A Valentines Day I Remember

Do you remember when it was Valentines Day we took a card to everyone in our class at school? They were these small Valentine cards that were in a large book and you had to poke them out of the cardboard pages.

It was very important to look at each card, read it, and pick out certain ones for certain people.
I would pick out favorite ones for my best friends and try to find mushy ones to give to the boys I liked. Of course these boys probably never even read them! You had to be careful not to give a mushy one to someone you didn’t like!

When I was young and going to grade school at Washington, I think it was when I was in the second grade, daddy would drive me to school in his truck on his way to work at Martis Electric. It was just daddy and myself. This Valentines Day I had my arms full. With a heavy coat and mittens on, I also had a book, my lunch box, and my box of Valentines for all of my class.
It was a cold and blustery day. We weren’t really late but all of the kids were already inside and I knew I had to hurry. As I opened the truck door and stepped down out of the truck I dropped all of the items I was carrying.
The valentines started blowing across the playground and I started crying! I couldn’t lose all of these special valentines, everyone else would have valentines to give out!
I felt despair as only a child can feel. Daddy had to hurry to work but he turned off the truck, got out and started picking up valentines. He calmed me down and told me it would be okay, we would find all of them. He helped me get all of my valentines picked up. And we did find all of them! He wasn’t mad, he just helped me.
I do not remember exactly what daddy said but I remember the weight of the world was off of my shoulders at that moment. Daddy was my hero!! For a long time, years in fact, I remembered that time as a special love I felt from my daddy, just for me.
It has always been a special Valentine Day…..



This is a Valentine Card my mother gave to daddy before they were married. It would have been before 1932.....

Chicken Dinner on the Farm

Yum yumm…. It is hard for me to believe after all of the chicken I ate growing up that I still like chicken today. Mama fixed fried chicken at least once a week for supper and sometimes more. With five in our family we would eat a whole chicken in one meal. The fried chicken that mother fixed was nothing like the chicken you buy in the grocery stores today.
We raised our own chickens and they were taken at a much smaller size then the ones you buy now. They were so tender and fresh tasting. Daddy would always get the wishbone piece, Shirley the breast bone, Janice a wing, mother the ribs and I liked the thigh, it had a lot of meat on it. The rest of the pieces would be distributed so that we each had two pieces to eat.
On many Sundays we ate chicken and noodles or chicken and dumplings. These chickens were ones that had gotten larger and older and were always cooked with homemade noodles or dumplings. We had some older hens that we would keep to lay eggs but after they had become a year or two old they would be used for this meal. And a new chicken would take its place for laying eggs. I felt the best part of using these older laying chickens were the eggs that would be in their egg sack inside them, they were just the yolk, no egg white yet, and in varying sizes. Mom would cook these with the noodles. They were so good.

But the story I want to tell is of all that had to be done to get these chickens to the table!
It all started in early spring. Mama would go to the hatchery in town to buy the baby chickens. Many times I got to go with her. It was exciting to walk in and hear all the noise! Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep…. You could hardly hear yourself talk. There would be cardboard boxes with dividers in them, and holes in the top and sides. Several boxes would be stacked on top of each other. These were all full of baby chicks. I loved to stick my finger in one of the holes in the side of a box and feel the fuzzy chick inside. Mama would always buy White Leghorn chickens. I think it was at least 100 baby chickens that she bought. The babies were all so fuzzy and bright yellow. Once in while there would be two or three that had a little black fuzz on them or even one that was all black. But when all of them grew they would have white feathers and yellow feet.

We kept these chicks in a small brooder house. There would be straw on the floor and one or two light bulbs, with a metal shade on top of it, hanging down from the low ceiling, close to the floor so the baby chicks could huddle under it to stay warm. Then food and water had to be put out for them twice a day. As the chicks grew and had feathers we could let them out of the brooder house during the day into a small fenced in area. In the evening we would go out and have to chase them back in to the brooder house for the night.
As they grew and became about 1 1/2 to 2 pounds in size the day would come when we spent the whole day dressing and cleaning chickens. Mama had a long wire with a hook on the end. She would go into the small fence area and use the hook to grab a chicken around the leg. We caught about 6 at a time. As Janice and I were standing there holding a chicken by the legs in each hand, mama would take a large sharp butcher knife and cut the head off of the chicken she was holding. She would just lie it on the ground and put its head under her foot and cut right through the neck. This never did seem to bother her or us. It was just part of things that we did on the farm.

After its head was cut off she would let go of it and jump back. It would start flopping all over the yard. After all of the heads were off we waited until they were done flopping and then go pick them up. Mama would go into the house and bring out a large bucket that had been filled half full of water and heated to boiling on the stove. Then she took a chicken, holding it by the feet, and dunked it into the hot water, swished it around a bit and took it out. She would hand it to Janice or me and we started pulling all of the feathers off of the chicken. We had to get them all off. Mama would always inspect them to be sure we had all of the feathers off.
Then we would carry it inside and holding it over a lit burner on our kitchen stove we singed all of the little hairs and a few furry feathers that were left on the chicken. But we still were not done! Now we had a huge bowl of water that we put the chicken in and with a sharp paring knife you scraped all of the skin of the chicken to clean off the singed hair and pull out any pin feathers that were still there. Again mama would have to inspect it to be sure it was clean enough and ready to be cut up.
This part was a little hard to do. Mama did most of them but as we got old enough she taught us how to cut up a chicken. It was done a certain way. Mainly so that you could cut through the joints instead of trying to cut through a bone. Also it divided up the chicken into certain pieces for eating. The chicken would then be put into a bag and placed into the freezer. We kept most of the chickens in the freezer to eat for the rest of the summer and through the winter.

The best part of this whole operation is that Janice and I got paid for helping!! We received 10 cents for picking the feathers off each chicken, and 10 cents for singeing and scraping a chicken. And when we were old enough to cut up a chicken we received 25 cents for each one we cut up!! It was a big pay day for us!!

Janice and I each usually did about 10 chickens in a day and mama would do lots more. All of the chickens would be cleaned and frozen within just 2 or 3 days.
I would sure enjoy having one of these small fresh chickens for dinner today! There is just nothing like it any more.

A Christmas I Remember

Christmas mornings for me were always just like the books that you read. My sister and I woke up, always very very early, and since I slept upstairs near my parents bed, I would ask if I could get up. Of course they would say it is not morning yet and after a while I would ask again. Finally after Janice would wake up also in a nearby bedroom then they would let us get up.
We would run downstairs to see what our special gift was, sitting on our special chair and to see what was in our Christmas Stocking. The night before mama would help us set a dinning room chair right in front of the Christmas Tree, one for each of us three girls. We left cookies on a plate on each chair and hung our Christmas stocking on the back of the chair. We always used one of mama’s nylon hose for our stocking. You could get so much more in it!! (This was before Panty hose!)
I don’t remember believing that Santa Claus came, I knew it was mama and daddy filling our stockings. They filled them mostly with apples, oranges and peanuts in the shell. I went to bed and thought they must get up in the middle of the night and put things on our chair and in our stockings. That part I never could figure out. How did they do that without me waking up. As I became older it finally dawned on me that they just did it before they went to bed! ha
We didn’t get a new doll every Christmas. A new doll was a very special gift that we received just a few times as we grew up. My very special friend, my Judy doll, I had as long as I could remember and I loved her very much. When I had my tonsils taken out in the hospital I had to have Judy with me in the hospital bed. And before I would let them give me a shot or anything they had to give it to Judy first. But over the last couple of years before this special Christmas all of her hair had fallen off, it was just glued on when she was new. I felt so sad that she was bald. And I guess I thought she was ugly. This Christmas the folks asked me if I wanted a new doll for Christmas. I said "no" what I want is new hair for my Judy doll!
So what did I see sitting on my Christmas chair that Christmas morning?! Judy, with a whole new head of hair, beautiful golden curls all over!! I was so very very happy!! I remember I started crying I was so happy. And I told mama that now I know what it means to cry because you are so happy. That was the first time I had ever experienced that. I never could figure out how they had that done without me knowing it. I had to have Judy with me all of the time. In later years mama told me they had gone all the way to Wichita, 60 miles, to a doll place and bought the wig and they told daddy how to glue it onto Judy. Daddy even had to buy special glue.
I still have Judy and she is still wearing the same wig. It is tangled now so you can’t comb it but it is still beautiful and I still love Judy as much as ever.

Consoling Factors for Recession

I enjoy quotes and really like this one....

In times of recession and shrinking money, the arts is one of the great consoling factors because you can turn to books and paintings and literature for insights into the human condition which greed and money can't buy.- Joan Bakewell, British broadcasting personality

I want to add to this quote with the idea that Photography and Nature are two things that also can console and present enjoyment, and are also things that greed and money can't buy or take away from you.
Here are a few to console you and to enjoy.....

Catching the Sun

Garden Blues


Rosey Pink

White Spider

Yellow Summer Days

Playing in the Pasture

One of my favorite things to do on the farm was to go play in the pasture. This was a 20 acre area that was used to keep our cattle in. It was like going out into the wild!
There were so many things to do and see.
Just to walk around in the pasture was an adventure.
There were large bare areas where grass and weeds would not grow. Daddy told us that these areas were volcanic ash and that there had once been a volcano is the area. This always fascinated me. I could just see a big volcano spewing out ash and smoke, probably east of us where the city dump was at. At least this is what I had decided. And in these bare areas were always lots of rocks. We could find all different shapes and colors. The best ones were the petrified wood and the agates. I always had a bucket of rocks around the farm and my favorites would be in my rock collection sitting on a shelf in my room. One year mama even helped us to make plaster of paris molds that we stuck these rocks into to make a keepsake. I still have one of these that mama had sitting on the back porch even after they had moved to town.

While you were looking for rocks in these areas you could see a lizard run by. I would chase him and try to catch him and once in a while I would. The horny toads were easier to catch and there were more of them. I would usually be carrying home a horny toad as I walked back to the house. Sometimes I would keep a horny toad in a large coffee can for a few days but the folks would have me turn them loose after a while so they would not die. I do remember once when I caught one of those lizards. I tied a strong thread around its neck and put a safety pin on the other end of the thread and wore it to school like a pin! That was fun! A live lizard for a pin!! Most of my friends thought it was neat but I think most of the other kids thought I was goofy! Then when I came home I had to let it go again.

After a big rain there would be a new adventure in the pasture. There was a dry wash that ran through it. Most of the time there was not water in it but after a good rain there always was. There were three areas along this wash that would hold a pool of water for several days or even longer if we had more rains. Then you could go to these pools of water and find crawdads and tadpoles and all kinds of water bugs. I liked to play with the crawdads best. You could walk barefoot in the water and when you would get near a crawdad they would run real fast backwards! It was so funny! I knew not to get to close because they had pinchers that would nip your toe but they never seemed to want to do that, they would just run from you. To see them run backwards was so much fun.

Another fun thing with this dry wash was the gold that I could find in it! Just ask my cousin Savilla she knows about this gold! She and I would go out with our little shovels and buckets and dig for it. In this wash were places where the water would rush through the pasture and leave a deep washed out area, it would leave a bare wall of dirt three or four feet high. Here is where we found our gold. We would dig into this wall of dirt and find blue-gray colored dirt, (clay), just a strip of it, a vein of gold!! We would keep digging, taking the blue-gray dirt and placing it in our bucket, and follow the vein back into the wall of dirt. After a while we would be rich!


Sunflowers were another adventure in the pasture. The wild sunflowers would grow so very tall. At least 6 foot or more. In the pasture there would be huge patches that had just sunflowers growing side by side. This area was just like a jungle to my sister and I. We would try to walk through them and then we would start bending them over by standing on the stems. And we could make a “room” in the middle of the patch. Sometimes we made a path and made a second room! We had a play house made out of sunflowers!
In the pasture is also where I developed my interest in insects. Of course there were many of them around. I would just sit out in the middle of the pasture, in one of the bare spaces, or by the pools, or even in the sunflower house, and love to watch the bugs. But this will be another story!

City kids didn’t know what they were missing . Although we did enjoy playing in the city parks once or twice a year when there would be a picnic or something that the folks would take us to. But my favorite place to play was in our pasture… Kansas in the Wild!

Winter Ice Storm

Winter weather has not arrived here yet this year.
I was looking thorough the pictures from last winters ice storm. It came on December 12th. Even though it produced a lot of destruction I found through my camera lens it could also be beautiful.

The morning after as the sun came up it was like walking in a fantasy land. The glitter and gleam was every where you looked. And with a slight breeze you hear the crinkle and crackle of the shimmering ice.

Mother nature had produced an artists paradise. Chandeliers of ice covered limbs. And looking close you see the promise of Spring is still there.

The ice does not last long. I enjoy having four seasons in each year.
Without Winter the Spring would not seem so pleasant.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

RAISING WHITE TURKEYS
I am not sure what started us raising turkeys on the farm. We never had very many at a time and I know we sold most of them. But it was always an exciting adventure. Turkeys are not the smartest of birds, they are dumb!

We started in the spring with the little baby turkeys. About 15 I think. They were more of a cream color rather then the pretty yellow a baby chicken was. They also had a longer neck. They really were kind of ugly for a baby! And they took more care then a baby chicken. So we had a large box, like one a TV would come in, newspaper all over the bottom of the box, with a light bulb hanging over it. We kept this on our back porch until they were large enough to be let outside to live on their own. It was interesting when we fed them. We mixed up this powdery chicken mash with cottage cheese! They loved this food and would gobble it up so fast that they were climbing on top of each other.

Once they were old enough to be left outside they had shelter in the barn. The rest of the time they were able to roam where ever they wanted on the farm. We had to chase them into the barn each evening. When ever it started to rain or storm we would have to go chase them into the barn because otherwise they would stand out in it and get all wet. Then they could catch a cold and die. They wouldn’t go into the barn on their own. Dumb birds!

You would have to check our cow tank several times a day too because they would try to sit on the side of the tank and many times would fall in. Since they didn’t know how to swim they would drown. We never had trouble with chickens doing that but there were always turkeys ending up in the tank. Mama would drag them out of the tank and take them into the house to dry them off. Sometimes I remember her lighting the oven of our gas stove to sit them on the lid to keep them warm while she dried them off. Dumb birds!
When someone drove into the farm yard we had to go out and shoo the turkeys away. They always wanted to fly onto the top of the cars. Of course company was not very happy with scratches on their cars.

But after all of this, these bright white large birds were so pretty and fun to watch when they displayed their feathers. They would puff up and love to strut around dragging their wings on the ground. Several males would march around each other trying to see who was the biggest and the toughest.

Then in early fall it was time to sell them. Mama put an ad in the Anthony Republican, our city newspaper. We also had a large metal stand that daddy made that was put out by the highway at the end of our driveway. “Live Turkeys For Sale”. Mama would pick out two or three to keep for ourselves. These she killed, cleaned and put in the freezer for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

When it came time to eat one of these large turkeys all of the work was forgotten. Turkey and dressing was one of the favorite meals in our family. It seemed they weren’t so dumb anymore.