Wake UP!

"Get up. Breakfast is ready."

"Are you dressed yet?"

"Wash your face."

"Are you up yet?"

"You're going to miss the school bus!"

The bedrooms in the house where I grew up were all downstairs. So was the bathroom, furnace, clothes dryer and chest deep freeze. The basement stayed cool in the summer. In the winter a gas stove radiated a modest amount of heat. The cement floor directly in front of it was warm and toasty. That is where my brother or I stayed if we were waiting for our turn in the bathroom.

In the mornings when we didn't want to get out of bed our mother would yell instructions, warnings and eventually threats down the stairs from the kitchen. If we lollygagged too long, our dad would assume the 'getting the kids out of bed' duties. He didn't employ threats of dire consequences if we weren't clothed and sitting at the breakfast table in three seconds. He developed a quiet, effective method of persuasion.

Remember that deep freeze I mentioned earlier?

A package of frozen hamburger or tube of frozen orange juice concentrate applied to the bottom of warm feet will result in said sleepy children leaping out of bed and changing from pajamas to school clothes in record time. After the first time, all it took was the sound of the squeaky hinges on the freezer door being raised to persuade us it was time to get ready for school.

Daddy Was Watching Her

My daughter loves cats. She has since she was a toddler.

Honestly, I don't remember how this story starts. My minds' eye doesn't see what I was doing or where her older brother was. He is strangely absent. This particular memory starts and ends with my husband 'keeping an eye on' our daughter while I did something in the house.

About twenty minutes into his voluntary duties, my mom 6th sense told me to go look in the garage and see how he and the three-year-old were doing. They were still alive. He was fiddling with something mechanical and she was sitting on the floor against the wall singing. On the garage floor, where it wouldn't have surprised me to see spiders. The garage floor, which truly wasn't clean enough to sit on. The garage floor, where I saw something that definitely didn't belong.

"Hey! I thought you said you'd watch her."  I whisper/hissed at him.

"Everything's fine," he insisted. "She's just sitting there singing to the kittens."

"Yeah, you're right. She's singing to them." I grabbed his arm and forced his full attention toward his adorable daughter. "Did you not notice that she has broken the necks of all four of them?"

I went over to her and gently removed a limp body from her tight little fists and placed it with the other three unfortunate kittens.

She had made up a lullaby to sing to her kitties. Since they needed to be rocked to sleep while she sang, she had taken them one at a time in a death grip about the neck and swung them back and forth.

How do you explain to a three-year-old that the kitties aren't going to wake up and play?

We took the kittens and a shovel into the trees and had a solemn cat funeral. We had a lesson about stroking kitties and not squeezing them so hard. We talked about never picking an animal up by the neck.

I would have been mad at my husband, but I have to confess that once when I thought she and her brother were playing nicely together in the yard, the mayhem led to my daughter getting eleven stitches.

Parenting is a learn as you go process. What a lot there was to learn.

Like the time I told the eye doctor my son didn't need shatterproof lenses.

Turtle Tank

When you were a kid, did you have a critter collection?  Did you catch lightning bugs and put them in a jar?  Or capture baby bunnies and try to keep them alive?  Ours were always dead the next morning.  Something about the shock and trauma of being caught and handled.  Did you fill a bucket with toads?

Our house is not at our farm.  We were lucky to find a habitable dwelling in the country, much less one that was handy to where we worked. That being said, if we needed an item at our house, it was a good bet we could come up with something at the farm and drag it home with us. That is how we got a small stock tank in which to keep the kids’ menagerie.

It was about 4 feet across, and if you propped one side up on a couple of bricks, you could have a pond on one side and dry habitat on the other. A maple tree provided plenty of shade.

My kids were always on the lookout for box turtles. The best place to find them was when they crawled across the country roads.

“Stop the car, Mom!  Can you get that turtle for us?”

One must assume the average person knows why you would never, ever bring a turtle inside a vehicle. If we were close enough to the house, good ol’ mom would apprehend said turtle, roll down the drivers’ side window and proceed to the hacienda holding the creature as far from the car as her arm would reach. Just in case you haven't ever held a wild turtle, they STINK! The turtle itself probably doesn't reek. Its self-defense mechanism is to emit a foul smelling urine that seeps into your hands and takes two or three days to wash off. The safest way to pick them up is from the top and hold the side edges of their shells. Keep your hands away from the tail!

Into the tank it went, while said youngsters raided the refrigerator for pieces of lettuce or carrot tops. It was nothing unusual to have three or four turtles in the tank during the summer. The kids diligently caught hop toads and added them to the menagerie, but they kept jumping out. This mom didn’t know toads could jump that high. Did you know toads also pee in reaction to being picked up? Their urine doesn't smell so bad, although I think that's why dogs don't bother them after one experience. It must taste terrible.

One day, about this time of year, I was rotor-tilling the garden plot with the Massey-Ferguson in preparation for spring planting.  It was cool and the toads were still burrowed in.  I unearthed one and hollered for the kids to come and get it.  My four-year-old daughter came running and took the new find to the tank.

Suddenly, I could hear her screaming over the noise of the rotor-tiller.  

What the heck?  Did a wasp sting her?

By the time I ran to the tank, not more than 20 yards away, the toad was in pieces and my innocent daughter was in total melt-down. Four turtles equal four toad limbs to tear off. Did I forget to remind the kids to feed their turtles? 

The carnivorous turtles were released and the stock tank returned to the farm where we never used it to corral wild animals again.

As God is my witness, I thought all those other toads jumped out.

Sesame Street Live

Sesame Street, on PBS, had been entertaining children for more than a decade before mine were born. Even the roadshows pre-date my kids, who are now in their mid-thirties.

In January 1986, we took our children to Sesame Street LIVE!  The venue was the Coliseum at Wichita. What I remember is that it was expensive. We couldn't help but notice that most of the adults were grandparents treating the kiddos to the show. 

Our seats were lousy.  They were on the left-hand side of the arena at floor level.  

When it was time for the show, all the performers ran through the audience on their way to the stage. Now our seats were fantastic.  Grover patted my two-year-old daughter on the hand.  WOW!
Daddy didn't have his camera ready.  👎

The theme of the show was Save Our Street.  
Here is a link to the commercial:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtqPve_oUmM

The colors faded after 30 years in the scrapbook.

Mr. Meanie was threatening to tear down Sesame Street to make way for a parking lot. An animated sign lit up at the audience response to a vote on the question.









The kids loved Oscar Grouch, and their grandma made a penny bank at ceramics class.
























 


The clothes hamper was the perfect place to pretend to be in the Grouch Can.

Love of all things Sesame Street extended to eating utensils. Now their children think they are fun to eat with when they come to this grandma's house.

Traveling Salesman

Traveling salesmen. They peddled everything from handy-dandy gadgets to make life simpler, to soap and magazines. Knock Knock. No, it's not Avon calling.

In a day when the majority of women stayed home and raised kids, the traveling salesman was sure to find the lady of the house when he knocked.

"Good morning, ma'am. Isn't it a beautiful day? Let me show you my wares."

Mom reluctantly allowed the man in the kitchen door where he opened his case on the lid of the washing machine. She looked at his samples and was making noises about not needing any of that product. The salesman, fearing she might not buy anything, began to compliment her.

"Are these your little brother and sister?" He pointed to my brother and me. My Mom, at 5' 1" and ninety pounds, didn't appear to have ever been pregnant or given birth.

"No, I'm their mother."

"Why, you look much too young to have big kids like these. You can't possibly be over twenty!" He confidently stepped closer to her as he troweled on the flattery.

Unfazed, my mother told him, "I got married when I was ten."

The man shied away like a horse who hears a rattler and stared horror-struck between mom and the two six- or seven-year-olds playing a game on the floor. She grinned at him, no deceit showing in her bright gray eyes and honest expression.

"Is that even legal?" he exclaimed. He snapped his fold-out sample case shut and ran out the house like the dogs were after him. 

I guess he didn't want to make a sale after all.

Rule 10.  Mom has been pranking people for years. Never underestimate her.

Were-Monkey

Our town has a railroad track which has been blocking the flow of Main Street traffic for decades. For as many years, people have been saying the train is going to prevent someone from getting to the hospital one of these days. The railroad people claim the train can clear the tracks quicker on its regular schedule than they can stop it and separate the cars. So far, I don't think anyone has died while waiting for the train to rumble through town.

One day when the kids were small, we were held up by the train as we were leaving town. Traffic had backed up a couple of blocks with the train just sitting there. 

It was hot, the kids were hungry, and they were fussing at each other in the back seat. One block to the left lies an establishment we've never visited. This might be the day.

"Hey, Daddy. Do you want to spend fifteen minutes in the P-E-T  S-T-O-R-E?" I spelled.

He gave me a horrified look at the same time a particularly loud altercation arose from behind.

"Sure."  He wheeled away from the line of hapless motorists and drove to the pet store.

I had been afraid we'd find kittens and puppies, guppies and gerbils in the shop. We already had plenty of cats and dogs on the farm. I had no intention of letting any beseeching little faces talk me into house pets whose care would fall on me.

Fortunately, the shop, which emitted a distinctly animal aroma, was fresh out of cuddly varieties. There was a python in a glass aquarium. Since Daddy is terrified of snakes, they knew not to ask. We also saw two monkeys. One was in a glass enclosure, and the other was in a wire cage.

I got the impression that the glass was to protect the public from the monkey. I didn't see any warning signs on any of the cages. Little did I know.

We were looking around, with me wondering how lucrative a pet store could be, when I noticed my three-year-old daughter peering at the monkey in the wire cage. Before I could say, "Honey, don't stick your fingers in that cage," she already had.

A remarkably fast monkey leaped across the cage and latched onto her little index finger like it was an appetizer for the mid-day meal. She let out a howl and jerked her hand back. Fortunately, all of it was still attached.

The proprietor assured us the animal had all its vaccines and scolded us for not watching our children. We could hear the train moving and decided we'd seen all we needed at the pet store. On the way home, we discussed whether we should take her to the doctor/emergency room. Instead, we decided to stop at Grandma's house and put some antibiotic and a band-aid on her finger. 

Within a day we learned that monkey had bitten practically everyone in the county who had visited the store. I thought it was reasonable to wonder why the attack monkey wasn't the one behind glass.

She didn't get sick, or lose her finger, or have nightmares about being bitten. However, until she turned nine or ten, she grew a long tail and swung from the light fixtures during a full moon. At least, that's what her daddy told her.

Watusi Cattle

My father raised Watusi for many years. These domesticated African cattle should not be confused with Longhorns. The Ankole-Watusi have been registered as a breed in the U.S. since 1983.  Dad was interested in them for three reasons. The first was his life-long abiding fascination with anything different or unusual. The second was the fact the meat is lean, and much like venison with no marbling. Third, the cows have easy births dropping forty pound calves. Rarely does an owner lose a cow or calf or require a visit from the vet.

There are two ways to describe the Ankole-Watusi.  Foundation Pure which means 100% pure bloodlines.  Or, Native Pure, which means a crossbred animal has been bred back to pure until it is 15/16ths Watusi DNA.

Dad also liked their disposition.  Although they have the most massive horns of any cattle breed, they aren't considered aggressive.  The lyre-shaped horns are the animal's air-conditioner with excess body heat dispersed through the blood vessels in the horns.

      I admit to being a little anxious when Grandpa led the kids among the herd to this baby.

Watusi need their space.  If too closely confined, they will swing their horns at one another demanding more room.  They also use their horns to brush flies away.  Most cattle would use their tail. They can accidentally knock a person down when they suddenly swing their head.

After they are butchered, the skull and horns make great decor. Dad donated a set of horns to many a local fund-raiser.

 
If you would like to see more images or learn more, here are a couple of links.


https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/ankole-watusi
http://www.awir.org/Ankole Watusi International Registration+

Ol' Bill

His short, stiff hair was close to the color of burnt orange or bittersweet Crayolas; the ones in the box of 48. He had a feathery line of longer white hair down his spine from the base of his head to the top of his tail. It was also that orange-y color, with a messy tuft of longer white hair at the tip. His face was white with a smooth pink nose dotted with small black splotches. The outside of his ears was the same color as his body, but the insides had white hair in them. They swiveled and twitched nervously at the least sound. 

He was a little taller than me, but I was only seven years old.  His nose always looked wet because cattle are like dogs when it comes to noses. Sometimes their nose runs like a human, except they don't have a mom to wipe it. One time when I got too close, he swung his head around, and that wet nose got against the school dress my grandma had made for me. I ran to the house and cried until my mother helped me take it off without getting any of those slobbers and other stuff on my skin. My daddy laughed and said it was clean snot since it had never touched the ground.

Ol’ Bill lived in a corral behind the barn with other Hereford steers.  He wasn’t old, but he was special. He had gotten hurt in the truck that delivered the pen of calves to our farm. He limped and didn’t grow much compared to the rest of the herd. When Daddy or Grandpa put silage in the feed bunks, the others pushed and crowded to get all the food they could. Ol’ Bill kept to himself near the fence. Daddy would bring a bucket of the feed and put it on the ground in front of him, while my brother and I reached through the fence and stroked his coarse sides. He didn’t mind that we touched him and we were never afraid that he would hurt us.

I don’t remember if we asked if we could ride Bill, or if Daddy asked us if we would like to try it. On a sunny afternoon after school, the family gathered at the fence where our furry friend was standing in his usual spot. Mom had her Kodak Instamatic camera ready to record the event for posterity.

First, Daddy settled my little brother on Ol’ Bill’s back and stood at the ready to snatch him to safety if the calf reacted badly. He really didn’t react at all. My brother was as tickled as if someone had handed him a new puppy. Mom captured the moment with a grainy picture of his big smile showing he had lost his two front teeth.
 


Then it was my turn. Bill was coaxed closer to the fence where Mom helped my brother step off Bill’s back and I eagerly stepped on. I was surprised. It was nothing like sitting on my pony. His backbone was pronounced and more than a little uncomfortable to sit on. The feather of white hair tracing his spine wasn’t quite long enough to hold onto. The stiff hair prickled my legs through my cotton dress. 

Daddy gave him a tug on the ear, and he took a couple of steps. His thick hide rolled loosely on his body as he moved. I squeezed as tightly as I could with my legs, but that only made the swaying more pronounced. I grabbed for something to hold. Suddenly I understood why people ride horses instead of cattle. 

We begged Mom to take a turn but she smiled and said she was too big to sit on him.

Our initial effort to ride Ol’ Bill was a triumph. Our success yardstick measured the fact that no one got hurt, or ended up on the ground smeared with manure. Dad fashioned a temporary halter out of a length of rope and would occasionally lead us back and forth in the corral at evening feeding time. I think it was to make Bill exercise instead of entertain us. 

Ol' Bill never wagged his tail or appeared happy to see us like a dog would. He stood by the fence and patiently waited to be fed. We didn't grow up with him. One day the pen of cattle were sold and he was gone. Such are the facts of life on the farm.