This may be a crazy idea but I decided to have a ‘Throwback Thursday’, also known as a TBT! My ‘throwback’ is what I remember of the first home that I lived in. Here is my story!
My parents lived in a converted granary (a building that normally was used to store grain) on my grandparent’s farm when I was born. Understandably, I don’t remember it, but I do have photos of my parents standing at the doorway and holding me. There was no electricity, no running water… no nothing except protection from the weather. However, my Dad worked very hard as a farm hand and was able to buy a small farm when I was about two years old.
We were quite isolated and that was fine until it was time for me to go to school. After life in the granary, my mom thought our new home was a palace. It even had an ‘upstairs’. We still didn’t have any electricity or running water, and there was an outdoor toilet, and a potty under each bed. We didn’t have a telephone, and our nearest neighbor was over a mile away.
The main room had a wood/coal burning stove, with an oven, a warmer above the cook top, and an attached basin that always had hot water for washing dishes and having baths. My uncle made a round kitchen table that had extension boards to enlarge the table when we had guests, and Dad made benches to sit on until they could afford to buy chairs. There were two small rooms accessible from the main room… one had the hand pump to the water well, and the other had a few cupboards for dishes and a counter that was Mom’s work bench. She also had a trap door in the floor to the dirt cellar to keep food cold and edible. The living room was small and rarely used, except in the summer because there was no heat in the living room or in my parent’s adjoining bedroom. I had my own room ‘upstairs’ and the only heat I had was through a steel grate in the hallway, that was directly above the kitchen stove. There was a hanging gas lamp over the kitchen table and coal oil lamps that could be moved from room to room. I don’t remember if I ever had light in my room; I may have gone to bed before it was dark!
My mom did her laundry in the garage for two reasons. It wasn’t so far for her to carry the water from the well, and the wringer washing machine was run by a gasoline motor that emitted exhaust. She often used a glass wash board to scrub out the stubborn stains before adding them to the washing machine. All the laundry was hung on a clothesline, fastened with wooden clothespins, to dry in the sun. In the winter, she still put the clothes on the line for a spell, because it was important to have clothes smell fresh even though they later, when frozen stiff, would be brought in the house to dry by the kitchen stove. The next day, everything was ironed on a wooden ironing board that my Dad made, and using a steel iron with a wooden handle that was heated on the stove.
My dad had a few milk cows, four work horses for field work, and Brownie, his favorite retired saddle horse that he used when he was single and a cattle driver in the Cypress Hills. Brownie was a one-man horse, allowing only my Dad in the saddle. When I was five years old, Dad was able to purchase a John Deere tractor, which made farming much easier for him. I was seven years old when I started grade one, and Brownie let my dad take me to school on his back.
All that changed the winter of 1947 with the extraordinary amount of snow. Even the work horses had trouble getting through the deep snow and I missed a lot of school. When the passenger train got stuck in the snow, and the piles of snow left on the highway by the snowplow was higher than the Greyhound bus, it was time to move to the city. My Dad had enough… and in the city he learned to be an excellent carpenter and I was able to walk to school. It was my Mom who missed the farm!
What can you remember about your first home? I would love to hear about it.
Tags: Childhood Farm City Memories
