I used to sit by the hour and listen to Jess tell stories of her childhood and I loved to compare and contrast her experiences with my own childhood.
Jess grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota on land cleared of trees by her father; she lived in a family of twelve children. I grew up in the town of Davis with one brother and lots of trees. The winter temperatures in Minnesota frequently hit 40 below zero. In Davis, our lowest temperatures in the winter would be in the 30s above zero. Jess, however, always said it seemed colder to her in Davis than it did in Minnesota in the dead of winter. Since it had been over fifty years since Jess lived in Minnesota, I guess perhaps she had forgotten just how cold 40 degrees below zero was in her childhood. Jess shared a bed with three of her sisters and had lots of handmade quilts to help stay warm. They had no central heat like we did, but they did warm up the house before bed with the wood burning stove in the kitchen. I had no sisters to share my bed with, but the central heater kept the house warm all winter.
Growing up on a farm, everyone in the family had plenty of chores. Jess said they all got up at five am to start the farm work and help their mother in the kitchen. I slept until seven and only had to get myself ready for school. My mom fixed the breakfast with the aid of the refrigerator, where we kept the milk, juice and eggs we got in cartons, and the bacon we got fresh from the meat counter at the grocery store. Sometimes we enjoyed packaged cereal from the store. The toast we made with store-bought bread popped out of our electric toaster. We could spread the toast with jam from a store-bought jar or use a cube of butter, which came by the pound in a package from the market. At Jess’s house someone had to milk the cow to produce the milk for breakfast. There was no refrigerator, so they had to get the milk fresh daily. Jess said she enjoyed milking the cows. Home grown meat--pork, chicken, or beef--was raised, slaughtered and hung in the smoke house, where it stayed cold in winter. Frequently, one of the girls would be sent to the smoke house to slice some pork for breakfast. Someone had to go to the chicken coop and collect the morning eggs, and someone had been up earlier to start the bread: mixing, kneading, rising, and baking for the breakfast meal.
They didn’t have any toaster, but who needed toast when you had fresh homemade bread hot out of the oven. “Yummy!” Mom and the girls made jams and jellies from the fruit grown on the farm. They also made the butter, which they got by skimming the cream off the top of the fresh milk and churning it until it turned into butter—all without the aid of a mixer, which we considered essential in our kitchen.
Jess, along with the rest of her family, bathed once a week. They had no indoor plumbing; on bath night, one of the kids was sent outside to the water pump to get water in a bucket to bring into the kitchen to warm on the wood-burning stove. Once warm, the water was poured into a large metal bucket that they used for a bathtub. They had homemade lye soap and handmade wash clothes and towels. I had the luxury of bathing daily in a nice hot tub or hot shower with indoor running water, store-bought soap, wash cloth and towels.
For his family of fourteen, Jess’s father built a two-seater outhouse, and they used Sears catalogs for toilet tissue. Jess said that outhouse did seem mighty cold in the dead of winter or anytime at night. I grew up with indoor toilets, both upstairs and downstairs, and store-bought toilet paper. I have experienced outhouses while camping, but Jess’s childhood experience was daily; I cannot even imagine myself in that setting. Jess herself said that indoor toilets were one of the greatest inventions every produced.
In my next paper I will share more of the comparisons and contrasts of Jess’s childhood and mine.
To be continued
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