It was kind of a shock to go to the file of my mother's "Random Recollections" last week and realize that they were all used. I had thought that there was at least one more. That is why I did not post anything; I had nothing composed in my head ready. So, I guess it is time to tell about my grandfather and his animals.

Most people know the "tune" to "Here, kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty!" It is a sustained "here" on a relatively high pitch, followed by, usually, four quick "kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty" on a lower pitch. The similar whistle for a dog of four quick lower-pitch tones followed by a two-pitch rising longer tone is known the world over. (I even heard it on a TV program about the dogs of the primitive New Guinea bush people. One of the aboriginal men used it to call his dog.) Those are the only animal calls most people know nowadays. But my grandfather knew others and, I suspect, most other farmers of his day did, also.

Whenever most people appeared in the fields and pastures, any livestock there would run away from them. But my Grampa Thompson could just stand at the gate to the pasture and call, "Shee-eep! Shee-eep! Shee-eep!" on a rising inflection and his sheep would come running to him as fast as they could. (That could be scary to a small child standing next to him.) The hogs would come to "Soo-ey! Pig-pig-pig-pig!" The "soo" syllable was on a middle pitch with the "-ey" much higher and the "pig-pig-pig-pig" the lowest. And the cattle came to "Hey, boss! Hey, boss! Hey, boss!" with the "hey" very high and the "boss" much lower pitched. I suspect that he also had a call for his horses, but they were gone before I could learn it. Perhaps he just called them by their names, but there might have been a traditional horse call, too.

The hog and cow calls are related to their Latin names (suis and bos) and I believe they have been in use at least since Roman times. It is amazing to think of the generations of shepherds and cowherds using the same "tunes" to communicate with their flocks and herds for thousands of years. Probably there were animal calls even before there was Roman language, too.

By the way, my grandfather's sheep were often pastured right next to the fence dividing his farm from the Peterson farm to the south. When the Peterson sheep were near that fence, they did not try to come to my grandfather's call; they knew their own shepherd's voice. He might use the same "tune" but it was not the right voice, so they stayed where they were.

Random Recollections IX

10/21/08

IX

My dad always liked the Thompson relatives who mostly lived in and around Albert Lea, but he especially enjoyed contact with his mother’s people who had moved from Albert Lea to Rockford, Iowa and later on, after his mother died, to the Muscatine, Iowa area. His uncle, Earl, lived in Des Moines and was always a welcome guest whenever he would visit. He was a brakeman on the Rock Island Railroad and my dad had always wanted to work on the railroad rather than be a farmer.
After Grandpa Thompson died in 1941 my dad applied to the railroad, but was told he was too old (52). I’m sure he felt good about the fact that he stayed on the farm and helped his dad as he was asked to do, but he never got to do the work he wanted so much to do. He learned to be a good farmer; he was especially good at predicting the weather which is an important aspect of growing and harvesting crops. He was very good to his animals and used work horses until the late 1930’s when he purchased a tractor for field work.

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I plan to do a whole blog on my grandfather's relationship with his animals. It was amazing to me, but probably seemed normal to other farmers. I was fascinated by his tractor, too. It was so very loud--no mufflers on tractors--and open to everything. Often he would invite a grandchild or two to stand by him as he sat on the seat and drove out to the fields. It was exciting, but did not feel safe to me. I know now that it was not at all safe and I would not allow my children to do it, if they had had the opportunity. Still, I survived, didn't I?

Random Recollections VIII

The only time I remember being baby-sat was when I was about ten years old and Mom and Dad were taking a trip to Muscatine, Iowa. It may have been that they were going for a funeral or maybe just a visit with Dad’s mother’s relatives. They sent me across the road to stay with Edmund and Sylvia Nelson and their daughter Ruth. Edmund was one of my mother’s brothers. My brother Bob and some of my cousins called Edmund, “The Bear.” He was not very approachable to say the least. Sylvia was a lovely lady and I knew Ruth from going to school with her even though she was four years older than I. I remember being a little undecided about whether or not I like staying with them for several days and especially the several nights.

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I need to do more research about that branch of the family in Muscatine. I did not know about them before. There is so much I do not know!

Random Recollections VII

I do not know why we went to Mason City, Iowa, but Mom and Dad and I drove down there one sunny day. I either sat on my mother’s lap or on the seat between Mom and Dad. We came to an intersection where, for some reason, Dad couldn’t stop in time and we rear-ended the car in front of us. My head went into the windshield and I got a small cut on the top of my head. I still have a bald spot (scar) on my head where the hair has not grown since the accident!

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I always wondered how she got that little scar. It did not show much, but once in a while her hair blew around enough or something and I knew it was there.

Random Recollections VI

10/01/08

I’m not sure of the season, but I came down with scarlet fever which at that time meant I had to be quarantined, so Dad, Bob and Bill went to stay with Grandpa and Aunty Mabel across the garden and Mom and I had to stay in the little house alone for the six weeks of quarantine.
Everything I played with or used during that time had to be thoroughly disinfected or burned. I had paper workbooks from school that I enjoyed using while we were quarantined and my mother simply defied the rules and did not burn one of them. It was not like her to break the rules, but she knew the book was important to me so she saved it and it is still in my possession!

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I am not sure where to look for that book, but I hope we come across it when we sort the rest of her stuff. Do you know how scarlet fever is spread? I don't, but maybe I will research it. I wonder whether that quarantine was effective.

Random Recollections V

09/24/08

V

"During my early grade school years and before, the teacher at our little country school lived during the week with Grandpa and Aunty Mabel.
I suppose because of having two older brothers I was able to read and write before I was old enough to go to school. I’m sure the school board or somebody with the proper authority must have given consent, because I was allowed to start first grade in the spring of the same year I should have started in the following September. Jerry Flugum had been in grade one all year and they passed me along with him into second grade that fall. I remained a year ahead of other students my age and never thought much about it until I reached high school and wanted to date and go places like my classmates. Sometimes I was told I was too young to keep up with them socially and I would argue that I kept up with them in class and felt I should be allowed to keep up with them socially as well."

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Does that sound like, "I am sixteen years old and just as stubborn as you are"?

Here is more evidence for the foolishness of "lock-step" grades in teaching people. It is what you know and can learn, not how old you are, that matters.

Random Recollections V

Random Recollections V

Random Recollections IV

09/18/08
I was born on January 7, 1929 while a blizzard continued to rage outside the Naeve Hospital in Albert Lea, MN. I have been told that when my mother thought it was time to head for the hospital, she and my dad got in the car and started down the long driveway from the house to the main road one-half mile away. They had made it a little way down the drive but they were soon stuck in a large snowdrift. As good neighbors do, Henry Peterson, who lived up the hill from our house, was out there with a team of horses to pull the car through the drifts and down to the road into town. My parents were able to drive the rest of the way so I could be born in the hospital instead of in the car! The Evening Tribune published on January 7, 1929 ran its biggest headline as follows: “Weather Grips Entire Northwest. Mercury Hits New Levels in all Sections. Little Immediate Relief From Cold Wave. Forecast - Drifted Roads Block Traffic in Some Parts."

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So my mother and I were both born in blizzards! No wonder we're so cool!

They told me my mother was born in the Navy Hospital and I wondered why there was such a thing in Albert Lea, MN. There are many lakes and ponds in the area, but no need for a navy facility. Now I understand: it was the Naeve Hospital.

Random Recollections III

"I remember one year in December when our Christmas tree was up and decorated in the living room of the big house where Grandpa Thompson and Aunty Mabel lived. (If we ever had a Christmas tree in the little house where my family lived until I was about 12, I have no memory of it.) We always spent Christmas Eve at the big house. We would start with oyster stew and then probably have potato salad and cold cuts with pie for dessert. After the table was cleared and the dishes washed and put away, we could gather in the living room to exchange presents. I would usually get to be Santa’s helper in passing out the gifts from under the tree. Aunty Vivian would be the one to read the tag and have me deliver the package.
One year I had really hoped for a pair of skis but there were no packages under the tree that could possibly hold them. After all the presents had been distributed and I didn’t get the skis, I tried to be happy with the gifts I had received. I was then asked if I would go to the kitchen and get something (I don’t remember what) next to the telephone behind the door. Of course, when I got there…there were my skis!
I can remember some of the Flugum (floo-gum) children being at our place shortly before Christmas one year and being invited in to see the tree in the big house. We had electricity as early as 1910 but most of the neighborhood didn’t get it until the REA came through in the 1930’s, so our tree had lights and ornaments all over it and I could tell they were so impressed by the beauty of it all.
When I was growing up our country elementary school was situated on a corner of our farm about ½ mile from our house. During the week the teacher was housed and fed in the big house across the garden from our little house. She taught all eight grades every day besides presiding over both morning and afternoon recess and monitoring the pupils during lunch. In the back part of the room there was a large heating stove which she had to start up in the morning and keep going all day and “bank” for the night.
This was basically a one-room school although there was a small coat room on the front and that was where we would take off our coats (or snowsuits), boots, mittens and scarves and hang them on hooks on the wall.
It was fairly easy to listen in on the lessons going on in the front of the room, so by the time we reached that grade we would have heard the lesson several times and would know the answers. The whole school had anywhere from a dozen to 18 students, some grades were not needed at all and others only had one or two members.
I remember a time when my dad came to pick me up with a team of horses on a big farm sled. A blizzard had been going on all day and he came to get me home safely. He also took Harriett Peterson to her home up the hill from our house. When we were out in cold winter weather in a wagon or sled we would use a cover made out of a horse hide."

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My family also had oyster stew on Christmas Eve (because of my mother) and I miss it. Oh,well, I can't really expect you children to like it just because it means something to me.

Apparently the Thompson family farm was doing very well in the first years of the twentieth century. Not only were they able to afford to run electrical wire out from town, but they also redecorated the whole house around 1914.

At some point there must have been a need for cash, though, because half of the original square mile that was homesteaded was sold to the Petersons. The drive forked just before the spot where the house stood that my mother lived in when she was little and then their drive went down over one of the streams and up the little hill to their house. I would like to include a map of the farm so you could visualize things better, but I don't know how to do that.

I remember seeing the old schoolhouse on the corner where the drive met the road. It had sat empty for years and one time when we arrived, it was gone. It had been moved to form part of a pioneer village somewhere in the area.

Random Recollections II

"Christmas when I was a child was a very exciting time. I remember helping Aunty Mabel bake cookies for the holidays. The main thing was she made a ton of the little pfeffernusse, some of which were rolled in sugar and some left plain. I can remember seeing the baked cookies filling up a washtub. Exactly where she stored them until eaten I’m not sure, and I’m sure she gave away a good many, also. This is a German cookie which she probably remembered from her childhood. My memory is that she was born in Chicago and lived there with her parents until she was 7 or 8 years old when she had to come to live with Aunt Annie and Uncle Louis because she was then an orphan. Aunt Annie and my grandmother, Lizzie, were her mother’s sisters.
The story goes that Aunt Annie seemed to favor Mabel’s sister and was more critical of Mabel. So one day when Grandpa Thompson was visiting over there and Aunt Annie started to pick on Mabel, Grandpa said to her, “I think you should come live at our house.” Whatever discussion there was ended with Mabel taking up residence with Grandma and Grandpa Thompson, Roy and Vivian."

So that explains why Aunt Mabel lived with my grandfather's family when he was growing up. It may not have been much better for Mabel at that house than it had been at her Aunt Annie's. Roy's stepmother favored her own daughter Vivian over him and Mabel. Still, Aunt Vivian was Mabel's firm friend and roommate for the rest of their lives.

I have made some large batches of cookies in my time, but never a washtub full. I think a washtub would hold maybe twenty or twenty-five gallons. That's a lot of cookies!

Random Recollections I

Recently I remembered that several years ago I had asked my mother to record stories from her life, especially her childhood. She was not comfortable doing a voice recording, so she wrote them down and emailed them to me. I found them in a file and will post one each of the next few weeks, with my comments. She called them "Random Recollections of Dorothy Reed" so I use that title, too.

"The first “event” I remember in my life was the day my step-grandmother was buried in 1933. My biological grandmother died of pneumonia and was buried on my dad’s third birthday in 1892.
My parents, two older brothers and I lived in a small house across a huge garden from where my grandparents and Aunty Mabel lived in a big house.
I was not allowed to go to the funeral so my Aunt Leona (my mother’s only sister) and her son, Clayton, came to stay with me in the little house. The funeral took place in the big house and we watched from inside as the people came. I don’t remember seeing the hearse or cars leaving, so maybe I fell asleep before that happened.
I have a picture in my mind of her being “laid out” on a black leather couch in the living room of the big house. Maybe I was taken in to see her before the funeral or perhaps I have made up the image in my mind from things other people have said about that day."

That means that my mother lived where those lilac bushes were in the corner of the small pasture just west of the house that I knew, which was the big house mentioned. As she points out, it can be difficult to distinguish between memories and imaginations, years later.

Things Are Not Always What They Seem, nor People

Beth wants me to tell the story of the woman who danced naked on the counter at the bar and I said I would tell why I am reconsidering what I was led to believe about my grandfather. Since those stories are related, I will tell them both now.

Growing up, I wasn’t told much about my father’s father, just that he had abandoned his wife and children. However, the tone of voice my parents used and the way they avoided visiting him told me a lot more. Obviously, that was a despicable act and he was a horrible person, not worthy to associate with his granddaughters. My grandmother was an innocent bystander, suffering from his evil act, struggling to make a living with her son and daughter on a farm without a man to run it. Well, it may not have been that simple.

I mentioned earlier that my father’s mother, Ella, was good friends with her husband’s sister, Norma. I remember Aunt (really “Great-Aunt”) Norma as the organist for the Methodist Church in the little town of Lanesboro, MN on the Root River (called that because it looked like a network of roots—We crossed it umpteen times on the way to visit them.). She was a gourmet cook and took wonderful care of her house with its Oriental rugs and other fine furnishings. She seemed the essence of respectability to me as I was growing up. My mother fretted over her children’s manners more at Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray’s house than anywhere else. They never had any children of their own and did not understand childish ways very well. They treated us like small adults, which I really enjoyed.

However, thirty-some years earlier, neither Ella nor Norma was so respectable or decorous. After my father and Aunt Norma died, my father’s sister, Carol, told my mother some tales of way back when. She heard the stories from Aunt Norma herself. My mother was shocked and never told anyone for a long time. She did eventually confide in me, but I do not know whether she told my sisters. Carol told her that Ella had often said that her two pregnancies were both of unusual length—one very short, the other very long. You need to understand that Ella and Glen, Sr. married just as the Great Depression was getting under way. The farm did not bring in all the cash they needed and jobs were hard to come by. Glen had to travel around the country, even to Canada and Alaska, to find work to pay taxes, etc. He was often gone for weeks or months at a time. Apparently, Ella eased her loneliness with Glen’s brother, Elmer, the first time and with his best friend, name forgotten, the second. She did have her friend Norma to go out to bars with and on at least one occasion the future Methodist organist removed her clothes and danced on the bar counter. I think that was before she married the eminently respectable dentist, Ray Palmer. I wonder whether it is related to the reason she could not have children. Often when you contract certain diseases you become sterile. We will never know for sure.

Anyway, these two were pretty wild in their younger days and my grandmother was not as blameless as I was led to believe. I think that my grandfather left when he found out that “his” children were not his at all. Of course, there is no way to verify this, but it seems a pretty good guess. I do not find that despicable. It is Ella’s behavior which bothers me most. And Norma has paid the price for her conduct.

No Interest?

I am not sure what happened to cause my first attempt at this post to be published with just the title, but I was not going to say much, anyway. Is anyone reading this stuff? Beth and Nathan have made a couple of comments, but not on the last post and no one else has said anything at all. I suppose I will continue to write these stories down, but it is discouraging that no one else is interested. Let me know if you like this stuff at all, okay?

Love,

Mom/Gramma

No Interest?

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 . . .

My Father's Parents

I figure that I should tell what I know about my grandparents before I totally forget the facts. I have already forgotten some details, but this is what is left.

My father's father (Glen Oren Reed) was from the same northeast corner of Iowa where my father grew up. He, too, was from a farming family, but I do not know much more than that about them. He had a brother, named Elmer I think, and a sister named Norma (married Dr. K.R Palmer, Uncle Ray, a dentist). Whether there were more siblings, I do not remember.

I saw this grandfather only three or four times in my life, usually unexpectedly. He had a different "Nana" with him each time and I was led to believe that he was not a suitable person to have around his granddaughters. The time I remember best was when I was six or seven (1956-1957)and he drove up in a big black and white Buick, brand shiny new, on a summer afternoon. I often thought of him when I saw cars like that one, but he never came again. From time to time--not related to holidays or birthdays--he would send gifts from all over the world. Usually it was dolls for us girls, in spite of the fact that I despised them. (The ones from Spain and Japan were very pretty. The one from Iceland was the biggest and was all hand sewn, with chewed-sealskin slippers.) He worked on freighters, getting off and staying a while where it took his fancy. This was often in Iceland.

On one of our family's trips out West when I was a teen, we saw him at his job in the supply room of a hospital in St. Joseph, MO. He died from being hit by a train in Colorado in the mid- 1970s. My father was convinced that he was pushed (not intoxicated), but the police found no evidence either way. I have recently had reason to rethink what I was told about him, but that is for another post.

I did meet my father's paternal grandmother once or twice when she lived in a house across the street from Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray's house. That house across the street had been turned into a nursing home and she was in a bedroom upstairs. We went across to pay our respects a couple of times when we stopped to visit Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray on our way to stay with my mother's family in southeast Minnesota. She was tiny, all pink and white and fragile-looking, but they told me she was tough as they come and 93 years old. When she died soon after, I wanted to go to the funeral with my parents, but they said I was too young. (I was twelve, I think.)

My father's mother (Ella June Underbakke) was born in the same area of Iowa, but her parents immigrated from Stavanger, Norway. They were engaged in Norway before he came over and got established in Iowa and then sent for her. After she arrived, they were married with no one from either family present for the wedding. There were a whole bunch of children, 10 or 12, most of whom I met as a child, but do not remember. The youngest, Agnes, I do remember as an old woman in a nursing home who kept calling me someone else's name. Ella and her husband's sister Norma were great friends, but I do not know whether that started before or after Ella and Glen were married. Ella tried running the family farm with her son and daughter who were teens when their father left them, but had to give it up.

She went to Rochester, MN, home of the famous Mayo Clinic, and worked in the kitchen of the Methodist Worrell Hospital for many years. She was in charge of the kitchen when she retired some time in the 1960s. In Rochester she lived in a tiny apartment in a building owned by a woman who was a dwarf and my grandmother's best friend, next to Aunt Norma. Margie's family owned a circus which was very profitable, so she was able to retire and buy the apartment building and live on the rents. She took me to the circus once when it came to town (some of the family still ran it) and I got to see behind the scenes. Margie had the apartment across the hall from my grandmother, so we often saw her and it was so cool to be friends with an adult who was no taller than I was!

When Ella retired from the hospital kitchen, she bought a general store in the tiny town where my father grew up, Burr Oak, IA. When he was a child, my father and his best friend, Dixon Smith, wondered how many people lived in Burr Oak, so they sat down under a bush and named and counted them. It was something like 106, but they found out later that a baby had been born that day, so their count was not completely accurate. There were still about that many inhabitants when Ella bought the store. There were two churches--Methodist and Lutheran, two bars--one with gas pumps--and another general store where you could buy liquor. My grandmother did not sell alcohol, though she did sometimes drink a little. Now when I say general store, I mean general! In addition to the regular grocery items, there were overalls, hats, shirts, socks, livestock feed, hardware, drugstore goods and a small lending library. She had a walk-in cooler and a walk-in freezer, which were very popular on summer afternoons. (They were not accessible by the general public, but we were family!) Every year the day after Christmas, my family would pack up and drive from Appleton, WI to Burr Oak for Inventory. Before midnight December 31, we had to count every item in that store and it would take all that time. I have vivid memories of climbing a tall ladder twelve feet high to count all the washers, screws, etc. in the bins on the top shelf. (I don't know why they always gave me that job!) There were regular hours posted on a sign on the door, but if someone needed something outside of those hours, he just banged on the door and Ella would walk down the two flights of stairs and open up for him. The apartment above the store was way bigger than the one she had in Rochester and full of antiques and heirlooms. It was cozy and comfy and smelled of baking. There was also a flight of stairs on the outside of the building that we kids could sneak out down.

Ella's baby brother, Melvin, still had a farm just across the highway from the store and he had a daughter just a little older than I. We do not have a lot in common, but we both love animals. We spent a lot of time out in his barn with the dairy cattle. (His Jerseys often won blue and purple ribbons at the state fairs in Iowa and Minnesota.) She also had a cool dog, sort of a corgi cross who was obsessed with fetching sticks.

When my parents moved to Arizona in 1971, Ella went with them and when the duplex was built, she lived in the other half. My mother would brag sometimes that she lived under the same roof with her mother-in-law for ten years without ever a quarrel. That says something about both of them. Underbakkes have many virtues, but they are critical of everything and everyone. If you can get along with an Underbakke, you are diplomatic, for sure.

I meant to cover my mother's parents in this post, as well, but it is so long already that I will save them for next time.

March 26, 1950

I have decided to start my stories with the one that comes first in my life. Later, I will relate stories from before and after it.

I don't remember much about my birth, but I have been told often enough that I do remember some details of the story. My parents met in Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota, but when they married, my father took a job with a radio station (KXGN) in Glendive, Montana. That is in the eastern, flat, boring part of the state, according to my mother. I do not remember it. They say that it has a lot in common with the Dakotas, including the severe winters. My birth was planned for the middle of spring, at the junction of April and May. So when my mother experienced abdominal discomfort the evening of March 26, she blamed it on the chili that was served at the party they had attended before my father had to go in to work. After a while, it became clear that the cause of this discomfort was not simply gas. By this time, one of the last blizzards of the season was blowing in full force. I do not know how my mother got to the hospital; perhaps a neighbor took her. She had telephoned the radio station to inform my father, but he had to get a replacement out there before he could leave his post. What with the weather and all, he missed the big event. The doctor arrived barely in time to catch me. I was so small-- 5 lbs., 12 oz.--that there was some doubt that I would make it, but obviously I did.

Beginning

This is something very new to me and it feels strange. I hope to get used to it soon. There are many ideas and beliefs I want to share with my family, as well as stories from my childhood and family history from even before that. That is why I want to have a blog. I hope to post something at least once a week. This creation was done on impulse this morning and I do not have a story ready, so there is nothing really interesting here yet. Perhaps tomorrow.