I was raised on a farm that was very, very active. We had short-horned cattle and my father also designed a barn that was for raising pigs and we had a large fruit orchard.

At the time, in my early teens, we had like 75 different apple trees and we had a peach orchard with 200 trees and there were gooseberries and currants in between the trees. I had the privilege of picking a lot of gooseberries and currents, and gooseberries are sticky.

It was a good time, but when I was 13 my mother passed away. She was ill and we had hired girls to come in and help with all the work on the farm. They’d garden and so forth and I remember the year that she was ill, we put up 1,000 jars of food that year and that probably included meat.

We had a summer kitchen and everything that had a place where we could do butchering. We’d get our own butchering, and making apple butter, soap, laundry soap and things like that.

As a little kid; I had to make butter in the basement. We had one of those red butter churns and I’d have to clean it up and everything and it was not my favorite dish to work, but that was one of the things I had to learn to do when I was a kid.

I got married at 18 and I didn’t much more know how to boil water. I mean, I was not the cook. My sister did after my mother passed away and mostly I was not in the kitchen. I don’t know where I was but I was kind of a tomboy, you know? I did anything else that needed to be done.

When I was a kid, and I remember in the 30s when the Depression was on really, really bad the guys would come out from the town to find work to make enough money to feed their families.

We had a creek that ran on the edge of our farm and my dad rigged up an irrigation system from the creek. The creek was very low because it was so very, very dry and he was irrigating some of the fields on the farm.

There were these big, big rocks in – they called them nigger heads at that time, they were black rocks in the bottom of the creek. He got the idea and he had these guys come out from town and haul those up toward the farm, which was not too far. It was a 10 minute walk or whatever, and bring them up and he had them build posts that were square. I think that there were like 6 of them that were built at that time and then the gates were placed between those posts in the different areas where we came into the farm and the fields.

That was an interesting time because I remember that happening. I went to the barn quite a bit and I liked cats so I always had kitty cats to take care of and a lot of cows so we had milking. I learned how to milk when I was not even a teenager; before I was 10 sometime. The joke was that he put me to milk this young heifer that he thought was of rather mild countenance so they let me milk this poor thing. I learned how to milk this young heifer and she laid down when I was milking her so I really got jazzed that I was such a slow milker that she just decided to lie down.


We had horses and mules and I remember when my father bought these large brown horses. They were huge! He had a male and female and I in my young mind I thought, oh gosh how wonderful. We’re going to have colts, you know?

This did not happen and my father – I was born at the time in history when you didn’t explain things to your kids like this, and I still don’t know the story there for sure, but they were thoroughbreds and beautiful horses, and there were a lot of things like that.

Here’s one story that goes back to before I was born.

We had a large barn and they would make hay and bring in the hay. Then we would have hay forks come down from the beams. They would then pull the hay up and put it into the loft. My father tripped it, and those big hooks came down and hit him and hit the lining of his heart and they thought he was going to die. They actually stuck into him. They punctured his chest.

So hooks come down, and they are huge! You know I was a kid so I am not too sure how big they were but I’d say 30 inches or more. My grandmother ran to the house and got a handful of flour and stuffed it down his chest and he survived, and of course many years and he was a very hard worker.

We always had a hired man that lived in and everything but my father didn’t shun work at all. I mean, he was a big worker, but he survived. I remember as a kid – the reason it’s so vivid – on Sunday morning he was always in the washroom shaving to go to church and he’d have his shirt off and I was always intrigued to go over and say, “Show me your scar,” you know? Things like that, you know? Things that impress you, but the story always stuck that it was very impressive.