My Mother's Parents

My mother's father was born on the same farm where I visited him much later, although in a house that had been torn down long before I was born. (I wondered why there were lilac bushes in a corner of the small pasture just west of the house I knew and they told me that was where the original house had stood. They said that the homestead deed was signed by President Abraham Lincoln, but I never saw it.) I am rather fuzzy on the details, but he was very small (3?) when his mother died. His father remarried a woman who already had at least one child, a girl, and was wealthy.

She had also taken in a little girl to raise, for what reason I do not know. These little girls grew up to be my mother's Aunt Vivian and Aunt Mabel. Aunt Vivian was her biological daughter and Aunt Mabel was the adopted one, but they were inseparable all their lives. They went to beauty school together and had a salon together and lived together, even after Aunt Vivian married Uncle Mac. We visited the three of them a couple of times after they retired to Seal Beach, CA in one of those communities where you have to be at least 55 or 60 to live there. Aunt Vivian and Uncle Mac never had any children and traveled a lot all over the country and to Canada and Mexico. I do not know whether Aunt Mabel accompanied them on their travels. I do know that Aunt Vivian's favorite souvenir was a model horse and she collected many types made of many materials. When she died, she left them to me because she knew I also collected model horses.

My mother told me that this stepmother was not kind to either Aunt Mabel or my grandfather, Elwin Royal Thompson. Vivian was her own daughter and no one better forget it. Still, he survived and inherited the farm from his father. Roy, as he was always known, did not marry until he was in his late forties and his wife was older than the usual also. They did have time to have Robert, William and Dorothy, my mother.

On the farm Roy, like most farmers in the region, raised corn, wheat, soybeans, alfalfa, cows, pigs, chickens and sheep. I have many memories of summer mornings spent weeding and hoeing the soybeans. He did use a tractor-pulled cultivator to root out the weeds between the rows, but removing the ones between the plants had to be done by hand. This was hot, back-breaking work and if there were grandchildren available, they did it.

Still, my memories of the farm are mostly wonderful. We could help with the chores of feeding the animals. Pigs are interesting, but dangerous. Sheep are not as interesting because they are so fearful, but they are not dangerous, except for the rams. Usually, there was not a ram on the farm, but Grampa would rent one when needed. Once I went out to the pasture before anyone else was about and discovered the hard way that Grampa had rented a ram. I was able to run fast enough to dive under the fence just before he caught me. My Uncle Bob also had a farm, outside Clark's Grove, maybe fifteen miles away. They worked together a lot. Uncle Bob's was mostly a dairy farm, though he also kept a few pigs. He would bring his heifers (grown cows that had not yet had a calf, though they might be pregnant) to pasture on Grampa's fields. We had a lot of fun with them, but their spines were very sharp for riding! Grampa always had mints in his pockets and would feed them to all the animals, including grandchildren. I loved the way the barn was cool and dim and smelled of hay and animals. You could be alone in the hayloft and lie on the hay and play with kittens or daydream or make up games with your cousins. There was a stream running through the farm and many trees, especially oaks because they produce acorns for the pigs. There were crabapple trees and a huge garden, but that was Ida's territory.

Ida Marie(?) Nelson married rather late in life, as I said above. She was very hard-working, rising every morning, except Sundays, at four or five to bake something before breakfast. There were always cookies, cakes, pies, etc., etc., etc. in the pantry. The pantry was like a closet opening off the kitchen. There was a door, but it was almost always open. Her apron hung on the back of the door and she put it on early in the morning and did not take it off until she went to bed, unless she went to town. Then she not only removed the apron, she put on a nicer dress and shoes and a hat. We had to change clothes to go to town, too. I especially liked to go to the meat locker place in town where they kept the beef and pork from their animals they had butchered. When you walked into the back room, you could see your breath, even if it was 90 degrees outside. It was a disappointment when they bought their own chest freezer to sit on the enclosed back porch.

Ida was well known in the area for her gardens, both vegetable and flower. For a time, she was president of the Garden Club and often won prizes at the fairs for both flowers and produce. Her vegetable garden was about the size of ours on Shulsen Lane and her flower garden almost as big. She did not have fruit trees, but her berry patches, straw- and raspberry, were huge. One of my favorite things in my life was eating red and black raspberries still warm from the sun with home-skimmed cream over them. (That cream had to be spooned on; it was thick like ice cream.) People would drive out from town to buy eggs and berries and other produce from her. In the early fifties, before they had the vaccine and even before they figured out how polio is tranmitted, my sisters and I were taken to the farm as soon as school let out, (because most cases were diagnosed in the summer) to try to keep us from coming into contact with anyone who might give it to us. So whenever we saw the dust of a car on the gravel road from town, we would watch to see whether it would turn up the half-mile drive to the house. If it did, we had to run into the house and just watch from an upstairs window to see who had come. If it was a stranger, we stayed there. If it was family, we could come down.

Ida's house was spotless, but I have no memories of her actually cleaning it. I remember her only in the kitchen or gardens. She did go into the front room every afternoon when the dinner dishes were done to take a nap in her big chair. That hour was almost sacred and woe be unto any grandchild who disturbed it! There were violets in a big rack in front of the west window in the front room and a huge spider plant over the table in the kitchen. Normally, no one sat on the window side of that table, but when we visited, we children did and that plant's baby "spiders" would tickle our necks.

This is getting too long already. Remind me to tell about how Ida cooked on a wood-burning stove and the chicks in the brooder shed and Grampa's sheepdog and . . . and . . . and . . .