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Look at Mom’s Hands

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         My parents told me and Allan how Grandpa Opdahl also had a big cast iron bathtub installed in the bathroom of their new house, even though there was no hot water running through the pipes.  That nice big bathtub is still in the same place today, having been “refreshed” a few years back.  It looks like new.

         Mom said there was a cook stove in the basement of their new house that heated water for cooking and baths in the early years.  “It was hooked up to the chimney and we made Belgian Cookies down there and it smoked up the whole house,” she said.  That big black and yellow cook stove stayed in the basement for decades.  I thought of it as a place for Dad to strew farm clothes when he came in the house.  I never knew it as a working stove.

         When construction of the new house was underway that winter of 1947-1948, Dad said plans were to put a cement floor in the basement like in Grandma Opdahl’s house but Mom had cried, “I want a drain!  I want a drain!”  And so they added a drain to the plans to accommodate Mom’s wringer washing machine and set-tubs and cold water rinsing.

         Dad told us that the basement walls in the house are made of poured concrete, cement that was mixed in by hand with sand and gravel and water, and dumped into the hand-dug foundation walls, poured one wheelbarrow at a time.  He and Uncle Junior did most of the cement work, he said.  Wooden boards had framed the inside walls, but there were no wood frames against the earth.  Dad said the basement walls are almost three feet thick in some places.  “We knew which corner to crawl in when there was a tornado,” stated Mom.

                  I heard other stories from the old days, that evening at their home in Alamo, Texas, stories that were new to me.

         Mom said she got her first camera when her "Mama" went to Fort Leonard Wood with some of my Grandma’s sisters, Grandma's brother Joe, and sister in law Theona to see Johnny Jennen, another of Grandma's brothers who was in the U.S. Army.  Grandma bought a camera for her oldest daughter, Betty Ann.  Mom said it had a black case that opened up and a flash cube sat on top. 

         Dad said that he and Mom were dirt poor.  “We could never afford a new manure spreader,” he said.  “I bought an old one and its roter stopped working so I’d fill it up and go out and sort of dump it on the field.  I remember one time I had enough money to make it for two more weeks.  I never made money on cattle.”

         Said Mom, “I chopped big burdock weeds out of the yard to get a lawn.”  Neither Mom nor Dad recalled how they got the grass mowed.  I think it's because there wasn't too much of it.  Said Dad, “I do remember there was a hand mower that had a broomstick handle and a rotating blade on the end of it."

         As we sat at the table in Alamo, looking at old pictures I had sent them earlier, from when I was a kid taking pictures at home with my own first camera, Dad remarked, “It looks like the Grapes of Wrath.” 

         Well, it’s true the house didn’t get paint on the outside very often.  If there was an extra dollar or hour in the day, it went into farming, not the house.  And Dad and the little boys, my brothers, had patches on the knees, and the inner tube swing hung five feet from the front door.  I’ve got a picture of Dad after riding the sled in back of a baler all day, and a picture of Mom after pulling weeds in the garden and bringing up a handful of green onions for supper. 

 

Click here to continue “Look at Mom’s Hands.”

The Victoria GAZETTE

May 2014

Some of the concrete walls in the basement of the family home, constructed in 1948, are three feet thick.  There wasn’t a garage for that 1957 Ford nor for the cars before or many after it.  Sometimes Dad needed a blowtorch to get it started in the winter.