Janet's Blog

The fall after Mom graduated from Bloomfield High School, she got her first teaching job at a one room school in Knox County. She taught there for two years in the early 1950s, marrying my dad in December of the second year, and joining him on his army base when the school year ended in May. When I was in Junior High, Mom started back to college to get her teaching degree, finally graduating while I was in college. As I was going through some of Mom and Dad’s old photos and documents recently, I found a couple of stories—the rough drafts, really—that Mom had written for one of her college classes. Now, as schools all across Nebraska are starting in the week to come, I think it is fitting for me to include the following story in my blog. So, here is Mom’s autobiographical story about a young, resourceful, one room school teacher who had to deal with a scary situation.  The young teacher struggled up the hill with the wastebaskets of trash, grumbling to herself. “It’s been a month no...

My dad struggled a bit with school. He once told me that he had Rheumatic Fever as an eighth grader, missing two whole months at the one room, country school he and his siblings attended. He said he felt like he never caught up. Nevertheless, he graduated from Bloomfield High School in 1951.  Dad was a sophomore when he met my mom, an incoming freshman, and the two of them clicked immediately, despite their differences. She was an outgoing cheerleader who lived in town; he was a quiet farm boy. She excelled in school, while he had to work hard to pass some of his classes. She walked the few blocks to and from school everyday. Dad and his older brother, Lee, drove an unheated Jeep the ten miles to and from their isolated farmhouse. But in the winter, when the harsh, northeastern Nebraska weather made travel difficult, they boarded with an older woman in town, recalling, in later years, how she never gave them enough to eat. Like most teenage boys of that era, Dad took a shop class i...

I was reading an article the other day about a mom in England who let her young daughter ride her horse to school one morning. The mom rode along, too, on her own horse, and led her daughter's pony home afterwards. The main issue with this was the fact that the school children all gathered around the pony, just outside the school gates, to pet the horses. When one entitled eight-year-old insisted that she wanted to ride the other girl's pony, the horses' owner let her know that it wouldn't be safe for her to do that, since she had no helmet or prior experience. Upon hearing that response, the girl's equally entitled mother pitched a fit, insisting that her daughter be allowed to ride and, when that failed, she complained to the school authorities that horses should not be ridden to school unless everyone (especially her darling daughter) was also allowed to ride. I guess that riding horses to school has become a novelty. I've ridden horses since before I could w...

When I was a baby, I lived with my Mom and Dad in a tiny little trailer house on the home place, a few steps away from the main farmhouse where my paternal grandparents lived with their two youngest daughters. The trailer, which was considerably smaller than many modern-day RVs, had a kitchen, living room, and bedroom, but only one sink, in the kitchen, and a toilet in a little nook all by itself. When any of us needed to bathe, we had to use the clawfoot tub in the farmhouse bathroom. One-year-old me, in our cramped trailer house. Around the time I turned two, Mom and Dad rented a farm a few miles away from the home place, just a mile outside of town. I am sure they were excited to move to their own place, with a real house, but they were not so excited to discover that the new house didn't have any indoor plumbing. They set out to remedy that situation as quickly as possible, but it takes some time to bury a septic tank and install plumbing in a house that has never had it before...

Doves and pigeons, pigeons and doves: ever since I was a little girl, I’ve noticed them. In my experience, I've found pigeons to be city birds, while doves live in smaller communities or in the country.  Years ago, even centuries ago, people hunted both birds for food. Even now, they are still hunted in some parts of the world.  Over the years, I’ve been acquainted with a few people who hunt doves, and I’ve known some who shoot pigeons because they are considered to be nuisance birds, but I've never known anyone who hunts pigeons to provide food for their families. I’ve enjoyed eating pheasants, quail, and wild turkey, and I’ve suffered through meals of duck and goose, but I’ve never eaten either pigeons (sometimes called squabs) or doves.   In the US, pigeons are not currently a popular food because they can’t be raised commercially in large numbers, making them too expensive to eat. I suspect the same is true for doves. Additionally, even country pigeons are associated...

Have you ever noticed how one event leads to another, and another, all through our lives? For example... Because my Dad was in the Army, I was born at Fort Benning, Georgia. Because my parents grew up in the Bloomfield area, so did I, at least for a little while. Beause my Dad was raised in the Methodist church, so was I, until we moved away from Bloomfield. Because my Dad's parents farmed, Dad did, too, after he left the Army. Because Dad received training to be a company clerk in the Army, he realized he had the skills to do something besides farming. That's why we moved to Norfolk, and Mom and Dad began their venture into the hotel business. Because I grew up in hotels, I lived in a more diverse community than most of my extended family and friends, and learned skills that most kids didn't have. Because we had no backyard, I joined my family in exploring the surrounding parks and countryside nearly every weekend, which inevitably resulted in closer family relationships a...

My family has always been a feather pillow family. As long as I can remember, my maternal grandma kept everyone well-supplied with pillows. I'm sure she cleaned old pillows and recycled the feathers into new ticking from time to time. Or, maybe, like Bill's grandma, she took her old pillows to the dry cleaners to be cleaned and reticked. Some of her pillows contained fresh feathers or goose down, obtained from a local, northeastern Nebraska farmer, because she did not raise any kind of feather- or down-producing fowl herself. When I was visiting Mom and Dad last week, I had a chance to go through some old suitcases filled with century-old, family photographs. I enjoyed seeing photos of my mom and grandparents as young children, as well as vintage photos of some great-grandparents I never knew. One photo stood out. At the turn of the twentieth century, when photography was still in its infancy, it was common for rural Nebraska families to be photographed outside their homes, wit...

It's been more than three months now since Uncle Gary left this earth. He knew he might not survive the surgery to repair his aortic aneurysm. After living with the aneurysm for years, and enduring several other procedures along the way, his last surgery was his surgeon's heroic, final effort to fix something that was finally beyond repair. Gary would be the first to tell you that he had lived a satisfying life. Except for one rather brief marriage, he lived alone in the house he had bought in North Platte. He had a large, loyal group of friends there, where he had retired after working there as a dispatcher and, eventually, communications supervisor, for the Nebraska State Patrol. I would characterize Gary as usually soft-spoken, diligent, determined, ethical, hard-working, and loyal to family and friends. He loved sharing his garden space with his neighbor, and sharing his produce with his friends. After his sister, my Aunt Ellen, was no longer around to make jelly, he learne...

It seems like such a long time ago, when the celebration of Christmas was new to me, and so exciting, and sparkly, and holy. And yet, in some ways, it just seems like a short time ago, when I posed in my red velveteen skirt in front of Grandma's tinsel-covered Christmas tree in Bloomfield, my newest doll in one arm, with my other hand resting possessively on the handlebars of my new (to me), light blue tricycle. Little Danny had something new to ride, too, a rocking horse, possibly made by Grandpa in his basement workshop. His left hand was poised on the horse, ready to ride into the sunset, sixgun pointing at some invisible villain. He was even dressed for the job, just like every other little boy who lived in the late 1950's. This is the only Christmas picture I have from my childhood. Black and white photos, like this one, were only taken on special occasions and, even then, we weren't guaranteed a good picture, since we had to wait and see what developed, weeks later, w...

Here I sit, watching the snow fall steadily down, outside the kitchen window. The blizzard hasn't really started yet, but the freezing rain, followed by this snow, has arrived, just as numerous meteorologists have predicted, so I expect the winds to crank up to hurricane force within a couple of hours, as forecasted.  After a relatively dry winter, here in the Nebraska Panhandle, we have already had about sixteen inches of heavy, wet, snow in March. This year, March has come in like a lion. You've probably heard the old adage, "in like a lion, out like a lamb," referring to the month of March, which is supposed to start out with winter's full fury, and end with the promise of spring. I think it really worked that way, most years, when I was a little girl living in northeastern Nebraska. When we moved down to Fairbury, though, March sometimes started off with spring-like weather right away. When Bill and I  relocated to northern Michigan, we were surprised...

Perhaps I should call it Grandpa's stick bed, or even, Uncle Gary's stick bed, because it probably belonged to one of them first. It was a simple, army-green cot, just a wooden frame with a canvas sling suspended from one side to the other. No one would call it a comfortable bed, by any means, but thousands of army privates, and undoubtedly some officers, too, had used one like it when their only other choice was the cold, hard ground. I'm not sure who first brought it to Grandma's house, but my brother and sister and I often argued about who got to sleep in a sleeping bag on the stick bed, and who had to sleep on the living room couch or share Aunt Ellen's double bed. When we spent a week with Grandma and Grandpa in Bloomfield every summer, Laura and I usually shared the bed in Ellen's room, and Dan usually got Uncle Gary's bed to himself. But, if Mom came to spend a few days, too, or if Aunt Ellen joined us for the week, as she often did, someone g...

It seems like no one fries chicken any more. After all, fried chicken is time consuming to make, and high in fat content--and besides, most kids these days prefer chicken nuggets to chicken with bones. When I was a preschooler, when my family still lived on a farm outside of Bloomfield, fried chicken was practically a household staple. Mom raised chickens--lots of chickens--so we had plenty of eggs and no lack of chickens to roast or fry. Fried chicken was my favorite, and a fried chicken heart was the choicest tidbit. Back then, no edible poultry parts were ever wasted. Sometimes, women chopped up the organ meats and put them in stuffing or gravy, but Mom always fried them, along with the back and neck, and someone always ate them. Dad liked chicken gizzards and liver, but the heart was the only giblet I ever wanted. We always ate our big meal at noon, so Dad would be provided with sufficient fuel to complete his strenuous farm work each day. During harvest, it wasn't uncomm...

Dad had been out working in the field on that sunny, spring morning, when he stopped to come into the house, and called me over to see what was in his pocket. At three or four years old, I was curious about everything, so I hurried over to see what he had brought me. Carefully, he reached his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a tiny, fluffy, brown, baby bunny, staring at me with its beady, black eyes. I reached for it eagerly, and he taught me how to hold it gently, while Mom went to find a shoe box. We lined the box with grass from our yard, then placed the bunny in the shoe box when I tired of holding it. For the next few days, my nameless bunny lived in the box, behind the cookstove, where it was warm. After the chores were finished on Sunday morning, we all got ready for church and Sunday School, leaving the bunny safely in his box behind the stove, while a savory beef roast, and pared potatoes and carrots, cooked in the oven. We only lived a mile northwest of Bloomf...