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.
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