On My Grandparents' Farm

A recent glimpse of a New England stone fireplace reminded me of visits to my mother's parents. We loved the nooks and crannies of their rustic outdoor fireplace. My grandfather made it using the local Flint Hills limestone. The fireplace was near the garden. A large wooden spool served as the picnic table. Large cedar trees provided shade to the area.
We clambered around the fireplace with our plastic cowboys and Indians. We could imagine the tiny figures re-enacting the scenes from the movies with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Rex Allen. The miniature horses made unrealistic leaps from stone to stone as the Indians attacked from rocks above.
Going to visit meant several hours squashed into the car traversing the hilly, gravel roads of south-central Kansas. One child fitted between my parents in the front seat, but the other four had to arrange themselves in the back seat. Sometimes we would take turns sitting on the floor and when a new little sister was added, she liked to wedge herself onto the rear window shelf.
Elbows and feet seemed to obtrude everywhere and at times we would whine about being hot or getting poked. The breeze from the open windows also brought dust and didn't adequately compensate for the 90 to 100 degree temperatures of a Kansas summer.
We entertained ourselves over the miles by singing and squabbling. Eventually Dad couldn't stand it any longer and would growl at us to hush up. We'd go a few miles in subdued silence, but could never sustain that for a whole trip.
The grandparents provided a familiar, yet novel environment, during our visits. Grandma kept strange smelling horehound candy in a covered glass dish on the shelf. I didn't really like it, but it was the only candy in the house. I was drawn to that dish, yet when I did eat one, I wished she kept chocolate covered cherries which were my mother's favorite.
Their parakeet, named Pretty Penny, preened his blue feathers while we entreated him to speak his limited vocabulary. I remember he'd been taught to say "Preposterous, birds can't talk." He also could say his own name. Sometimes he surprised my grandparents with phrases learned from radio commercials. The radio sat in the dining room near his cage.
We loved watching the wild birds that came to their window feeder in winter. If we sat quite still at the dining room table, the birds fed on a large platform just inches away through the glass. My grandparents taught us the names of the nuthatches, chickadees, cardinals, and blue jays that entertained us. We could look through my grandparents' binoculars for more distant birds.
On rainy days, we could play in their basement. The broken gramophone could be made to play a record if we turned the turntable with our finger. My timing was uneven so the songs sounded all quavery, alternately too fast or too draggy. I remember a large chick incubator stored in the basement too. An alternate play spot for the five of us was the screened porch.
Grandpa's wood shop also provided hours of play. He kept small blocks of wood in a box under the workbench. There were all sizes and shapes left from projects. We could arrange these like blocks on the floor while he sanded and cut things at his workbench.
Outside the woodshop a green apple tree grew. The apples were small, a light green and not tart at all.
When we walked past the wood shop and past the apple tree and past Grandma's flower garden, eventually we would come to the railroad tracks. We would wait for the train to come by so we could wave at the conductor. Sometimes he threw packages of gum to us.
Walking further, through the pasture, we came to an old family graveyard. The carving was worn and hard to read. Some earlier family that had owned the farm had buried their loved ones there. It was fenced to keep out the cattle, so trees and bushes had grown up around the gravestones. It seemed so forlorn, hidden away far from the current farmhouse.
Grandma's kitchen held a hutch with a flour bin built into it. Vegetable peelings were thrown down a hillside across the driveway. A tangle of volunteer vines grew from the cucumber and melon seeds that the chickens missed in their scratching. A variety of fruit trees came up from the seeds of plums and peaches to grow on that slope. There were thorny gooseberry bushes too.
In my grandparents' yard we could pump water from the cistern. They had running water in the house, so perhaps the cistern remained from earlier days.
Growing in purple abundance on a trellis was clematis. Walking through an arched arbor, one entered Grandma's flower garden. I remember old-fashioned flowers like snapdragons, sweet peas and hollyhocks. Now I'm drawn to pictures of English cottage gardens that remind me of wandering through their flower garden.
The vegetable garden was beyond the stone fireplace. Grandpa turned the soil with a wheeled three-prong implement. The green beans simmered with bits of bacon and creamed peas with new potatoes overcame any resistance we had to eating vegetables. The rhubarb turned into wonderful pies, slightly tart.
Over 40 years have passed, so the memories of visiting the grandparents start to slip away. I'll have to prod my sisters into supplementing these remnants with their own memories.

PHOTOS:
(1) my brother & I playing in the fireplace
(2) misc. relatives but the photo shows the screened porch, the cedar trees, the cistern, and spool table in the background
(3) my family and new baby sister pose in the garden archway
(4) the five of us (I'm on the left)
(5) My grandparents on the right, with their 3 daughters, 3 son-in-laws,& 8 grandchildren

Story ID:	2601
Written by:	Virginia Allain (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Organization:	none
Story type:	Family Memories
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	Madison KS Greenwood
Year:	1950
Person:	Ruth & Clarence McGhee