The fabric used for the 25 and 50 pound bags of flour during the ’30s and ’40s was tough and useful and pretty.
In the days before doubleknit or wash and wear, there was pleasure in variety and the flour sacks provided flowery variety.
Here’s a simple little poem about the wonders of those flour sacks. (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.”
He describes this thrift mentality that resulted in their perpetual lack of military preparedness as a “weapons outlook” that concluded money thus spent was “spent unwisely.”
He says, “One sometimes has the feeling that the Danish outlook has never developed beyond the idea that, in time of war, you take your rusty battle-axe down from the wall–or go and try to find it 
in the woodshed where it has been serving a useful purpose–and sharpen it on a grind-stone…Preparedness has seldom been a strong point in Danish history. The Danish people are too tied up with everyday life, are blessed with too great a sense of humour to be eternally en garde. Their mentality dictates their fate.” (more…)
New Year’s Eve on the farm was a time for sledding on the ice-covered roads or tobogganing down the long hillsides in the pasture under the stars, crunchy skiing under a full moon and then hot cocoa just before midnight when all of the kids would gather back at the farmhouse to be together with the larger family as the clock slipped past midnight.
Twenty miles to the east at the State Line where North Dakota begins, it has already been the new year for an hour when we quietly catch up and begin the march through the new weeks and months that would be given us. By New Year’s Eve, we would have been in the grip of snow storms and zero/subzero temperatures for six weeks already, with three months to go in those high northern latitudes. But winter wasn’t so bad . Really. It wasn’t.
We weren’t frustrated by winter because we didn’t try to evade it. Our normal winters featured unheated second floor bedrooms (sometimes with light snow cover on the blankets in the morning); frozen rabbit turd collections in the wheelbarrow, shotguns in the moonlight and kittens in the barn.
We kids occupied the unheated second floor bedrooms with an occasional light covering of snow on our blankets in the morning. True story. (more…)
Those of you who are regular MBOB readers may be thinking–North Dakota?
Our Montana farm was nine miles out in the country with three miles of that being narrow two lane pavement and the other six very narrow scoria road. My 2 years-older brother and I both attended all four years of our high school at a Lutheran boarding school 180 miles away in Minot, North Dakota.
We had much more opportunity to participate in clubs, athletics, music and drama there than we would have had from the farm because there we had deal with driving through winter weather which could frequently be life threatening. When it was 25 below zero and the wind was blowing, normal country parents in 1956, ’57, ’58, ’59 weren’t 
really excited about allowing teens to “run into town for the basketball game.”
Now during 8th grade, Dad took me to town for every home basketball game because another 8th grade girl and myself (both clarinetists) had been drafted into the high school band because they were really short of clarinets so it was not that our parents were averse to our participation in school activities. In fact, they assumed that we would be involved in many things and it was just hard to get it all done and, by the way, we two youngest were the last of seven. Our parents were just tired at some level, I think…and Best Brother and I being at the boarding school spared them six additional years of monitoring kids out running around the country. (more…)
Dad included this Christmas thought in a letter to Mom dated December 15, 1925, as they were anticipating their marriage in April of 1926:
“Now we are nearing the beautiful Christmas time when we
shall pause and see our Christ as the little child who came to save us. May we be as children and accept Him in our hearts, to dwell there through the years that may come for us. Christmas always means more to children than to grownups, so I guess we should all be children again for a day or two in order to receive the true Christmas gift.”
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Sixty-five years after he mailed that, I mailed the following to Mom, now 85 years old in 1990: (more…)
When I started compiling word pictures of my childhood memories, I realized they were like the mailboxes along the roads and the old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds that served as landmarks in rural Montana.
The dolls I got for Christmas two or three times were amazing wonders to my eyes and so very much appreciated. The miniature doll bed that was their home had been built for me by my Dad, and was about a foot wide and perhaps 14 inches long, with a little curved headboard.
It also featured a small patchwork quilt with squares of velvet and wool which were leftovers Mom had from a quilt she made around 1950. The doll quilt is just in the other room here now in 2012.
In the winter, when the upstairs bedrooms were not heated out of a reasonable desire to save on coal consumption, the doll bed and miniature cupboard with all the little dishes were moved downstairs to the large and warm and toasty kitchen. It really was ok that our bedrooms were not heated in the winter because at night, we’d be buried under piles of blankets, their count in double digits and during the day we would be with the family downstairs or be outside playing. Children did not retreat to their rooms during the day when it was time to be up and about so our rooms did not have to be warmed all day. I think we’ll go off on a daisy trail for a moment here— (more…)
Children’s and adults’ birthday celebrations in the 1950s were always full-blown family events and almost identical in their content for any age. There might be five or twenty-five guests. There were not always presents, although there were always cards. A child’s card would usually include some nickels, or dimes taped to the inside. On the Sunday closest to a child’s birthday, they would have the pennies (or the older kids would have a couple of nickels and the necessary number of pennies) to put in the birthday bank at Sunday School opening exercises while the group sang Happy Birthday to them.
Today’s MBOB is filled with cuteness of cats. Just because.
“Sharon ate all the crackers again!” was a complaint lodged against me somewhat regularly when my best brother would go to the cupboard on a winter Saturday afternoon thinking to have a couple of saltines. Mom nearly always had cookies in the cookie jar–gingersnaps, chocolate chip, thin-rolled sugar cookies–but when we discovered it empty, it was understood that two saltines were the equivalent of one cookie, so saltines (or raw carrots) were the go-to snacks in our house if the cookie jar was empty.
The reason for my repeat violations on this issue is simply this: munching away on saltines while reading Nancy Drew or Carolyn Keene or The Bobbsey Twins just worked. I have a glass of cold water drawn from the cistern, a book, and a row of crackers on my lap. Utter contentment that was–supported by complete oblivion to the impact I was making on the cracker inventory.
When I started compiling word pictures of my childhood memories, I realized they were like the mailboxes along the roads and the old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds that 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.
Money, what little we ever saw, seemed to have an inoffensive presence in everyday life on the farm in the fifties. This was not a laissez-faire attitude as much as it was a chosen 
perspective that had both strength and history.
We appreciated what we had and didn’t think much about what we didn’t have. There was never any connection that I can recall between the amount of money available and the quality of life in our home.
Our Dad specifically trusted God, but he also had an earthy sense of humor about money that was sometimes expressed as “Money isn’t the first thing in life but it’s sure ahead of whatever’s in second place.” (more…)
When I started compiling word pictures of my childhood memories, I realized they were like the mailboxes along the roads and the old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds that 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.
In the 1950’s, a barn that looked like this one became one of our landmarks after it fell in on itself one Saturday night.
It had served its farmer well, provided shelter for his cows and a dry place for his hay; occasional shelter for a piece of machinery and sometimes a place to hide Christmas presents that might be discovered if they were brought into the house. Neither the barn
nor the farmer would have directly acknowledged it but the last time he walked away from it that evening, they both knew it was about over, and his hand gripped the shaky, worn-smooth-as-silk frame at the door with gratitude. Out of habit, the old latch that holds the door shut is dropped into its place.
The old man knows the barn has nothing left to give. He recognizes that the weather moving in is, sometime tonight, going to take her down. The next morning as the farmers are visiting outside the church, waiting for the bell to ring 27 times, they listen to his story. (more…)
