The Wildwood: November 2011

Sunday, November 13, 2011

When I think of my Grandparents

I think of the farm they lived on when we were young children in the 1950's

My cousins all thought that was a big house when we were kids in the 1950's. Funny how when you are an adult you realize how small it really was.

We used to like to sleep out on the upstairs sleeping porch in the summertime and you could see all across the pasture and to the barns.

Grandma and Grandpa milked and we used to like to separate the milk from the cream in the basement. I still remember that old separator, the bench it sat on was still in the basement room along with the dank smell that only an old basement has in 1993. We also had to pump water from a well to carry into the house. It had no running water, so that meant no indoor toilet. I would just die if I had to live like that now. You forget how spoiled we are now and how much has changed over that last 50 years.

This is also the house that the Butman's were building, friends of my grandparents, when my Mom was born in August 1923. It was 110 degrees and they took the new baby over with them to see the house. They say Mr. Butman saw them drive up and he stepped right out through the open porch window to get to hold my mom, the newborn, and the story was it was so hot they made homemade ice cream and fed the new baby. Maybe that is why my mom loves ice cream to this day 88 + years later.

This is my big brother who loved that farm and didn't ever want to go anywhere but to Grandma's!

This is also where I learned to love horses. This was Dusty and he was the best horse and was great with the kids. My brother loved that horse. It belonged to my uncle and we were all devistated when Dusty ate some loco weed and died.

The farm was for sale in this photo in about 1993, part of a large parcel broken up into smaller acreages, it had been bought in 1962 by a family, then sold again and for 30 years or so you couldn't even drive down the road because of a padlocked gate until this sale.

This is a photo of my mom and I in front of the barn door taken some 40 years after my Grandparents left the farm to move to town.

When I walked into the barn all the memories of that barn and my childhood memories of it came to me and transported me back to when I was about 5 years old and the smell was exactly the same as I remembered....way back then. I have been in lots of barns over the years but this one smelled different and the same as it did the last time I smelled it in 1962.....

It brought tears to my eyes and a overwhelming feeling of the loss of my grandparents and my cousins as we were as kids playing together gathering up eggs and running with the turkeys my Grandma used to raise. Thinking of my cousin Kathy going to get eggs from under a hen that had other ideas, chasing her, pecking her legs, and me laughing mercilessly! We were all together then and happy as little larks, now my grandparents are gone and my cousins are scattered to the wind all over the country.... Time changes,
people pass on, but the memories are always there.