Farmhouse Memories

Being in this farmhouse brings to mind my grandparent's place in west Texas.  She had a flour bin built into her kitchen cabinet.  To you and I it might look like a drawer, but it doesn't pull out, it tilts forward, and you could put more than 25 pounds of flour in it.  There was no air conditioning back then, so if you didn't use the flour up pretty quickly it would get full of weevils.  How long do you think it would take us today to use up 25 pounds of flour?

My grandmother was born in 1899 and brought to Texas by her parents in a covered wagon.  My grandfather was the first child born in this tiny town in the early 1890's.  Think about that!  That was only 25 years after the Civil War!  They both lived into the 1970's.  That means they lived thru World War I, the Great Depression,  the Dust Bowl, World War II, the Korean conflict, Viet Nam, the first man walking on the moon.  Actually, my grandfather fought in World War I.  These were amazing people!

My grandmother had her flock of chickens and a brooder area of the chicken coopwas set up  to keep umpteen baby chickens warm and healthy.  My grandfather had his smokehouse where he cured the ham from the pigs they raised.  They had cattle and horses, raised hundreds of acres of cotton and wheat.  He was always proud to have the first bale of cotton nearly enclosed every year sitting on the curb downtown. There was a windmill that pumped water from the well into the horse trough and, when the trough was full, into a cistern mounted above a stone shower enclosure.  First you had to make sure no snakes were hiding in there and then you could go in and take a (way-cold) shower to wash off the field dirt - and there was a LOT of dirt back then when tractors didn't have air conditioned/stereo/CD equipped cabs.  By the time I came along there was indoor plumbing and there wasn't any way on earth you could get me to get anywhere close to that outside shower.  No-sir-ee-bob!

The barn had huge bins that must have held several hundred pounds of horse feed.  There was a tack room for all of the ropes, leads, harnesses, etc. the horses required.  There's a wonderful story from when one of my brothers was in his teenage rebellious years and went to live with our grandparents for a year.  Our grandmother went to town one Saturday morning to collect the mail and stop at the drugstore for her morning coke when some of the town gossips approached her about my brother being seen "parking" on Lover's Lane the night before.  When she got home she was giving my brother what for while our grandfather was quietly reading the newspaper she'd brought from town.  Wrapping up her tirade, she whacked the newspaper and said, "Sam, we never did anything like that, did we?"  He raised the paper a bit higher and said, "Didn't have to.  The horses knew the way home."

Mmmm-mmmm.  I do love that story!