Mother had a heart attack while we were all quite young. I was eight, Roy 9, and Ray, Athena and Bertie, all quite small. (With all due respect to my grandmother, who lived to the ripe old age of 87, I’ve often wondered if her heart attack was a massive panic attack and subsequent nervous breakdown. That would have been an easy mistake for doctors to make in 1927. In either case, I’m sure she needed the rest!)
This was the time of my early growing up. Mother was confined in bed in Salmon at Aunt Lora Cockrell’s home, for over six weeks.
Dad was left with the five of us kids, ran the ranch, did chores, milking, cooking and did what he could at the house. This was the time of my “early” growing up. The neighbors were as helpful as they could be, but summer is irrigating and haying time, and they had their own ranches to run. The women would come in with food once in a while, especially Mrs. Meeks, and she would walk a long way to bring us something. Dad hired a woman to come in once in a while to do heavy cleaning.
This was the time, also, when I really started to cook. I would pull a chair up to the wood stove and cook eggs, bacon (which I sometimes burned), and fry potatoes, sometimes cooked and sometimes raw in the center. Dad showed me how to cook “coyote” stew, which was fried potatoes and onions, and when they were done, he would break a dozen eggs in, and stir it all up until the eggs were cooked. All of us kids just loved it. While I was doing the cooking, we had that often! Also lots and lots of pancakes, and I learned how to make good butter.
I remember one time a little neighbor lady brought a big pot of beans and bacon. Oh, how good that tasted.! And it wasn’t until years later, that Dad finally told us he found a big stink bug in his bowl of beans! I said “Dad, how come you didn’t tell us?” “Well, if I had of, you wouldn’t have eaten your dinner, and besides that, honey, all the germs were boiled out!” The little lady was about half blind, and she just didn’t see it! Her heart was good, though.
Doing the washing was the hardest for me and at 8 years of age, you’re not too big, or too strong. Dad would fill a big round wash tub and put in on the stove to heat, then in about three hours, he would come in from the field and put it down on two chairs, another tub on another chair, and a round stick of wood for me to stand on. So I got the wash board, a bar of Felsnaptha soap (which I can still smell and I love the smell of it), and I started the washing.
I washed all the small things, like our play clothes, socks, etc. Dad didn’t want me to do his clothes, which were too big, too heavy, or the sheets. But I put the sheets in and scrubbed hard as I could, then when Dad came in, he would finish the big things and wring them out and hang the sheets and his clothes on the clothesline. Roy and I hung the small things.
That time was a very hard time in our lives, especially for Dad. But I think it helped to teach us kids the meaning of responsibility and dependability, and it certainly taught us how to work. It was difficult for our Mother, being sick and not knowing how things were each day. She had Bertie with her at Aunt Lora’s.
As young as I was, I couldn’t help but notice how wonderfully well Dad coped, always gentle, hopeful, and always good-natured and optimistic, which was his way all his life. How we loved him.
