I grew up a wild and totally free prairie child…
I chose the photo above for the cover of my father’s obituary program. He was born in June, 1922 and died in March, 2015. The years in-between were rich with all the adventures of that time. He spent 4 years in the United States Marine Corps and was, forever after, a Marine first, above all else. I loved him dearly and I suspect I was his favorite, as I was the first born had brown eyes, just like his.
His favorite place was the vast gently rolling stretches of prairie in the middle of the nation… a tiny town in the center of South Dakota.
My father loved everything about the prairie, the forever changing winds, the pitch black night skies, filled with millions of stars, the resonant song of the meadowlark and the scruffy rolling tumbleweeds flying across the land in the fall winds.
He arrived shortly after the war with his new wife, who was expecting her first child.
He set about building a small home for his new family, with the help of my grandfather, himself a prairie homesteader.
When Grandpa John arrived as a homesteader he first built a chicken coop and the family settled in there. Sans chickens they waited patiently while Grandpa John built a house. In the evenings the sound of a single violin drifted across the prairie. A humble St. Louis steelworker had settled in. So Grandpa John was very wise in the ways of prairie home building as my father and he built our new home together.
So what does the life of a prairie child look like. In a town with very little of the outside world, we could make our own path. After breakfast and early morning chores, my younger sister and I were free to run about the township. We had limits of how many blocks from home we could wander and a loud yell from my mother would bring us running.
From earliest times we started each evening with a story. My father was a wonderful storyteller and his tales only fueled our imaginations for new adventures.
He set about teaching us all of the wonders of the natural world. One of his many passions was collecting rocks, so it wasn’t long till we knew granite, quartz, limestone and shale and we spent time cracking open unassuming gray shale boulders to discover fossils or granite boulders with wonderful quartz crystals inside. Occasionally we could find arrowheads if we looked carefully.
My father was also a fisherman, so many times we would head for the “railroad dam” just down the hill. Although the steam railroad had by now been replaced by diesel locomotives, the name of the pond remained the same. Occasionally we could catch a fat bullhead, which only my dear Grandfather was brave enough to eat.
As the seasons changed, we collected leaves from the trees in our area. Again, it wasn’t long until we knew each tree by name. We would press brilliantly colored leaves in a book until they dried, flat and stiff with their bright colors still shining through. We had a “leaf collection” for the winter months. As the harvest time rolled around the “combiners” would roll into town with their machines. Most ranchers and farmers could not afford such machines and would hire “combiners” to help harvest. They were often people with a deep faith in God and had much to share with the community. They would let us ride with them on their machines as the streams of golden wheat filled the trucks.
Winter months in isolated prairie communities are often a challenge and a time to develop some indoor skills. Playing checkers was one of those skills. A game so easy to play that even a young child could participate with a little gentle coaching. This was a time for sewing dresses for a newly purchased doll or baking something delicious as the snow flew outside the kitchen window. My grandfather heated with coal and he would often bring us a piece to put in a jar to make a “coal plant”. Combined with a little food coloring and table salt and a little water, colored salt crystals would form up the sides of the jar, much to our amazement.
You might asked whatever sparked such a mother lode of memories from years gone by. I was just thumbing through a Lehman’s Catalog trying to locate some items to survive this current pandemic. I was looking specifically for a clothes wringer so if I were to wash my clothes by hand I could remove the excess water. And sure enough, they have a clothes wringer reminiscent of my own mother’s wringer washing machine. Hers was electric however. I come from the generation where the clothes were patiently pulled from the wash waters and fed into the wringer device into the rinse tub. There, they were stirred about, many times by an impatient child who liked to play in water, and then pulled into the wringer again into the final rinse water which was a brilliant blue- Mrs. Stewart’s Laundry Bluing – used to brighten your whites and colors. A final wringing and the clothes were ready to lug up the stairs and hang on the clothesline, which was usually a pair of T-poles and several wire lines high enough off the ground for anything you would want to hang on them. After they were fully dried they were gathered and brought into the house. Some were folded and some were sprinkled, starched and ironed. Such was the laundry day of a prairie housewife.
Someday, when all of this pandemic has gone, perhaps I will return home again just to revisit the memories from times past.
Country Comfort 