Sunday, February 22, 2015

Cowgirl Sass and Savvy

Growing up in the big woods

by Julie Carter

It wasn’t in the same century, but it wasn’t that many years later that I wore braids, lived in some Colorado “big woods” and had a life not so very different than what Laura Ingalls Wilder described in her “Little House in the Big Woods” book series.

There was Ma and Pa and three younger brothers and as a young family living on small ranch wages, we also pioneered our way through life with growing or catching our food, storing it for winter and planning spring gardens and fall harvests to supplement. 

We bathed in a wash tub placed next to the wood stove and slept in bedrooms cold enough to freeze the water in the glass on the night stand. Pancakes were on the table every morning dripping in homemade syrup my mother boiled up with water, sugar and maple flavoring or the occasional chokecherry syrup. Eggs being served depended on the mood of the laying hens and the chore child who gathered them.

The cows were milked early and the buckets of foamy milk handed over to “Ma” for care. It was refrigerated in jars and the cream rose to the top in thick layers to be skimmed off and used for eating, baking or soured for the churning of butter. My mother’s recipe box is full of recipes calling for butter and cream – the real stuff.

 Later a “cream separator” became part of the process and a cranking job for a kid. I can still hear both my parents admonishing one of us to “slow down” or we’d turn the cream into butter before it ever left the machine. I might add that the time it saved in milk processing was used up in washing the many pieces after each use and putting it back together ready for tomorrow’s milk.

Our days were peppered with visits from assorted family, the old guy who cut timber and skidded logs with a team of horses and seasonal big game hunters. My grandparents lived down the road a couple miles, close enough to walk (or run away from home with that destination in mind), or even one time, my attempt to ride my tricycle, the getaway vehicle of choice for a 4-year-old.

There was always work to do for both my parents. Work that involved survival and maintaining some level of comfort in our living. Oblivious to what that took, we children played in the meadows, in the nearby creek, on the hillsides covered in pines or in winter, the snowbanks that isolated our world to a white wonderland. We more often than not wore socks for mittens and made some feeble attempt to keep track of our stocking hats. Jeans were always wet as there were no snow pants and snow boots as we know today.

At night, we were safe and warm in the house and instead of a fiddle like Charles Ingalls played, my dad played the guitar along with his singing and even some yodeling. “The Wildwood Flower” will be forever embedded in my memory.

Bedtime came with the dark where we learned to read books by being read to and we said a good night prayer asking the Lord “our soul to keep.” We asked God to bless everyone we knew and named them one by one in a nightly repetition.

This was 80 years after Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story took place and yet the differences were minimal give or take an electric lightbulb and a gasoline driven vehicle. 

I’m still a couple decades out from the 80-year mark of my story’s beginning, but already the changes are mind boggling. The world is leaping ahead faster and faster. For instance, I write this on a computer that, through a single wire, is hooked to the entire world for an instantaneous connection. These words will be available to anyone with the same connection or even to that cowboy riding across the back-40 when he checks the cows and his smart phone.

However, sometimes a ride up the road peddling a little tricycle seems a better way. Maybe because it is just so simple.

Julie can be reached for comment at jcarternm@gmail.com

No comments: