Note: This will be my last posting for the summer – except
when I get occasional contact with a computer.
Off soon on a summer adventure…(Plans for House sitter in place - dogs looked after, garden carried for... bags not packed yet - but soon...)
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| My grade school - two classrooms: one grades 1-4, and 5-8 |
When I was a kid I remember the last
day of school – turn in books – get report card – tell the teacher and friends good-bye
– and then feel that intense liberation of ‘freedom’. I grew up in an era where
there were no organized summer sports or summer camps for kids… For me it was a
time to feed my imagination – The days were warm and filled with birdcalls… I
loved exploring the ever changing wonders to be found in the “woods” – a piece
of land on our land that sometimes flooded – that and the terrain was not
suitable for machine farming. So it remained native woodlands.
It also led down to a small creek with all
kinds of amazing ‘critters’.
Some
days I had friends come out from town or I walked into town to play with them.
'Little' creek ran through our farm - we also had a bigger "Cross creek"
There was no library near our farm –
and my mother was concerned that my sister and I should be reading in the
summer months.
With a good deal of
searching she found that outlying farm people like us could borrow books from
the Kansas state library situated in the Topeka capital building.
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| State Capital library - Topeka |
At the
time it was a big trip to drive into Topeka – over 30 miles away – a two lane
road passing through two small towns, and across the old rickety steel bridge
on the Kansas river…
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| Kansas River |
...but we drove in every two weeks to turn in our books and
exchange them for new ones…I can still remember the sweet smell of all those
books stacked in rows in levels to the ceiling…
We
became friends with the librarians and even invited them to visit our farm
– which they did… pretty exciting!
I loved to read – especially adventure books
about Indian life, the South Seas, Alaska gold miners, science books, sailing
ships, fantasies… whatever delicious good books I came across.
As I got older my level of reading steadily grew
to reach an ever-wider range of books… We had one of those hanging wooden bench
swings hung from two chains extending to the ceiling… it was my favorite place
to go off into my reading adventures.
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| Kansas countryside |
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| Capital Building Topeka |
The capital building itself was a
marvel – with larger than life murals on Kansas life and history, the
opportunity to climb up to the very top of the dome and long out over the
entire city (for a flat land boy like me this was incredible)… there was the
legislative chamber… but as a small boy what I remember most was the resonant
sound of walking in the great huge building and hearing my voice echo in the
halls. We would walk past all these offices that were doing the business of the State of Kansas... pretty impressive to a farm kid like me...
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| Mural - capitsl bldg |
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| Mural - capitsl bldg |
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| Mural - capitsl bldg |
Farm activities intensified in the summer – Combines harvested
the fields of grain… As a small boy I loved to ride in the truck that was receiving
the separated kernels from the combine – it smelled of wheat and was warm from
the sun – as it came flowing over me from the combine chute. My Uncle Joe used
a horse and pulley to lift great piles of cut hay taken from his fields and
they were lifted with two overlapping hay hooks – then hoisted high into the
barn –
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| Internet photo - but this is how its done - note the 'pull rope' attached to a horse ( not shown ) |
The barn was designed so that after that, each day during the year, a quantity of
hay could be dropped, from the loft, down chutes into the manger of each cow
waiting to be milked… I had my chores, which grew a more each year, as I grew
older…
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| Combines - they store the grain - then empty it into a truck through the chute |
There were strawberries and other
fruits or vegetables to pick, eggs to collect daily, kitchen fuel to be brought
in, water to be pumped into the cow trough, drinking water to be carried from
the household pump just outside the gate, and often I would walk into town to
buy something from “Weiners “ market that my mother needed in her cooking. I remember the warm evenings with cicadas singing in the trees - and the cottonwood leaves murmuring in the breeze.
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| Delia Kansas - where we "went to town" |
Another part of my summer ‘education’ was 'guesting' regular visitors
from far off Nebraska, Idaho, and even California – this was an age when story
telling was an art form– remembering things that happened in the past – and in
the telling I learned about where I came from and what ‘my people’ believed.
Most summers my family also made a big road trip – usually to visit far distant
relatives but also we saw a lot of the American west. Perhaps this is where I developed my love of
travel.
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| Evening in Kansas - Imagine the smells and sounds... |
The death of my father when I was 11 changed many things – The
death of a parent is traumatic – and I was very close to mine… Being required
to leave the familiar and move to California was like moving to another
planet. In the long run I adjusted, and
like an uprooted willow tree I took root in this place and I have long come to feel that it is my home. I will always carry with me my
roots and the memories of childhood. It
is said that challenges can make us stronger…. Sometimes we never feel
quite ready for the situations we are thrust into – but if we are fortunate we
learn survival skills from the experiences that make future encounters with ‘the new and different’ more manageable.
