The Farm

Yesterday would have been my Grandma Anderson's birthday, though she died when I was nine.  She is the one whose picture I pass and then look at my face in the mirror and think, "Oh, Grandma came to visit!"  I am also her size and shape and she had breast cancer like I did, so I identify with her a lot.

She and my grandpa had a farm in Valley Falls, Kansas and every summer from the time I was three till she died my sisters and I spent the whole summer there.  My mom took us there the day after school was out and picked us up Labor Day week-end. My grandma must have been a saint!

There were cows and chickens and horses. There were pigs in a fenced in area across the driveway that had a mulberry tree right in the middle.  If you ran really fast you could get to the mulberry tree, climb up it before the pigs saw you, and eat mulberries till your face and hands were purple. The pigs only got the ones that dropped to the ground. Sometimes Grandma asked if I had gone there and I denied it but somehow she always knew.

One of the years we went there Valley Falls, maybe all of Kansas, I'm not sure, held their Centennial celebration. Grandma made us all special outfits, with the extremely politically incorrect name of Squaw Dresses, and bonnets like the settlers wore that we could wear to the festivities in town. She had a treadle sewing machine and even though we weren't allowed to wear shorts back in St. Louis, she made shorts and sleeveless tops for us to wear in the devilish heat. Air conditioning wasn't even heard of then, at least not in people's houses.

We had an ingenious way to deal with the heat sometimes.  If you shut yourself (and your sisters) into the outhouse and stayed till the heat in there was so off the chart that one of you was about to faint, then when you opened the door and came out, the contrast was so great that you were fooled into thinking it felt almost cool outside. Perhaps that is where some of my missing brains cells went.

The barn had a hayloft and my sisters, much more adventurous than I, would climb up the ladder and jump down into the wagon load of hay that was just under the loft.  I was too scared to jump but my sister, Arleta, the daredevil of us all, climbed clear to the peak of the huge barn,---on the outside!---straddled it and sat up there waving to the rest of us.  Grandma almost had a heart attack when she saw her, of course.  To this day I don't know how she got down without killing herself, but she did and lived to torment me (and me her) another day.

The horses were really work horses so they didn't get ridden much, but we often had to go out to the pasture and bring the cows back to the barn in the evening, so instead of riding a horse, I rode my black and white cow. She was named Patty, after me, when she was born and I considered her mine. Fortunately they were milk cows not beef cows.  I don't think I could have handled eating anybody that I knew it's name.

We roamed those eighty acres and even onto neighboring farms from morning till night sometimes, just the three of us.  We didn't even have cell phones to check in, can you imagine? More dangerous than that, the quintessential memory of the farm, the first that comes to mind whenever we think of that time, is the sound of the horn on my Grandpa's 1952 Ford every night when he came home from his job in Topeka.  He would  start honking when he turned the corner at the neighbor's wheat field and we would run as far as we could down the gravel road to meet him.  Then we jumped up onto the car and rode all the way home on the hood.  I held onto the chrome hood ornament but my sisters road free-hand, the wind blowing in our faces.  And lived to tell about it.

Taken together I guess it was only a total of about eighteen months of my childhood but it is the time I remember clearest and most fondly. A time of adventure and freedom and joyful exploration. Thanks, Grandma.  Happy Birthday.