For my younger readers you are going to say, “Oh here we go again” I wanted to share this anyway. The year was 1946 and with World War II over and all of the soldiers coming home, jobs were hard to find in small town Minnesota. Factories that had been running full steam for years on military contracts, were now laying people off all over the United States, including my father and this only exasperbated his problems. My father was no exception to the troubles that came from this and with a wife, two young boys, a baby and no place to live, he found an old farmstead where we could all live. It came complete with several head of cattle and the rent for the place was the milk they produced and dad and his brother-in-law were the one’s who had to milk them. My father had never lived on a farm before
Did I say we had no electricity and the house was all one big room and my mother hung blankets on ropes that ran from corner to corner to divide the house up. She got her water from a pitcher pump by an old wash board sink and the ice man came several days a week to put ice in the icebox. We had kerosene lanterns for lights and those two men milked all of those cattle by hand twice a day. Then they dumped the milk into cream cans that were cooled by an artesian well that ran through the property. The house was heated with an old wood stove. You get the picture.
Why am I telling you this? Just to say how grateful I am for all that I have and the reality of that is brought home to me each time I think back to those days. I’m not only grateful for what I have now but I am grateful too for having a memory that provides me that glimpse into a world that I still remember seventy some years later and for having hard working parents that were absolute survivors, who never gave up and fought back.
Both of my parents had known a far better life then this before the war, so living like they were, it had to have been very hard on them. I was a five year old so hardships to me were probably not that apparent. At least by the standards of that time and place. When my dad died almost fifty years later he still wasn’t a rich man by any means. He had lost his beloved wife some twenty years before that to cancer. But even in the grips of his grief and loneliness, he carried on with life; grateful for the large family he had by then, who rallied around him in those later years. He was poor in riches but rich in spirit.
I have always thought that those hard lessons of living with that kind of adversity become teaching moments if we let them. They are so much more poignant then reading about them or hearing 2ndhand about someone else’s struggles in life. Yes, you had to be there to get the full effect. I think of all the times my father could have turned to some under handed way to make a buck but he never did. He told me later in life that, “When you raise your son, you raise your sons, son too.” Those weren’t just words with him, that was his mantra and his constitution and he lived it to the fullest and even though three generations have passed since then, those words still live on with me and in my family.
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