Donna and Cliff: homeowners

So, on Labor Day weekend, 1967, we moved into our little house.  In a lot outside the back door, weeds were growing so tall, they towered over us.  I think I did without chickens for awhile, and we must have butchered the pig before we moved.  Babe the polled hereford cow moved with us, along with her black heifer calf.  
The first few nights, rats kept us awake.  That scared me, because I knew of some people whose baby got chewed on by rats when I was a teenager in Harlem.  We put out poison, and that stopped the rat scurryings.  
There we were with twenty acres, and no tractor.  I recall Cliff and his brother, Phil, cutting weeds in that pen behind the house with scythes.   I could hear them talking and laughing, but I couldn't see them for the weeds.  

Behind the tractor is the trailer house we rented from my parents before we bought our farm.

It wasn't long before Daddy sold us the old Minneapolis Moline tractor he'd had for awhile; he didn't use it anyhow.  As always with my parents, we paid a certain amount each week until the tractor was ours.  So we had a tractor, but no implements.  The brakes on that tractor were very undependable.  
I felt like I was living out "Little House on the Prairie"; I learned to bake bread and make jelly.  There was an apple tree behind the house, and we had quite a few pies that fall.  Life was exciting!  
Then it was winter.  The only heat in the house was a stove in the living room; it had once had a fan to help distribute the heat, but that had long-since stopped working.  I moved our son's crib into the living room so he'd be closer to the heat.  He was sick a lot that winter, or maybe, just because he was my first child, it just seemed like he was sick a lot.  When people came to visit, they'd huddle around that stove trying to keep warm.  The kitchen was so cold that my home-made bread wouldn't rise, so I'd bring it to the living room and put it behind the stove.  Then the side of the dough next to the stove would cook.  
Our pipes froze often.  Little house on the prairie indeed!  Later on we got a wood stove for the basement, which helped immensely.  It heated the kitchen floor, and we could open the door to the basement and let heat up into the house.   

We bought our first milk cow, Suzy, from my parents on the little-bit-a-week payment plan (that's my sister-in-law, Charlene, on the cow).  Cliff was supposed to milk her because I didn't know how to milk; but you can guess who ended up milking.  There was no barn or shed on the place, so I had to milk out in the open, rain or shine.  By this time Cliff was working at the butcher shop, and a fellow he worked with there, Gene Wyzard, came out on weekends and helped him build a pole barn.  Cliff has used the skills he learned from that man many times over the year.  Gene died from cancer before he was forty.  
Everything little gain we made on that place was so hard-won, so treasured, such an adventure.  I'm doing these entries mostly to refresh my own memory, so I don't forget the good times we had.  


Cliff figures we can make it on Social Security because we know what it is to do without; we got by on very little back in the early days of our marriage.  
Of course, we don't have my parents to help us now.  

How two city folks bought a place in the country

As soon as Cliff and I were married, I began talking about buying a house; I perused the want ads, reading aloud to him the ones with houses that seemed not-too-pricey.  He'd grunt in response, but didn't seem enthusiastic.  
Finally he voiced his opinion:  "People like us don't buy a house."  
He explained to me that his parents had never been able to afford to own a house; they tried once, but ended up losing it after perhaps a year.  He felt that nobody in our position, with our income, could possibly think of owning a home.  I dropped the subject.  
Weekends we'd go visit my parents in the country and Cliff would hop on Daddy's Sears garden tractor.  
"He acts like a man that just got out of prison," my dad said many times, as we sat in lawn chairs and watched a smiling Cliff ride past on the little tractor, mowing my parents' yard. 
When I was pregnant with my first baby, the folks bought a used trailer house to put on the property they rented, "just to rent out for a little extra money".  
Guess where we moved?  
Somebody gave Cliff a sickly little pig with a crooked nose, and I got some banty hens.  
I gave birth to our baby boy.  
An old man down the road had a polled hereford heifer who calved at the age of eighteen months;  she and her baby were pretty small, and he sold her to Cliff.  I'm sure we borrowed the money from my parents and paid them back a little bit each week, because we never had that kind of money saved back.  We borrowed a lot from them, back in those days.  We always paid it back a little at a time.
My mother and I always rubbed one another a little wrong, mostly because of my "don't-try-to-control-me" attitude.  I thought it might be nice to move to another location where I could enjoy my personal space.  But here we were with chickens and a pig and a cow and calf; we certainly couldn't move back to the city without giving all that up.  
I guess I must have told my parents we'd like to buy a place of our own.  
Mother (the person I refused to allow to control me) came through, finding out about a little house on twenty acres for $14,500.  An old gentleman had bought it as an investment.  He let us set our own payments at $100 a month.  Interest was very low.  We moved in on Labor Day weekend, 1967; we were homeowners!  
And that's how we ended up in the country.  Thanks, Mother!  Looking back, I know we would never have managed that move without help from you and Daddy.  Sorry I was such a pain in the  neck sometimes.

More memories

I went looking in an old photo album, hoping to find a picture of the 8N Ford tractor I mentioned in yesterday's post.  Cliff cannot recall ever seeing a picture of that tractor, although I seem to remember seeing a hazy picture (aren't all my old photos hazy?) of Cliff on that tractor, holding our son.  If such a picture exists, I didn't find it today.
What I did find was a group of pictures from that time period depicting a very exciting episode of our farm life:  We had a pond built!  

This is where the dozer-man was marking the outline of the pond.  

There was some rain, which started the pond filling with water before it was done.  Cliff took a vacation day from work to watch the pond being dug, but the guy only worked half a day and then went fishing.  

Judging by the size of my children in this picture, we must have had the pond built in 1971.  
We swam in it sometimes.  We had it stocked with fish, although I don't remember catching anything but tiny sunfish.  
Our cost was $666.  Oh my goodness, we thought we were in tall cotton.  
I'd love to have a pond like it on this place, but the windblown sandy soil on which we live doesn't hold water like that Oak Grove clay did.