My First Home - 1925 - 1936

My first Home
    I remember more about how we lived in my first home than the appearance of the house.  My first recollection is sitting on a chair in the kitchen with my feet in a pan of hot water.  I had stepped on a nail embedded in a board.  My sister Dorothy was soaking my feet in hot water, then she proceeded to pour kerosene into the open wound.  Kerosene was used as a germ killer in my childhood.

    The next thing I remember is getting a spanking from my Father.  I had watched my Mother break an egg and pour the egg back and forth between the two shells of the egg.  We had chickens on the farm and I had gone down to the chicken house and cracked several eggs and mixed them up like my Mother did.  I think I did it once and received a scolding.  The second time I broke the eggs I was spanked.  That was the last time I tried breaking eggs.

    One of the fun experiences I had as a child was sneaking off to a small slough close to the road.  I very carefully removed my clothing, hung them on a willow tree and jumped up and down in the cold murky water.  I never did get my hair wet or get caught in the act.

    I had 2 brothers, Donald was 4 years older and Larry was 8 years older than I.  My brothers were experimenting with smoking corn silks one day.  They would send me to the kitchen to get matches and I would bring the matches back outside to the summer kitchen.  My Mother must have been taking a nap.  We didn’t get caught messing with the matches either.

    The farm we lived on the first 8 years of my life contained 80 acres.  I had the run of the farm along with my dog Cindy.  In the summer time I checked out the robin who had built her nest in a worn out grain binder.  I watched the baby Robins grow to large for the nest and mama taught them to fly.  One day I found a pheasant nest with baby pheasants in it.  The Mother pheasant chased me, but I picked up the baby birds in my skirt and took them to the house.  My Mother put the baby birds with a sitting hen and she raised them.  In the fall the pheasants flew away to the cedar trees.

    When I reached the ripe old age of 6, my job was to go after the mail.  The mail box was ½ mile from the house.  Russell the neighbor boy would meet me at the road and we walked and talked all the way to the mail box and back.  In later years I told my sister Dorothy about going to the mail box with Russell.   He was the youngest in a family of eight children.  Only two ever married as their Father was very controlling and the children were shy.  In High School Russell would not visit with the other students.  My sis was surprised that Russell talked to me.

    We didn’t have much money or material things as my childhood was in the middle of the great depression.  However we always had good shoes and good food to eat.  My Mother made my dresses and snow suits.  My Uncle Ernie was a depot agent and he would send my Mother clothing and she would remake clothing for us.

    In 1936 we had a winter with a lot of snow.  Donald would break the waist deep snow so that we could go to school.  Sometimes we skied with wooden skies that fit over our overshoes.  My sister Daisy who was 17 years old contacted pneumonia that winter and laid in bed for 6 weeks with a 104 temperature.  The Doctor came to the house every day and cupped her on the back to break up the congestion.  He lived in a small town 5 miles from us and because of the deep snow used a horse and sleigh to get to the farms.  That same winter my brother Larry and a neighbor boy drove a single tree sleigh to the High School in Geneva that was3 miles from the farm.  They put the horse in the livery stable until school was dismissed.  The High School had one teacher and the students were there until their senior year.  The last year of High School was spent in a larger school at Ellendale which had about 30 students in each class.

    My Father lost the farm in 1936 and we moved to a rent farm about 10 miles from us.  The neighbors came with their horses and sleds and moved us.  The snow was so deep in March that they had to shovel out one road for almost half a mile.  This finishes a few of my  stories  about my first home.