Humble beginnings

I remember one day an American friend, here in Japan, mused that it sure would be cool if we could see how our grandparents or great-grandparents had lived their everyday lives. Gee... I certainly had never wondered about that!  My paternal great-grandparents and maternal great-grandparents had lived on adjoining  farmsteads, and one was the same farm where where I grew up and the other was a place of many a childhood adventurous trek across borders. It wasn't until I went away to college that I even realized that for many Americans their roots on the ole home turf are still very shallow. My family, and just about everyone I knew in my youth, had roots in the U.S. dating back to around the time the Mayflower touched land.  

 

My maternal great-grandparents bought an established farm, complete with barns, and with an older farmhouse, as newlyweds. There, they started their family. My grandmother was born there. My mother was born there. I was born in the nearest hospital and arrived there about a week later to continue the tradition of growing up on the family farm.

 

My great-grandparents, grandmother, and my great-aunt around 1900~1910.

 

Look below: Hey, it's the exact same house as I grew up in and almost exactly the same as I remember it about 75 years later! The only difference besides some new shingles was that at some point they enclosed the porch against those frigid Midwestern winters! Boy, oh boy, I'll bet that kitchen had been cold on a January morning without any buffer against the wind! Same old cellar door is open, though. (We kept it closed so a kid wouldn't fall down the rickety wooden steps.) Many a time did I take shelter down in that same dark, dank, musty dirt basement though and look at all the ancient preserves sitting on the shelves down there as we waited out a storm. I can still recall the dank dirt smell under the porch steps where I'd crawl under to play as a kid, too!

The house in 1977. Notice that cool blue pedal car I got to play with as a kid that's sitting at the old hand-pump well.

  Around 100 years ago, they used sheep to trim the grass while we'd advanced to a lawn mower in my childhood. But, boy, do I remember that shed behind them. One side was called the "cob house" and the other the "coal house" and many a morning I was sent out to fetch a pail of corn cobs and coal chunks so that Grandpa could light the fire in the cast iron stove in the kitchen!











Take a look at it in 1972!

Once the fire got going, Grandpa set his tin cup on top of it to warm his morning cup of milk. He didn't drink coffee or tea nor did any of the "old folks" I knew in childhood as apparently they kicked that habit during the Great Depression. It was the only heat source in that room -- even if it got to be -20 below Fahrenheit or Centigrade! The house was just too old for converting to central heat or to install any sort of more modern furnace.

Lucky for me, my parents had "modernized" the house when they married so the 2 outhouses outdoors were mostly just being used to store garden tools as a make-do shed in the vegetable patch. I used one as a funky playhouse in my youth after it toppled over in a storm, though. But, with a houseful of people, they were still good for an emergency!  Anyway, there was a "his" and a "hers" and they sat on opposite sides of the garden. Bet you can't imagine venturing outside in the dead of night for a bit of nocturnal relief can you? Well, back in the day, people didn't! My grandfather and father both still kept a chamber pot under their beds into the mid-1970s when I left home. Ewww... Carrying those down to the toilet, to empty in the morning, was another nasty chore I had to do as a little kid! Gee.... and my kids complained about their chores!

I have to admit that I'm a bit bemused about the fad of "shabby chic" home interior. As a kid, I knew shabby and it sure wasn't chic! Nope, no crackly lead-based painted doors or the like in my home now that I have some say in things! No mystery for me about how my grandparents or great-grandparents had lived their lives either in earlier days. I could dig dirt to make a mud pie and find an Indian head coin they'd dropped in the yard (and more than likely frantically searched for at the time) or a china head doll that had broken while my grandmother or her sister played in the garden. I knew and smelled the same flowers they loved. I knew the same chill to the bone cold they endured during winter and the same humid summers in the same sea of corn fields. I played in the same creek and picked the same apples and pears. I played in the same barn where they milked their cows and pitched hay to our generation of bovines. I knew their childhood dolls and all the cool dresses they had hand stitched for them. I pounded the same piano keys although it was certainly in need of a good tune up by the time my day came around so I never really learned how to play. But their music scores still sat there waiting for me to learn. My sisters slept in the same bed where they were born but there wasn't enough room for me there too. The rooms in the house still went by the old names of "the dining room", "the parlor", and so on, even though no formal dining table sat in the one room and "the parlor" had long since lost any refined appeal for awaiting guests. I even knew the things they packed away in the attic... But, what I didn't know was the firsthand personalities of my ancestors as they had passed on before my day. Only Grandpa, the guy who came at the time of the marriage to my grandmother, was left from the older generation.

As a teenager, I spent many a moody hour sitting propped against that old wagon wheel below, with cows milling about, dreaming of getting away. I had a fascination with Asia and by sheer grit and will power I knew that someday, somehow I'd be able to leave, and see something of the world beyond.

 

My mother used to say to me, "You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl." Yeah, I guess she was right. That old farmhouse is long since gone and grown over into a jungle of weeds. But, it lives on in my mind.

Here I was, still a couple of years away from realizing my dream.