It Wasn't a Bed of Roses

Copyright © 2006 by Barbara Island.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

Orders@Xlibris.com

30144

Contents

DEDICATION:

DEDICATION:

I’m writing this for my children who

Have been through hell and back with

Me. Each special in there own way. My

grandchildren who mean the world to me.

My family who gave me reason to go on.

And finally . . . Ken I always knew there

was a lot of good in you. I love you all.

I’ve always wanted to do this but never had the courage to start. I’m going to write quickly a little bit about my childhood. Then I’ll get into the good stuff. To begin with, when I was born, my parents lived in a bunk car on my grandparents’ farm. Later, we moved to a small trailer in their woods. My mom and my grandma Island didn’t get along. Grandma wanted my dad to marry another gal that he had dated because she did whatever Grandma wanted her to do. My mother had a mind of her own. I was glad Dad married Mom, or I suppose I would never have been born.

Next, we moved to a farm that we rented from Paul Hanson. He owned the farm, so we gave him part of our profits every year. We never had much, but we had a lot of love. Our farm was a beautiful place. It sat on a hill with water and trees surrounding it. We had all white buildings with red roofs. It wasn’t modern though.

I got sick a couple of times because it was so darn cold, so we started moving to town every winter and back to the farm every spring. Dad had to haul us up the driveway with the tractor because it wasn’t passable for about a month in the spring. We had a huge hill at the end, and after I had walked about three-fourths of a mile home from school, that hill was horrible. Dad always told me to just look at your feet and walk; you won’t even know you went up a hill. It did help! Dad was so smart. My dad delivered coal a couple winters in Fergus Falls. I remember him talking about putting in pipeline to. He would do whatever he had to do just to make ends meet.

When I was about six and a half, my little brother, Darrell, was born. If he hadn’t been so darn cute, I wouldn’t have liked him at all. He got a lot of attention, so it kind of took some of the glory away from me. When he started to get hair, he had a lot of almost-white curls. I guess I kind of spoiled him too.

We didn’t have enough money to hire anybody to help Dad with the farmwork, so Mom and I ended up being the hired help around there. We had a few cows, a few pigs, and a lot of chickens. I remember Mom and Dad used to take the old truck and park it at the edge of the field. They had a tarp over the pickup box. Then they would put a bunch of books and toys in there with us and would leave water and snacks. Then every time she made a round in the field, Mom would stop and check on us. When I became a little older, I had to start helping in the field. I filled spray barrels and drove the truck beside the combine. It was awfully hard to keep the grain hopper over the box of the truck because I could barely see over the steering wheel in the first place and the chafe that got all over you from the grain itched so bad it was awful. Then there were the rocks that had to be picked in the fields every year. I could never figure out how that worked. You could pick them every darn year, and the next year there would be just as many. The only thing I could figure out was that they must grow back. Then at bath time, I was always third in the tub. I think about it now, and it sounds really gross, but back then, it was normal. We would set the tub out in the sun and fill it with water in the morning and let it warm in the sun all day. It would be all ready when we got out of the fields. Sometimes we would take a bar of soap to the lake.

Thursday night was the highlight of my week. Stores were open in town; there were free shows and a drawing after the show at the theatre. So we would always get all cleaned up and go to town on Thursday nights. Everyone would be in town. It was a lot of fun. There was this old guy named Sophus who played the accordion. He would sit on a stool in front of Olson’s Cafe and play half the night. There was always a bunch of people standing around listening to the music and visiting. By the way, Olson’s Café had the best Boston baked beans in the country.

My aunt and uncle used to live in our farm. They had a little trailer house out by our garden. Their son and daughter were really close to us in age, so it was almost like having another brother and sister. We all got along great.

Dad was quite the inventor. We had a huge yard; he would tie the wagon to the back of the lawn mower, and we kids would steer the lawn mower, and it would pull the wagon. That sure made work a lot of fun.

Grandma and Grandpa Island lived about three miles down the road from us. They were my dad’s parents. Grandma Island made the best doughnuts and squash pie. It was so good that I used to send the Fuller Brush man down there for doughnuts. Grandpa was so funny. When he got mad at Grandma, he would reach in his shirt pocket, smile, and then turn his hearing aid off. In those days, they had a little flat box that sat in your shirt pocket and a little wire that ran up to your hearing aid. Sometimes, when he would go to town, he would stop at Pikops Variety to buy corn candy. Then when he came home, we would go sit behind the garage so Grandma wouldn’t find out. We would eat the corn candy, and he would sing me this little Norwegian song knowing that if Grandma found out, she would get upset with us. Whenever I stayed overnight at Grandma’s, I would go upstairs and listen to the ten o’clock news because Uncle Clifford always listened to the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. He had this catchy little tune that the Hamm’s bears sang. It was a beer commercial that went like this: From the land of sky blue waters / comes the frosty beer refreshing, / Hamm’s the beer refreshing. I liked to listen to it. I would picture it in my head because I knew those little bears would be rolling on those logs in the river singing away so cute!

It’s funny, the things you remember when you get older, like being scared to death of the dark. There were stories about a couple of kids that were supposed to have fallen in our cistern and never got out. The cistern happened to be in the middle of my bedroom floor; I always kept the bed in the middle of the floor over the cistern, and I checked under the bed every night before I went to sleep. I never thought about it at the time, but little kids could have got that cistern door open wide enough to get out anytime they wanted, even under the bed. I had my baby brother sleep with me. I must have figured he could protect me or something. Not really, but it was company, and I was too scared to sleep alone. One night, when I looked under the bed, I saw a face. Well, it was my brother. He’d looked under the other side to see what I was looking for all the time. He scared the crap right out of me. I pinned my curtains shut every night too. I sure didn’t want to look up and see someone watching me.

We had a big cattle tank right outside the bedroom window to catch rainwater, and I swear every varmint in the country lived in that tank. You could hear noises all the time coming from there. My dad had a generator and twelve glass-packed batteries in the shed by the granary. He would start up the generator and run it for hours to charge all those glass batteries so I could run my night light all night. Plus we had this big flat rock in front of the house that Mom would put her washing machine on. Monday mornings she would wash clothes. That old light plant would really be working when she was getting ready to wash. We didn’t have electricity except for that. We had a gas refrigerator. We burned wood and corn cobs, plus we had fuel oil, and it was still colder than the dickens. I had a hook on my closet door too, so I could lock it every night. And I kept a pot, to serve as a bathroom, in the corner of the bedroom. There was no way that I was going out in the woods in the dark to use the outhouse. The owls would swoop down at us when we walked out at night.

We had bats upstairs. We never used the upstairs of the house though. Dad would get all upset when a bat would get in the house. He would throw a blanket over us and chase them around with the broom, trying to get them out. We got skunks in the cellar one time, and when Dad and my uncle tried to get them out, they stunk up everything. Mom kept flour in a tin bakery can, so she figured she could use it because it was in a can with a lid on it. She tried to bake with it. It was not a good thing; we had to throw it all out. We stayed at Grandma Island’s till they got some of the smell out of the house. We had to throw a lot of our stuff away.

Another really great thing I remember was Dad putting a full-size bedspring between two big old oak trees, and we would use it like a swing or hammock. It was great. We had an old Victrola, one of those tall record players that you would wind up and play seventy-eight records on. It sat out under the oak trees by the bedspring swing and the tire swing. We played it all the time. Dad put a branch, which he had cut off, on a rope and made a swing for us too. You could hang on it with your hands and wind it up and spin; it was a lot of fun. Those were great memories. We had a big summer kitchen, and on the weekends, a lot of the time Mom and Dad would have their brothers and sisters and their families and friends out to our place, and they would throw sawdust on the floor and play and have big dances. It was great. In those days the kids would always be included in everything the folks done; at least in our family, it was like that.

I used to walk or ride a bike to the neighbors and pick up their kids, and then we would walk or bike to town. It was about five miles, but in those days that was nothing. One of our favorite things to do was going up to the top of the courthouse. It had this big old open spit with a roof over it. Like a huge concrete porch, it’s hard to explain, but a lot of the kids in town would go up. You could see for miles. These days you can’t go up there at all. I guess they closed it off. I remember jumping in my dad’s lap once and the chair tipped over backward. We both went through the window and landed out back in the woodpile because the window was open right behind Dad’s chair and there were no screens.

We used to go camping a lot. We would take our 1941 Chevy. I think we drove that car for about fifteen years. In fact, I used to get embarrassed because everyone was getting different cars and we were still driving that old Chevy. Dad took care of that car way too good. It had suicide doors; when we went camping, Dad would tie a tarp to the car doors and the other end to a tree, and then he would hang up a hammock for himself to sleep on. I slept on a cot right outside the car, Mom slept on the front seat, and Darrell in the backseat. One time Mom stuck a bunch of candy bars in the back window of the car; all the wrappers were on the foot of my cot in the morning, so guess who got the blame? I knew I didn’t eat them, so the next night, I waited to see what happened. It was a raccoon. He must have walked right over us to get at the goodies. So Mom apologized. My mother used to heat up the lake water to wash the dishes. She could cook anything on her little camp stove.

My mother’s folks, Grandma and Grandpa Brown, were real sweethearts. They went to Itasca State Park with us once, and Grandma slept with her feet out and her head covered in the tent. She said she couldn’t sleep with her feet and head under the same covers. I thought that was so funny. We had big family get-togethers every weekend at my grandma Brown’s house. All the aunts and uncles and cousins would be there. Grandma would have all kinds of pies, and she would make these big old Aunt Sally’s cookies; they were huge, with frosting on them. Everyone would pitch in and help. It was so much fun. Grandpa always smoked a pipe. He used Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco. His orange tobacco can always sat on the desk. He smelled so good. Grandma always smelled like Chamberlains hand lotion. (I look for it in stores nowadays, but they probably don’t make it anymore.) We used to stay at Grandpa Brown’s a lot. It seemed like there was a couple of cousins there all the time. My cousins on that side of the family were close. We all got along real good. We had family reunions every couple of years. We still have cousin reunions every few years.

When I was in the fourth grade, my dad got a job at the Twin City arsenal in cities. So we moved in with my aunt and uncle for a while. I got on the bus the day I was supposed to start school. I ended up at four different schools that day before I got the right one. Later, we moved into a motel. We rented it by the month over the winter. It was okay because we could cook. It was one big room and a bathroom, and it was close to Dad’s job. We got our first television there. I used to watch Howdy Dowdy all the time. They had a contest, which I entered, hoping to win a bike. I won but I didn’t get first prize; instead, I won a pair of roller skates. I was really disappointed, but at least, I had won something. Also in the fourth grade, there was this kid named Martin. I’ll never forget his name because he’s the one that told me there was no such thing as a Santa Claus. I never liked that boy after that. It was a very traumatic experience finding out there wasn’t a Santa Claus.

We moved back home in the spring. We lived above the Corner Café and bus stop when I was in the fifth grade. Mom had a spinal tap that got messed up, and it paralyzed her. My grandma Island told us that she had died. My brother and I started to cry and went to the neighbors. Dad wasn’t home. Then we heard something outside our house. It was Dad and my great uncle Ted; they had brought Mom home in the back of this old station wagon, and they were trying to figure out how to get her up the stairs to our apartment. It was a very happy moment for us kids just to know she was alive. Mom couldn’t do anything but roll her eyes up and down for yes and across for no. We couldn’t afford a nurse to help with her, so we took care of her ourselves. I almost flunked fifth grade, but my friends brought my homework home for me to do. I slid by somehow. It took about a year for Mom to get back on her feet, but she was determined to do it. She eventually walked again. She was the most stubborn person I ever knew. Then we were living in a house by the water tower the year I was confirmed. Mom had 90 percent of her stomach removed because she had bleeding ulcers. She was home the day I got confirmed, but she was in bed; she didn’t make it to the church. She pulled through that one too. Then right after that, she had a breast removed, so we had a tremendous amount of medical bills. But at least, we had Mom.

In the sixth grade I went to Wendell School because they consolidated. I had to walk quite a distance to catch the bus from the farm. I guess it was two or two and a half miles. I had to meet the bus over on Highway 59 at the Cat’s Eye Corner. They started wearing hoopskirts that year. They were wires in your slips to hold your skirt out. The fifties were great! But if you didn’t arrange them right when you sat down, your skirt would go straight up in the air in front of you. One time I got on the bus and was tired and plopped down next to this boy called Leonard, and my skirt went straight up in the air. I was so embarrassed I could have cried. Everyone