Sunday Sweetheart + More Pioneer Beginnings

I must tell you a cute story. It is a current story but I must share it with you all. There is a lady in our ward who is probably in her late 80's. She has black hair (with help from her hair dresser, I'm sure), she gets around very well and still lives in her own home. I don't know how long her husband has been dead--actually, I don't know that he is dead. He never comes to Church so I'm assuming he is no longer with us. I have to find out what her name is. This is ridiculous. Anyway, she dresses very stylishly. When I say stylishly, I mean stylish for an older lady. None of this business of trying to look like she's 30. She wears nice suits in beautiful colors. Last Sunday she was wearing a purple suit and it was gorgeous. The color was terrific on her. She is very slender and just a darling lady.

Now the reason I'm telling you about her is this: When this lovely lady leaves Sacrament meeting to go to Sunday School she walks past where Grandpa and I always sit (unless I'm playing the organ for Church, or the piano for Choir or to accompany someone). She always stops, grabs Grandpa's hand, and reaches over to give him a kiss on his forehead. Then she turns to me, if I'm by him, and says, "He is my Sunday Sweetheart." If I'm not there, she tells him: "You are my Sunday Sweetheart." She squeezes his hand a little and then she is off to Sunday School class. Is that the cutest or what?

Now, back to the Pioneer era of my life.

Since I wrote last, I've been thinking more about the size of the two-room house where I was born. I'm thinking it was possibly a little larger than I told you. The rooms could possibly have been 15' x 15' each, so the overall total could have been 15' x 30'----that's 450 square feet and I was the seventh child. Porter had died but there were eight of us living there. No wonder Daddy felt compelled to add on some extra rooms, small though they were. Let's say the addition was 10' wide and the over-all length was 30'---that is an additional 300 square feet for a total of 750 square feet for eight people. I don't know how the older kids felt about the small space, but it was all I knew and that's just the way it was. I never remember wishing it were bigger. Good grief, the Navajos on the nearby reservation lived in hogans that were much smaller than our house and some of them had pretty good sized families. Often they had grandparents living in their hogan with them. And we have all read and heard horror stories about people in the third-world countries who have two or three families living in spaces much smaller than then home where I was raised. I was always grateful to have a roof over my head, food in my stomach and clothes on my back. And the house was always warm, during the day, in the winter.

Of course, when the fire went out, the house got cold. The bedrooms were never heated so the beds were COLD. We had a solution for that. We put bricks or smooth rocks (about the size of the bricks) in the oven to get hot, then we wrapped them in towels or old denim, or some such material, then we'd put them in our beds about 20 to 30 minutes before we expected to be getting into bed and lo! our beds were nice and warm. However, when I was small I was very skinny (yes, I really was) and before morning the bricks or rocks would cool off and my skinny little legs were too small to keep the bed warm so I'd have to sleep the last half of the night in the fetal position to stay warm.

In the mornings, I'd get out of bed and run out to the living room or kitchen where there was a stove with fire in it and dress by the stove. My dad was usually the fire builder. He'd always get up about 5:00 a.m. to make the fires. In the winter it didn't get light enough to go out to do the chores for a couple of hours after he had the fires built, so he would pull a chair up close to the stove (it took a while for the heat to spread around the room) and read the Scriptures, mostly. Sometimes he read his farm magazines but he really liked to read the Scriptures. As soon as it began to get light, he'd head out the door to do chores. What were his chores? Well, let's see. We always had at least one cow that had to be milked. And of course, the cows needed to be fed. Then he'd chop wood so the woodbox would be full for the day. He'd bring in coal (when we had coal) so mom wouldn't have to go carry it in. Also, all the kids had chores as we got old enough to do them. My mom and dad always believed in starting their kids when they were young. I remember when I was very young, going to the wood pile to pick up the chips that daddy created when he chopped the wood. We used them to start the fires in the mornings so we picked up chips every day. We also fed the chickens at a very young age, although daddy carefully oversaw things to be sure they were done correctly. We almost always had a pig and the pig liked to eat, as well.

I need to amend things just a little. Daddy didn't always read. Sometimes he fixed breakfast for the family. No, he didn't get the cornflakes out. We ate big breakfasts when I lived in my parent's home. We ate fairly good lunches and light suppers. (More about that later.) Oh my goodness, I loved it when my dad cooked breakfast. If he had recently killed a beef, or a pig, or a lamb, he liked to cut off some steaks and bring them in to cook. He'd make baking powder biscuits that were light and airy and wonderfully delicious. Of course, we always had homemade butter to spread on them or how about some milk gravy made from the meat drippings? We'd eat steak, pork chops or lamb chops with biscuits and gravy. While daddy was cooking up this really good breakfast, mom would come into the kitchen and make the "mush."
For those of you who do not know what mush is--we call it cereal now. She always insisted that we have hot cereal for breakfast. Sometimes she'd cook oatmeal (regular, not quick cooking)
or cracked wheat, or germade (farina). I loved them all. Still do. Once in a while, she'd make cornmeal mush. I liked that, too. And then, occasionally, if we had run low on some of the other cereals, she'd make mush out of whole wheat flour. I knew she didn't like to make whole wheat flour mush very often because it was so hard to get out all the lumps and it took longer to cook.
But, I didn't mind. I liked it a lot. And, my dad cured his own ham and bacon. It took quite a while to get it to his satisfaction but it was worth the wait. Sometimes we had ham and eggs or bacon and eggs (and mush) for breakfast and daddy made baking powder biscuits and gravy with the ham or bacon. I guess what I'm trying to say is: I loved those big breakfasts. It seems to be a good idea to eat large breakfasts and small suppers. I was skinny until I changed the plan and began living like other people who ate little or nothing for breakfast and big suppers.
The sad thing is that I didn't do that for my family. I loved the big breakfasts but didn't take the time to make them. Of course, we didn't live on a "farm" and the pace was a little less relaxed when we were raising our kids. Sorry about that!

It occurs to me that you may be wondering how we were able to preserve those hams and bacon that my dad made. Well, flour sacks were always fabric in those days (never paper) so daddy would wrap the hams and bacon in several layers of flour sacks and then he'd climb the ladder on the north side of the house and hang those hams and bacon under the eaves. That was the coolest place there was. It seemed to work. No one ever died from eating his ham or bacon.

I got off in a direction I hadn't really intended for this installment. Originally, I had intended to tell you what life is like with no electricity, refrigerator, sink, running hot water, bathrooms, telephones, computers, carpet, double-paned windows, air conditioning, etc., etc. I can do that at a later time. There is so much more, as well. How I grew up is why I'm me and it has been a fantastic journey. I was rarely unhappy as a child--or at any time of my life. I've always thought it better to be positive and cheerful and have tried to maintain those attributes in my personality. I'm excited to be sharing this with all of you and I've loved your responses to my efforts.

One last thing before I sign off tonight: September birthdays: Taylor, 16, Sept. 10th; James, (how old are you?), Sept. 15th;Eric, 4, Sept. 25th; Davey (how old are you, 23?), Sept. 26th; Kammie, 18?, Sept. 26th. October birthdays: Heidi (I know how old you are but I won't mention it), Oct. 3rd: Zac, 19, Oct. 13:
Kacie, (are you 21?) Oct. 26. Happy Birthday to all of you. I love you more than I can ever say. You are all more wonderful than I have a right to expect and I'm proud of you.

Goodnight for now. It's been fun and it's still only the beginning.

I love you all.