into the house to make cookies; in times of stress I often did that.

But I did some hard thinking, too; perhaps praying.

"Dear God, put us back on the farm where the children can make all the noise that they want to, and eat all the green apples."

Better a stomach ache than a bruised mind.

If the children were not under my feet I worried about whom they might be annoying. I tried to keep them busy. I hunted paper jobs, and helped them deliver the papers. I pestered my friends: "Haven't you a lawn for a good boy to mow?" So few wanted to bother with boys; they wanted men to do their mowing.

Reading of the wildness of present day youth I knew it would floor me if my children did likewise. That all young people were wild I did not believe, nor would I let mine be--if possible.

I have never wanted my children to "have it easy." The hardening process of life is as necessary to a child's soul as work is to his body. I wanted to teach my children to do what they did not like to do, cheerfully. (A thing, alas, it took their mother long to learn.) I wanted to teach them the dignity of labor and the great truth--so scorned by this age--that they can never be truly happy outside of their work. In no place, that I knew of, could I better teach these things than on a farm.

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BACK ON THE FARM; part 1; By A Farm Woman Who Went Back; 1930

Yes, after five years in town we are back on the farm. And how glad to get back! What thrills we are getting. Those minute particles of happiness that all the world is seeking elsewhere we are finding at our farm home, one after another.

If that is the way we feel about a farm one might wonder why we ever left in the first place. The only reason seems to be that necessity demanded it. Like many other farmers, we bought too much land when the war boosted farm prices dropped below normal. Yet I value those five hard years in town. In no other way could I have acquired so true a sense of values; could I have seen how much better off than the average town family is the average farm family.

Why did we move back? You've heard this: "The farmer gets his living, and that's about all." Well, that is why we moved back. We wanted that living, rather than the one that was ours in town.

We were "getting no place" in town. Studying the situations of friends who were blessed with more material possessions, with larger salaries than we were, we decided that they were getting no place either. To be sure, they should have arrived somewhere for they were going, going, going, all the time; dances, parties, conventions, motor trips. (People on a farm are so tied down; you've heard that, too.) No doubt they considered that they got a better living than the average farmer, but what a price they paid of it! Letting the things that they wanted to do pass them by; making contracts they did not care for; worrying, hurrying, gathering to them nothing worthwhile, though they thought they were living. They saved no money, either; instead debts madly pursued them.

Even could we have afforded it, that was not the kind of living we wanted. We wanted soil that would bloom at our touch, an outdoors where our children could make all the noise that they wanted to, a home where the evenings would not find us scattered: Father in his office , Mother at Women's Club, the children at the movies. And farming is such a together job! Don't you think so?
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