Repairing, making do ... where has it gone?

It's raining out today, so I'm inside catching up on some of the house things ... laundry, folding clothes, packaging the frozen rabbit pieces ... things that have gotten side tracked in favor of getting the outside things done while the weather permits.

I found myself picking up a pair of socks, seeing a hole in the heel and rolling it up to be tossed in the garbage and wondering why we throw things away and buy replacements? That's not what I grew up with and I'm not sure when it happenet changed.

I remember evenings at the ranch house before my grandparents retired.

My grandfather often had a bridle or section of harness and his leather sewing kit, replacing a buckle, or rope, braiding in a new lead. He was the one that taught me how to braid with four strands or cord rather than the usual three.

I don't remember my grandmother ever sitting in her rocking chair without her hands being busy. Her sewing basket sat beside the chair, always with stockings waiting to be darned. Like many ranch women then, she always wore a dress and in the winter, especially, heavy brown cotton stockings were worn to keep legs warm. I remember the wooden egg she would slide into the toe or heel of the stocking and weave the thread expertly across the hole as she repaired it. When the darns were developing holes, they were discarded, but not into the garbage. The foot was cut off and the leg cut into strips, to be put in the rug rag bag, where they would eventually be hooked or braided into rugs for the side of the bed on cold winter mornings.

Clothing was patched and patched again, until the cloth at knees and elbows would no longer hold a patch. Then the garment was taken apart to become a shirt for me or quilt pieces for another winter quilt. Heavy wool clothing was especially valued for these everyday winter quilts, as heating was by coal stove, one in the kitchen and one in the living room, no extra heat in the bedrooms and not particularly effective insulation. During winter blizzards, I can remember brushing a fine sifting of snow off thenorth window sill in the bedroom, and being thankful of an extra wool patchwork quilt.

Almost everything I can remember my grandparents giving as gifts, other than books ... for me, usually, as I was a reader from a very young age ... was handmade. My grandfather made my "hope chest" ... something every girl was expected to have and in my case my name was on the front, carefully cut by hand from scrap plywood with a coping saw.

My grandmother often gave hand-embroidered pillowcases which she edged with crocheted lace as gifts. I remember her sorting through her box of transfers to find something "suitable" for a wedding or a birthday and deciding on the color scheme. She taught me to embroider, starting with a simple kitten design on kitchen towels, although I found the crocheting much more difficult and was never good at that until I started working with yarn, years later.

My grandfather had one set of "town clothes", wool dress pants, a tan western shirt and a tweed wool jacket with leather trim. I remember photos of him in those clothes when I was still in grade school and he was buried in that same set of clothes nearly 20 years later.

I don't remember my grandmother every having a "store bought" dress until after they were retired and living in town and my mother took her to a store and insisted she buy a dress and a sweater before they drove out to visit her older brother on the coast. She had favorite patterns that she made her dresses from and a whole package of apron patterns as well.

This is typical of how I remember her, in a picture taken when she was in her early 70s, after my grandfather's death, when she was spending summers at the ranch with my parents. Dressed in a cotton print "house dress" with a flour sack apron over it, her hair neatly rolled and sitting in front of a bank of lilacs near the cellar.
I'm not sure when it started being easier to replace rather than repair, although it seems things now are often made to be quickly obsolete. Sales people and advertising emphasizes the need for you to wear the current style to be seen as "successful" and there's always a new "gadget" that makes things easier and quicker and someone to convince you that you really can't do without it.

But for me, one of the most cherished keepsakes I have is a kitchen towel I embroidered to give as a gift to my grandmother when I was not yet a teenager. She kept it in her "special drawer" until her death, then it went to my mother's hope chest. After my mother's death, it came back to me, one of the few tangible memories of when you "made do" ... and gifts were something that you invested time and thought into rather than a quick trip to the store with a credit card.

Thoughts on gardens

I grew up believing gardens were a fact of life. Everyone had a garden. Seed catalogs arrived in January and February, the next interesting event after the Christmas catalogs in the fall. While most of the seeds we planted were those that were saved from the previous year, everyone enjoyed looking at the catalogs with their new varieties and lush foliage in the middle of the Montana winter. We were lucky to have 90 days growing time, so what we could grow was limited as well as the varieties.

One of the first signs of spring was when Grandma started the tomato and cabbage seeds. She had shallow wooden boxes filled with cans with both tops and bottoms cut out. The cans were filled with dirt and seeds planted and the boxes sat on tables and benches in the south-facing enclosed kitchen porch. Often the tomato plants were already blooming when they were set out.




After the long winter, we were always anxious for the first fresh produce of the season. Rhubarb was one of the first things up and fresh rhubarb shortcake for desert, with whipped cream from our cows was one of the early taste treats. Leaf lettuce, radishes, green onions, green peas, carrots, cucumbers, new potatoes all came quickly, then green beans, cabbage, beets, corn and squash.



Besides providing fresh produce all summer, the garden provided vegetables that carried us through the winter as well. We canned peas, green beans, corn, carrots and beets, pickles from the cucumbers and potatoes and onions in bins in the root cellar.





The garden was a family project, with my grandfather and father helping as well. With limited rain, irrigating was a necessity. The house garden was watered from the well, with a gasoline engine that ran the pump during the summer with the"big garden watered from the creek with a pump and pipes. Much of the garden work was done in the evening, watering, hoeing and pulling weeds.

One of my earliest gardening memories is of my father sneezing while he was hoeing potatoes and losing his false teeth in the potato patch. I was only 5 or 6 years old at the time and thought that was hilarious because he had to take his teeth to the creek and wash them off.

When canning time arrived, everyone helped as well. I remember sitting on the back porch shelling peas, snapping beans and shucking corn out of bushel baskets of vegetables brought up from the garden in the early morning. I was too young to help much with the actual canning, though I remember the big black Monarch kitchen stove being stoked and the racks of jars full of vegetables being lifted into the big canners to boil.

Apples, peaches, apricots and cherries were sold in grocery stores in town in wooden crates and we always got several crates of fresh fruit to can every year. There were thickets of wild plums and chokecherry bushes in several places at the home ranch which made our jelly, jam and preserves.

The cellar walls were lined with shelves from floor to ceiling filled with row after row of pints and quarts of canned food. I can remember being sent to the celler to get another quart of green beans, a jar of dill pickles, more potatoes. Then back for a quart of peaches for a cobbler or another jar of plum butter for the biscuits.

I have never quite outgrown the feeling that I need to plant a garden in the spring. Regardless of where I've lived, I have usually at least tried to have some garden, tomatoes in Las Vegas ... lettuce, tomatoes and corn in Montana again, even when I was working full time.

I've done a bit of gardening here in Kentucky as well. Unfortunately, the heat and humidity severely limits what I am able to do though I try to manage a few of the things I like best fresh from the garden every year. Tomatoes simply don't taste right out of the store either. I really enjoyed getting fresh brocolli out of the garden one year, one of my favorite vegetables, and one I could not grow in Montana.

But I would give anything to be able to sit down to a breakfast of my father's sourdough pancakes drowning in home made chokecherry syrup ... or a lunch of sliced tomatoes and onions on home baked sourdough bread.

A Mother's Day Letter

Dear Mama,

The women in our family have always been letter writers, though we got out of the habit of writing once I returned "home" from Spain after my first marriage. I was still 60 miles from the ranch but you had phone service by then so we talked often. I find it comforts me now to write letters to you again.

It comes as a shock sometimes to realize I'm unconsciously saving things up to tell you. Years ago, when I was raising show dogs and sold a puppy for $1000, the first thing you said was "Oh, I wish Papa were here and he could hear that." He'd been gone nearly 20 years but I understand that so well now. So many things have happened since you've been gone and my reaction was the same as yours ... I wish you were here so I could tell you that.

You taught me so much, and it's helped me get through some bad times. You said when things are difficult, you don't give up, you don't give in and you don't complain. You simply face the direction you have to go, take a step forward, then the next step and the step after that. Keep doing that and you will eventually come out on the other side and find you have survived. You rebuilt your own life after catastrophies twice that I know of, so it wasn't just words. This is how you lived your life.

Once I was mature myself, I not only loved you because you were my mother, but you became my best friend as well. When I had time, my first thought was to ask if you wanted to go somewhere with me. Now I am getting to the age you were then, I tire more easily and enjoy "going" less and I wonder if you accompanied me when you would have preferred to stay home and relax, because you knew I wanted your company.

Did I ever thank you for instilling in me a love of books and reading? I don't remember a time when I was not read bedtime stories, starting with nursery rhymes and going on to Greek mythology. I was reading myself before I ever went to school. That love of reading has stayed with me all of my life and provided hours of enjoyment.

And one of my very earliest memories is of being held in your lap while you sang this song to me:

You Are My Sunshine
My only sunshine.
You make me happy
When skies are grey.

The memories are comforting ... Happy Mother's Day ... from your loving daughter.

After most of a lifetime in Montana, May is spring for me, even though in Kentucky it arrives much earlier. For a Montana native, March, even with green grass or April, with daytime temperatures that can get into the 80s isn't spring. Spring comes in May.

There are other things that seem "wrong" about spring in Kentucky. The first springtime flowers you notice here along the rural roadsides are daffodils. Daffodils are supposed to be flower garden flowers, though here they are garden flowers simply gone wild.

Then there are the flowering trees, beginning with the redbuds. They can be incredibly georgous, a bank of soft raspberry parfait color banked against dark treetrunks with trees and underbrush just starting to leaf out.


The first of the true wildflowers are the woods violets. They hug the ground along fencerows and creeks and in the forested hills, deep purple against the glossy green leaves, sometimes difficult to see against the dark ground of fall leaves. They are lovely and delicate, a flower that could not survive the harsh winters of Montana.

But I miss the early harbingers of spring in Montana. First, the brilliant yellow of the first buttercups, sometimes even edging a late snowbank. As a child, the buttercups arrived on the hill behind the cabin, announcing that winter would not, in fact, last forever and the overshoes, heavy coats, gloves and scarves could soon be put away.

The buttercups were followed soon by the "shooting stars" that needed warmer weather and drier ground, brilliant sparks against still nearly barren ground.

There were no wild flowering trees. Occasionally you would see apple or crabapple trees in someone’s back yard but in the hills, while plum thickets and chokecherry bushes could get as high as 12 to 15 feet, they were not trees. They flowered only briefly, white drifts of blossoms looking like late snow along the branches.

A hard frost or late spring snowstorm could wipe out a season’s berry crop as well as any garden planted by enthusiastic but overly optimistic gardeners. Early June was considered "usually safe" by most long time residents. A 3-day blizzard with 6-foot snowdrifts in late May were not uncommon and in my 30-plus years of living there, I have been snowed on in every month except August.

Spring in Kentucky is earlier and a much gentler season, with lush greenery following closely after the enthusiastic flushes of flowers and blossoming trees, covering rounded hills and obscuring the landscape. Rain and fog softens the colors and the landscape even into the heat of summer, the brilliant greens you see only in early spring in the west continuing into the fall in Kentucky.

Kentucky Derby 2009 ... Dad would have loved it.

Dad was a rancher and a cowboy most of his life. He viewed horses as a useful and necessary tool, a necessity on a western ranch.

The posted photo was taken when he was in his 60s, while he and Mom were still running the ranch themselves, without regular outside help.

He was a small man, wiry and athletic and in a different time might well have become a jockey himself. He rode horses for his uncle in "brush track" races in South Dakota until he was in his teens and never lost his interest in race horses.

For a rancher, one full day away from home in the summer was a "vacation" and some of my earliest memories of "vacations" are of a day at the county fair ... and the horse races.

The relay races and the wild horse races at the Sheridan County Wyoming rodeo were always fun, but my father's favorites were the "real" Thoroughbred races at the Billings Fair in August. At a time when driving 130 miles to spend a day just for fun was an effort, we always spent one day there and the horse races were the big attraction for my father.

I loved them as well, growing up on horseback. Race horse books, starting with C. W. Anderson's books, graduating to the "Black Stallion" books by Walter Farley contributed to my early ambitions were to be a jockey, not a career for females at the time, though horses have always been a big part of my life.

For Dad, one of the big attractions of retirement and winters in Phoenix, AZ was the winter racing. He went often, studied the race forms and enjoyed his $2.00 bets. He studied the riding of particular jockeys and had his favorites with both horses and jockeys. He always said he would really like to go see the Kentucky Derby "someday".

He would have had a bet on the little Thoroughbred that came from "out west" ... with a cowboy trainer and owners ... to win. I can imagine his response to the question of "What makes you think this horse belongs in the Derby?" ... and he would have agreed with Bob Baffert's comment "I think the cowboys brought a pretty good horse to the Derby."

He always talked about wanting to see the "real thing" just once ... the "big race". My relocation from Montana to Kentucky came years after my father's death and one of my ongoing regrets is that he was not alive to come here and see the Kentucky Derby.

I'd have loved to be with him and see his enjoyment of finally getting to see "the big race". It is, in fact, one of the reasons I've never gone to the Derby myself since I've lived here. I still miss my father acutely, even now, when he's been gone now nearly 20 years.

One of the first thoughts I had, when I saw this year's Derby, with the little horse from New Mexico winning, was "I wish Dad was here and could see this." He would have truly enjoyed watching that race and seeing the little horse from "out West" win the "Big One" ...

Grandpa was a cowboy

I've always enjoyed reading westerns all my life but anytime I think "cowboy" it is always my grandfather that I see in my mind's eye. He was tall and rawboned, with white hair and a moustache even in my earliest memories and sat a horse as if he'd been born there. He was a self-contained man, quiet voiced and not given to conversation. Looking back, it seems he was not just comfortable being alone but that he may have preferred it.

With no siblings or neighbor children for playmates, my companions were mostly four-footed, so I growing up in a somewhat reserved adult household I was not inclined to chatter. I did, of course, go through the usual "many questions" stage and I still remember his response when "why" and "what for" got wearing and repetitive. He did, still, have a bit of the "south" with certain words, and "for" was "fur".

"What for, Grandpa?"

"What fur?"

"Yes. What for?"

He'd snort, which he did very well, through a rather Roman nose. "Cat fur, to make kitten britches."

Grandpa was born toward the end of the "trail herd" times and left home permanently at the age of 11, starting his working life riding with the trail herds driven from Missouri up into Kansas and Nebraska in the late 1800s.

He taught me much of what I know of horses and cattle and although ranch life was hard on both men and animals, something of compassion as well. He rarely said anything derogatory about neighbors the rare times I remember him doing so involved them not caring for their animals well. His livestock never went without adequate pasture, or hay or water even during the worst of the Montana snowstorms with temperatures well below zero.

I never remember hearing him raise his voice to man or beast and although it was uncommon for a ranch to have a "house pet" he had a big, black tomcat that spent much of his time in the house when I was a child. The preferred place for both Grandpa and Old Tom on cold winter afternoons was on the couch directly across from the potbellied stove. When Grandpa would come in from feeding cattle, he would pour a cup of coffee from the battered blue granitewear pot that sat at the back of the kitchen range and head for the potbellied stove.

Old Tom was always curled up in there and would grumble as he was pushed over. Once Grandpa got settled, with his long legs propped up on the rim of the stove, he would open the book he was currently reading and settle in. I would be reading too, at the other end of the couch, but I was always watching for the next scene I knew was coming.

Old Tom knew something of patience and would appear to be comfortably asleep until Grandpa was definitely engrossed in the book. Then, one paw would very carefully be stretched out and then "whack!" on the back of Grandpa's levi-covered leg and a black streak would be off the couch and halfway to the kitchen before the book, escaping the swat aimed at him.

Although he was only able to complete the third grade before he went to work at a man's job, he enjoyed reading. He had a floor to ceiling bookcase filled with books, was the one of our family that read for enjoyment. Although my grandmother had graduated from high school, something almost unheard of in that time, and my mother was herself a schoolteacher, he was the person that received books as gifts at Christmas. The first book I can actually remember truly "reading" was one from his bookshelf, Trails Plowed Under, by Charles Russell. Although one of the attractions for me were the wonderful paintings and drawings in the book, I remember several of the stories still.

He was not a demonstrative man. I don't remember him ever hugging or kissing me but I never doubted that he loved me. I remember him lifting me up on his cowhorse and letting me ride while he led him through the corral to the pasture. I remember him spending hours showing me how to milk a cow and how to squirt milk in the barn cat's mouth. I remember him showing me how to warm a bit with a bare hand and my breath so it wouldn't stick to a horse's tongue when they were bridled in the winter.

I got to "drive" the work team on the feedground while the cattle were fed. I got to hold the reins and I listened for his every word, which of course the horses were responding to rather than to my efforts at "driving". But I can still remember how important I felt I was to be helping while Dad and Grandpa pitched hay off the bobsled and the team plodded around the field with traces jingling and harness leather creaking in the cold.

He certainly did not have an easy life. He was holding an adult's job when he was eleven. When he and my grandmother filed for a homestead, he worked for a "neighboring" ranch, 40 miles away, for cash. He was paid $40 a month, with one weekend off a month. We moved to our own small farm and he and my grandmother ran the ranch alone for several years after that, finally retiring at the age of 77.

Even after he retired and moved to town and my parents took over the ranch, my grandparents had most of a big backyard in garden and raised and canned enough for both families. We ran some cattle for him on shares and he would be at the ranch in the fall when we weaned calves, borrowing my horse to ride into the corral and separate which heifers he wanted to keep as replacements.

I was close to my parents and both grandparents, but although I lost my grandfather only 3 years after I was grown and gone from home, many of my most vivid childhood memories are of him. So many things I've used ... and needed ... throughout my life are things I learned from him. Many of his "lessons" I have used all my life with horses, but not only horsemanship, but a love for books and perhaps something self-sufficiency and how to be stubborn and endure hardships and setbacks without complaint.

2009 ... New Year's resolutions ... and looking back

Holidays are always the most difficult time of the year for me. No family close and even though I've lived in Kentucky for nearly 10 years now, it will never truly feel like "home" to me. I can hardly bear to listen to the song "Home for the Holidays" during the Christmas season, it is something that won't happen for me.

The holidays I remember the best were the ones that included my parents, grandparents and close family friends. Those memories, of course, lead to others and I find myself thinking "I wish I'd had a chance to tell them ...."

That phrase is often finished by " .... thank you for doing this for me." Almost never for something purchased and given as a gift but a gifts of time and attention.

I tended to be more of a "Daddy's girl" perhaps in part because as an only child, I was the "extra help" and the help was most often needed outside. So many of my interests were more in line with my father's ... geology, mining, arrowheads, rockhounding ... and I was horseback doing ranch work from the time I was able to get on and steer a horse in the right direction.

There were many times after I was an adult with children that my mother watched the children while Dad and I "worked". But the time I remember most ... appreciated most ... and most often wonder if I thanked her for ... was her keeping both kids while my Dad and I went on a 4-day trip back to the area in Montana where they met and were married.

She would have loved to go as well, seeing places she had wonderful memories of, places they had been together, still a few people they had known then. But she stayed home and kept the two grandchildren so I could go. I have wonderful memories of that trip, even some tangible evidence of it, one of the few keepsakes that I still have. We placer mined in a creek where Dad had mined as a young man and I have a small gold nugget we found together.

Did I ever remember to thank her for making this memory possible? or did I just bubble over telling her how much fun I had and everything I got to see?

Looking back, the things I regret are the things I did not do ... acts of kindness that I failed to see and do at the time ... actual words of thanks I neglected to say ...

So my New Year's resolution for 2009 is not about getting more organized, or getting more work accomplished, or projects I want to complete.

It is to remember to thank those who do things I appreciate ... to make the effort to say "Thank you ... I appreciate your help, your thoughtfulness, your time".