There was seldom a day that the arrival of the mail didn’t bring magazines to our house. I suppose our parents subscribed to at least twenty or twenty-five — farm magazines, news magazines, church magazines, periodicals like the Reader’s Digest and Saturday Evening Post, and “the world out there” magazines like Arizona Highways, Naval Proceedings, and the National Geographic.
Most of the farm periodicals had pages reserved for the reading skills and interests of the young people on the farm. On those pages there would also be ads for items like this stamp album which was ordered for me when I was about eleven or twelve.
The penciled-in price in the front of the book indicates the 125-page hardcover album cost $1.10. Tucked within its pages is one of the envelopes in which I received a batch of 12-20 stamps every couple of weeks (which cost 10 cents per envelope). This single envelope still has 15 stamps from the Argentine Republic that never got pasted in place (more…)

My brother wrote this monograph about the family horses, including some more personal memories. Much of what he describes was well before my time, literally, as he was seventeen years old when I was born.

Dad farmed with horses through 1934 before he bought his first tractor.  We had 12-15 head of draft horses when on Grandpa Soren’s place.   Pulling a duckfoot or the disc required eight horses; a two bottom plow, seed drill or binder used four and a cultivator or mower required a team of two horses.
Horse teams were replaced with fresh horses at noon.  The horses were rubbed down before harnessing and after removing the harness they were again rubbed and curried.
After moving to the Jorgenson place in late 1934 and having sold the heavy horses, Dad bought a team of light weight horses from Bud S who lived down near Lanark.  Swindle broke these horses, named Pete and Tony, with a whip.  The effect of such treatment would be with us as long as those horses lived.  They were skittish, unstable, easily frightened and they did not trust anyone.  Mother was afraid to have us kids near them.  We were scared of them. (more…)

These weekly MBOBs are snapshots from the back roads of my memories.
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.  

This particular MBOB is the first of its kind. Last winter, Cyrano left a comment on an MBOB indicating that he was working on plans for an extensive trip that he and his wife hoped to take through The Great West of the United States.

They did it!
He shared his plan in January, “I’m sure my wife will love it! Hee hee. I’ll just tell her ‘I’m taking you to see Mt Rushmore, my Darling.’ Via Oregon, Idaho, and Montana…” Well, they got it done, and are still getting it done as you read here. And yes, they’ve seen Mt. Rushmore, along with a dozen other places, and then pushed on through North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho into Oregon.
A few days ago,  my husband and I had the best time time getting acquainted with these friends. We had a long visit over dinner, and a long, long visit over photos we both had at the ready – his treasure trove including the one below which was just taken on July 25.

Cyrano had mentioned in the planning stages that “It’s vast out here in the west” and they surely have the proof of that in their photos and in their memories. We had a deep-down good time with them at Shari’s where the loaded potato soup is just fine. The hours flew by as we supervised the shift change and eventually parted as old friends.
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Please scroll down and get the Sousa music going before you begin reading this morning….  

At four thirty on a July morning when I was about fifteen years old, I was awake. Unusual. Don’t know why.
The house is quiet. Dad has breakfast and heads down to the barn to milk the two cows before beginning a long day’s work around six o’clock.
My bedroom on the second floor of the big farm house is actually the farthest point in the house from the front door or the back door, so slipping out of the house isn’t a matter of just stepping out of the door. But it’s a quiet, somewhat balmy morning and I suddenly realize that if I wanted to, I could go for a bike ride in my pajamas. I want to, so I do. (more…)

Palle Lauring has a two page discussion in A History of Denmark (David Hohnen, Host & Son, Copenhagen, 1960) in which he analyzes the historical reluctance of Danes to spend materiel, men or money in the interest of a constant state of military defense.
This missing piece in the essential business of self-preservation is  even more significant in the light of another observation he makes elsewhere in the book:
“Even though the central, basic land of Denmark has been obliged to cede various territories, the nation is nevertheless still there….Denmark has maintained her position throughout her 1,000-year old history.  Her inhabitants represent one of the few peoples in Europe that have never suffered from large-scale invasions or population transfers and so today can really claim for the most part to be the descendants of the ‘Danes’ of the Stone Age.” (more…)

Yesterday was stressful here in the Treehouse.

The day before yesterday was stressful here in the Treehouse.

The day before the day before was — well, you get the idea.

For many reasons (all of them stressful) at 8:30 last night, I had no MBOB in the pipeline.

That’s not good.  But yesterday morning Michellc had posted a family story on the open thread that was a mailbox and an old barn if I’ve ever seen one.   I asked her to contact me at the CTH and she has given me permission to share it as today’s MBOB. (more…)

Many of the Danes in northeastern Montana arrived there only after significant temporary settlement in other states.
As the Danes arrived at Ellis Island in significant numbers in the 1890s, they enjoyed temporary welcome in Brooklyn and then went on to Iowa and Nebraska and Wisconsin.
For some, that second landing point became their lifelong home. For others, it was the place where they worked for years to put together cash to move on and buy land elsewhere, and during that time most of them started families, built churches and schools,  and became American citizens. When the calling to greener grass and adequate cash met up, they packed their saws, their smithing tools, their few household goods, and their children and moved on.
My maternal grandparents’ interim landing point was Racine, Wisconsin, where their first five children were born before moving on to greener pastures in Montana (now that’s an allegorical phrase if there ever was one–if you know anything about the nature of northeastern Montana).  My paternal grandparents’ interim landing point was a little village about five miles from Aurora, Nebraska. (more…)

Mailboxes along the roads
and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds
often served as landmarks in rural Montana.
These landmarks told us where we were,
and how far we had to go.
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 writing the word pictures to tell the stories of growing up on the farm, I realized that these stories, just like those barns and mailboxes that stood along our country roads, still identify places on the road, still seem to inform me about  where I am and how far I have to go. 
In 1953 and 1958, refrigerator surfaces were not used to display family pictures, notes from grandchildren, or school photos of second graders held in place by cute little magnets.
The kitchen was a place of intense activity with cupboard doors, refrigerator doors, and oven doors being opened and shut a hundred times a day in the process of baking, cooking, setting meals, cleaning up after meals, thawing meat out for tomorrow’s meals and spreading out Farm Journals and handwritten recipes to plan new desserts and vegetable dishes for the next big family gathering.  It was a great day when the ladies discovered that crumbled potato chips made for a great topping on almost any casserole. Lots to learn.  Lots to enjoy.
Mom ordered a copy of Cooking with Gail, a suitable cookbook for a youngster.  Gail was a farm girl in Iowa whose mother was teaching her the homemaking arts, step by step.  They gathered the recipes and the instructions in a simple spiral bound cookbook that was sold through the Farm Journal. To this day, her directions for apple pie and for simple chicken/turkey dressing are what gets it done in my kitchen..
The kitchens of those day sputtered, boiled, melted, froze, pureed, fried, baked, creamed and processed all manner of photogenic goodies, almost 24/7, year round, but neither the kitchens nor the refrigerators were considered the place to display valued family photos. (more…)

I attended high school at a Lutheran boarding school 180 miles from our Montana farm for reasons of convenience and opportunity. Our parents were tired after chasing kids,   for over thirty years by that time, and besides that, there was a top notch choral program there that provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in music.

At some point during my first couple of years there, I wanted to send a card to my Granny in Montana.  I didn’t know her address, but she lived in the lovely little town with tree-lined streets and a big cattle auction ring in the Yellowstone River Valley, a place where they actually had irrigation systems with small canals accessing the rich farmland all around the town.  They also had wells that gave usable water, drawn from a fairly high and constant water table.  Even the people who lived on the farms spread out around the town had green lawns all summer.  It was remarkable.

The farms were surrounded by flocks of sheep and fields of sugar beets that fed the equipment at the Sugar Beet Factory south of town that provided employment to generations of strong men whose parents and grandparents settled the valley.  The histories of all of these good people were recorded by folks in the community and published under the fine title, Courage Enough in 1975. (more…)

My older brother whose teen years were in the last half of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s remembered bringing water from a well two miles away, in barrels, on a stone boat pulled through the dirt by a team of horses.

He described our water as precious to begin with, and then “…the more it was handled the more valued it became.  We first pumped the water out of the well, hauled it home and dumped it in a cistern, then pumped it back out and carried it into the kitchen for Mother, or in for bathing and washing, and then we carried what remained afterward to the garden or to the pigs.”

Around 1949 or 1950, there were two massive pigs in the 20 X 20 pig pen down behind the barn. They had to be slopped daily and their names were Nicodemus and Yellow Hammer. (more…)