Today we have a guest MBOB-writer from within the Treehouse, and I’m so grateful for the help. My husband is facing some serious medical challenges and I’m a bit tattered at the moment due to some of my own strength limitations so I asked for help from some of our admin stalwarts. They have jumped in with love and hugz and clicking fingers. Thank you so much! – Sharon
Hi, Stella here.  Sharon issued a challenge today – share with you a MBOB of our own.  Here’s mine.
What it was like growing up in the 1950’s.
My earliest memories are of life in the early Detroit suburbs, a time when families were moving out of the city into the country.  So it was with our family.  My Aunt Flossie and Uncle Tom and their sons had bought some land and built a home in the country, about twenty miles or so from downtown Detroit.  My uncle, who was a carpenter, built the home himself, and it was small.  My aunt said that their first winter, there were no walls; they partitioned rooms for privacy by hanging blankets from the rafters.
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When the churches on the prairies were established, the first furnishings brought in were reflective of doctrine, including the baptistries, the altars, the pulpits, the essential candle ware and communion ware. They also reflected history and heritage from other places half way around the world.
The societies that were basic to community function came with the Scandinavians who populated the prairie states and The Ladies Aid was central to all of that.
The same family lines would populate the offices of The Ladies Aid for decades and decades: the secretary, the treasurer, the president, the vice president – all knew by rote the activities, the responsibilities, the tolerated variables in process and the expectations that were passed down from mother to daughter to grand-daughter. (more…)

My brother was about eleven years old when he and his friend from the farm about two miles over stumbled into an opportunity to get free rabbits. Even as a nine-year-old, I was surprised when Mom and Dad said it would be all right
What on earth do we need with a rabbit?
It was obtained for sheer curiosity and to achieve the status that an eleven year old achieves by owning a rabbit. There really was nothing more to it than that and of course, it easily satisfied those childhood goals. (more…)

No one ever explained where the question originated, but it was used randomly by youngsters and adults alike – “How now, Brown Cow?” [See hardfacts’ comment below for the history of the phrase 😉 ]
If a youngster had made a complete mess of an assigned chore, the question was a bemused inquiry, “How now, Brown Cow?” which could be responded to or not. Either way, the questioner would likely just start helping to straighten things up and get the wagon back on the road, so to speak.
It might also actually be addressed to a brown cow encountered in the barn yard, just for the sake of conversation. In that case, no reply was expected.
We had a good relationship with our one or two milk cows – they were gentle and useful. They did not have individual names – all were called Bossy. How we felt about close physical proximity to them depended somewhat on what time of year it was – more about that in a minute. (more…)

Warning: Might be uncomfortably graphic. Describes an accidental death. 

This MBOB describes a part of my husband’s heritage and is shared with his permission.
The physical context is his childhood surroundings. The river mentioned is where he fished as a young boy. The house described is the one in which his father was born, and is the house in which he grew up.
I find it a poignant representation of what life and death was like – back in the day. This article was published on September 22, 1892 in the hometown paper and presents aspects of community, pioneer life, and journalism of the times. (more…)

Mailboxes along the roads and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks that told us where we were and how far we had to go in the prairie country where I grew up in northeastern Montana. 
Sometimes they signaled “home” and the end of the road.  At other times, barely visible through swirling snow they told us we had miles to go.  When I started compiling these word pictures I realized they were like those mailboxes and old barns—still identifying important places along the road, still signaling where I am and how far I have to go.  

Our summers were usually dry and seldom offered enough rain to keep things green beyond July 1.
There was just one–one summer in which there was enough rain that the water did stand deep enough and long enough in the roadside ditches to support a small and short-lived tick community. (more…)

The big doors were not roll-up, but roll-to-the-side. Heavy to handle, for a girl, but efficient.
The garage had a certain clean smell on a summer day–resulting from fine-as-dust dirt floor, dust in the air, sunshine, grease guns, used and clean work rags, and an old-style five gallon gasoline can.
There were very few things that could go wrong with a piece of machinery in the field that couldn’t be fixed in the garage.
If we saw Dad return to the yard from the field in the middle of the day and head straight for the garage–or a more serious scene–not only drive back on the tractor, but return with the machinery still attached to the tractor, and park the rig up behind the garage near the small walk in door on the southwest corner of the building, it usually meant a quick run up there to see what had happened. Most serious of all was if we saw him come walking over the pasture hills, having had to leave the tractor in the field. (more…)

This is a repeat today. It may actually be a three-peat. If you need another to read, check the drop menu and search categories under Mailboxes and Old Barns and pick an alternative.
The morning glories in bloom on our patio trellises remind me of September mornings on the farm in 1954.

 Somehow it seemed that the first day of school was always a perfectly sunshiny day that still had the smell of wheat chaff in the air.  The hollyhocks on the east side of the house were so tall by this time that they leaned over the sidewalk, the sweet peas were about done blooming and the cottonwood trees were anticipating cooler fall weather.  It was good to go back to school with a new plaid skirt or jumper, new blouses and a jacket or sweater.

My brother and I always stood for a picture just by the open door of the school bus that first morning.  It was a sign of the times that those in the photo didn’t resist and onlookers didn’t snicker at it.  The Photo By The Bus was expected ritual for any household boasting a camera.

The first grade teacher had taught first grade since the Civil War, as we understood things.  She was friends with the really old ladies in town, because she had grown up with them.  Her hair was always in a tidy little chignon snugged up against the back of her neck.  She was never unkind and her students were never unruly.
Her rules were few and clear, and she did not speak to her students outside of the classroom.  She was our Wizard of Oz but much better by far:  if the curtain had ever been pulled back on her most private life, she would have been proven to be wise, kind, helpful, prim, educated, sturdy (in her firmly laced, low-heeled black shoes) with absolutely nothing useless or pretentious in her life.
She had never married, but had more children of her own than anyone I’ve ever known. (more…)

My father’s fifth grade report card (1909), dated two years after his arrival on the Montana prairie from the Nebraska plains, records his grades in reading, penmanship, arithmetic, spelling, grammar, geography, and history. The family home was two miles south of the one room school house. I expect he and his two brothers had the use of a single horse to make their way to and from.
These children spoke Danish at home but their parents pushed for them to do well in English. In the early years, the churches did still have Danish worship services once a month or so but they didn’t see clinging to the language from their childhoods as being a virtuous thing. (more…)

This MBOB begins with a daisy trail which will deliver you to the point of today’s essay a few paragraphs down the page.
Terry, Montana is 160 miles south of where our farm was.

The site where Terry is located was first called Joubert’s Landing, in recognition of the man who built a supply point along the Yellowstone River for freighters traveling from Bismarck, Dakota Territory, to Miles City, Montana Territory. When the Northern Pacific Railway‘s transcontinental rail line arrived in 1881, the town was renamed for Alfred Howe Terry,^[6] a General in the Union Army who commanded an 1876 expedition in connection with George Armstrong Custer’s campaign against Native Americans,^[7]specifically in the west. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry,_Montana

Terry had ground water (which we didn’t have) and some big trees near the Yellowstone river (which we didn’t have) that made some log houses possible. The planting of Terry’s first tree, however, was still documented for the history books.

The town was located just south of the Yellowstone River midway between the larger towns of Miles City and Glendive…Seen from a distance in 1893, it looked like a mirage on the dusty treeless plain. Sagebrush and cactus were its only vegetation. The first tree in Terry—a wild plum—would be planted later that year. (more…)