The Robin’s Return filled the farmhouse on summer afternoons and early winter evenings.  Like a music-box within the old piano, it came from my sister’s fingers and not from one of those perforated sheets that would be wound into the player piano to be presented mechanically.   (please click to listen softly while you read)

Music was not  just achievement, but everyday fun. The Tennessee Waltz and Beautiful Brown Eyes were part of the sheet music rotation and this was my inheritance — growing up with music from before my time.  Although I would enjoy the music of the 1950s on the radio when I was waiting at the mailbox on a summer’s day, when I was at the piano I was playing the sheet music of World War II and the 1940s (and every song book ever published by Back to the Bible from Lincoln, Nebraska). (more…)

http://theconservativetreehouse.com/category/mailboxes-old-barns/

That link will take to you brief opening lines of all the MBOBs published in the last two and half years.

Would you mind using that as a source today?

I hope you might find one you may have missed earlier and enjoy reading it today.

You can either comment here or on any earlier-published post. Again my sincere apologies for the lapse.

Here’s a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about memories that sometimes move in and out of focus — and become part of the irretrievable past.  (more…)

It’s a sunshiny day and I’m up in the garage with Dad.  He’s working at the very long work bench where his grinders are, where the sun floods through the window and shows the designs that hang in the dust of the air.  About ten or twelve years old, I’ve climbed up on the big tractor tire just to sit there and watch him work.

I’ve figured out that Dad is not just Dad, but a separate person who would be living and farming and thinking and reading even if he wasn’t my Dad. And so I deliberately went to the garage, to watch him work and to think about that.  Recognizing that he is other becomes a framework for what comes later: conscious respect and deliberate honor.

Because little girls in those days weren’t supposed to interfere in men’s work, I just sat there on the tractor tire and watched him work.  We didn’t talk, except without words.

If I were an artist, I could draw you a picture.

A shiny day in early April. The surface of the flower garden on either side of the porch steps in front of the kitchen is warm — warm enough that the heat has softened the dirt as it reflected off the south side of the house.  It’s too early by several weeks for any sound of buzzing insects or any trail of ants seeking a likely nest, but the air is still and warm, inviting a youngster to come out of the house and do something. (more…)

Perhaps it was in the evening when Mom said, “Tomorrow you can go up to get the mail by yourself.”

Only once in a lifetime does the day come when a thirteen year old farm girl is first told “Tomorrow, you can go get the mail by yourself” when the farm girl lives on a farm where the driveway is very, very long and this means she gets to drive the car — solo.

The mail is delivered to the wood-post-mounted box that stands along the county road 3/4 of a mile from the house.It’s at the end of the long drive that curves out of the yard,  up and down over several hills, the narrow dirt road running smoothly between the fields and the barbed wire fences, between the ditches filled with wild roses and Indian Paintbrush in the summer, and thistles in the fall. (more…)

DRYLANDER’S DREAM, BY A DRYLANDER’S GRANDDAUGHTER

  “Joannie Girlee” as told by her dear Mother, Esther on July 3, 1993

Fabricated and Filled by Joannie

            The heat from the sun burned down on the parched earth as Fredrick Hansen scanned his once green fields.  For years, he and his neighbors had tilled and toiled this prairie land on the North Eastern corner of Montana.

When these pioneers first began settling here, it was their Christian Faith that gave them courage and hope.  Just over the hill stood the high steeple of their beloved Church.  Pointing Heavenward, it was a beacon to look up, rather than down in the dust underfoot.

So it was at this place of worship that Fredrick and Johanna  gathered with their 13 children each Sunday.  Located just a ½ mile away, it was an extension of their busy home!  Often their friends and neighbors gathered in this white frame church to worship and fellowship.  Truly this was the center of their lives and rural Danish community!

So it was here  that this congregation served as a Mother Hen to all who needed covering of His gentle wings!’

Coming up in the summer was a greatly anticipated annual District Convention of the Danish Lutheran Church.  It was here that all gathered for inspiration and sharing.  These American Danes so enjoyed the opportunity to renew and make new friends.  These yearly gatherings were the highlights!  Also, it gave the congregations a chance to meet and hear the new men who were called into the ministry.  Truly, it was here that much of the Life of the Church was ignited and returned with those who were blessed to attend. (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.  Memories from those years — Mailboxes and Old Barns.

On a cold November night with a moon that’s new, it worried my thoughts if I heard a pack of coyotes howling across the pasture hills.  There’s something about their lonely cries that sort of grates at the heart under the best of circumstances, but hearing it in the cold of fall reminded of the possibility that they had some of our cattle on the run.  Even coyotes couldn’t be said to flourish on the hard prairie turf, so we never had multiple packs to deal with but one was enough.

After the crops were in, or in the summer between planting and harvesting, Dad would spent days repairing the fence lines that surrounded a field here, five hundred acres of pasture there or two hundred acres there. (more…)

The Colorado blue spruce in the photo below are about twenty years old.  This view includes about 20% of our tree line/wind break.  These long rows of trees were on the north  and east sides of the big farm yard.

Nothing could stop the howling winter winds that still come across the utterly treeless prairie hills, but these rows of trees — spaced far enough apart so that the tractor and cultivator could be dragged through to keep them clear of weeds — spared us far deeper drifts of snow in the yard, blocking buildings,  in the aftermath of sub-zero blizzards. (more…)

With or without company, Sunday dinner was a little more —  a little more leisurely in terms of the time set aside for enjoying the meal, a little more dressed up, a little more scrumptious on the dessert.

And one of the amazing perqs of acquiring electricity (always called “juice” on the farm) was that when we went to church on Sunday, we left the cook at home.

Dad would start the ’53 Ford about 9 a.m..  Brother and I would scoot into the back seat and we’d all have a few minutes to wait for Mom while she was tucking the last of Sunday dinner in the oven before we left the house.  Dad would have the car radio on with regular Sunday program featuring Percy Faith and his orchestra.  We  thought it was terribly clever of us to say, “That’s Turkey Face and his orchestra” and then laugh ourselves silly until Dad glanced at us in the rear view mirror remind us that our cleverness was limited. (more…)

Our coal-burning furnace was a big one.  The furnace room in the basement was a closed off, unfinished portion of the basement, about 25 feet X 20 feet with dirt walls, the floor of the big farmhouse overhead, and entered through a big door from the finished portion of the basement, where all of the canning, freezer, cupboards, laundry and old wood stove things lived.

Walk with me straight into the furnace room and past the furnace — and a left turn has  us standing directly in front of it.  When Dad brought coal to the house from the mine south of the river, he would remove a small window just at ground level.  The coal would be shoveled off the truck, and then through that little opening into the basement where it would lay in a great heap between the furnace and the wall, waiting for its day to heat the house.

On a spring day when there was still quite a bit of coal left–enough to finish the season–Dad came and called to us to come to the basement because there was something he wanted to show us. (more…)

Sixty-three years ago, a little country church on the prairie celebrated their 50th anniversary when three generations who had worshiped and matured there returned to sing together, eat together, pray together and remember together.  Our mother’s mother Johanna, along with her husband, was one of the charter members and as such, was asked to write a letter of memories and thanksgiving.  This is her letter.

Dear Emmaus Congregation,

My heartfelt and sincere congratulations on this your fiftieth anniversary.  Greetings in Jesus’ name.

It was in April 1910 that we and our six children came to Ambrose, North Dakota.  Soren Thompson met us with horse and wagon to take us to the home of Pastor and Mrs. Kjoller.  There we found a warm and hearty welcome.  Many times I think of how kind and generous they were to us all.  We stayed with them three weeks while my husband worked on the house that was to be our home in Montana. (more…)