Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl

by Carol Bodensteiner

  A moment like this, experiencing such power, I wondered if I looked as different as I felt.

  The steering wheel fought against me with each bump we hit and my hands ached from holding on tight. I did not care. Dad entrusted me with this great responsibility. Struggling to keep the tractor headed perfectly straight, I moved from the world of dreaming, of pretending, to the real world. Just like that, I was working with the men.

  Ashes

  In all the years I was growing up, I can count on three fingers the times we took a vacation that didn’t involve going to stay with relatives. One of those was the trip to Stone City, a trip burned into my memory not so much for itself as for our return home and the losses that followed.

  The day of the trip, the alarm jangled and I awoke, my pajamas tangled around my arms and legs. I’d kicked the sheets off the end of the bed in the night in a fitful effort to find a cool place for my feet. Faint breaths of warm air carrying the sweet scent of new-mown hay drifted through the screen of the bedroom window. Rubbing sleepers out of my eyes, I got up, pulled on my shorts and buttoned up a sleeveless shirt as I slid my feet into the rubber thongs that had become my favorite footwear. They had the great advantage of going from dirty to clean under the faucet outside the back door. Mom bought them for me to wear to swimming lessons, but I now wore them anytime I couldn’t go barefoot. Except to church.

  Sue rolled out of bed right behind me. After we’d pulled up the sheets and spread, smoothing them over the pillows, we headed out to do the barn chores. The morning sun glared red on the horizon, promising another hot July day. As we shuffled down the hill toward the barn, dew on the grass was chilly wet on my toes. “No rain today,” I observed. Dad always said if there was dew, it meant no rain; if there was no dew, it very likely would rain.

  Dad watched the weather signs every day, particularly when he had hay to put up. “Got that last cutting in without a drop of rain on it,” he’d comment in an off-handed way to a neighbor, as though it didn’t mean particularly much. “Yup. That’ll be good hay,” the neighbor would respond.

  In an unspoken competition, Dad and the other farmers watched each other, noting who got crops in first, whose hay was cut but still in the field when it rained, who kept weeds mowed in pastures and who didn’t, who still had corn standing in the field when it snowed. Observations such as these were shared every night when we had supper and it wasn’t long before we kids were keeping an eye on our neighbors, too. The neighborhood was tight-knit. Through an unbroken grapevine of casual conversation at the feed store, at the gas station, after church let out, or by phone when it was urgent, they also knew who needed help. Then they offered that help quietly or they just showed up.

  Dad and the hired men had finished putting up the second cutting of hay earlier in the week, the bales stacked high in the new barn south of the milking parlor. That meant there wouldn’t be hired men at dinner and so we’d be able to take the drive Mom had promised again last night.

  “I want you girls to see some things,” she explained when we asked where we were going and why. “It will be a little vacation,” she added. Her words sent a thrill of anticipation rippling up my spine. A trip that had no useful purpose like getting groceries or a part for the tractor. A day devoted to just driving somewhere unknown. A few hours when who knows what might happen. I was ready.

  Mom said that Grant Wood, a famous artist, had lived in Stone City. I fancied myself to have a future as an artist. After I finished my assignments at school, I went to the bookshelf and pulled down the “H” encyclopedia. It held pages of pictures of all different kinds of horses. Arabians. Quarter Horses. Palominos. And my favorite, Indian Ponies. Little Joe Cartwright rode an Indian pony on Bonanza. Horses were far and away my favorite thing to draw, and I drew them all the time.

  I saw the ads in Dad’s Successful Farming magazine, the ads claiming I might have a real future as an artist. If I just drew the Pirate and sent it in, Real Professionals would assess my talent. I could not imagine quite how it worked, but I believed if I could re-create that exact Pirate, exactly as he appeared in the drawing, I would win. I would be judged a Talented Artist. In my bedroom, door closed from the prying eyes of my sisters, I drew the Pirate, spirited a stamp and envelope from Dad’s desk drawer in the kitchen, and ran my drawings to the mailbox. My sisters and Mom and Dad would be so surprised when I won.

  I ignored the tiny detail that I had drawn the pirate and the cowboy in a similar ad and sent them in several times before and heard nothing. I figured the Real Professionals were busy with their own art, or I hadn’t made my copy exact enough, or my letter got lost, or their letter to me got lost. Nowhere in my thinking did it occur to me they thought I had no talent. Of course I had talent. My teacher Miss Fowler said so and so did Mom when I showed her the horses I drew.

  One year I positioned a card table by my bedroom window intent on sketching the hills, trees and fields north of our house. I imagined myself painting stunning landscapes with my eight-color watercolor set and the leftover paints from my last paint-by-number project. The results were more akin to cave drawings. Nothing I drew looked remotely like anything I saw in the magazines Mom stacked away in the crawl space of the attic. I abandoned my studio after a few days, discouraged. Then in a little while the idea would flit through my mind again, like a migrating bird in the spring, and I’d pull out pencils and paints and crayons to try once more.

  But now, NOW, I was going to get to see where a real artist painted. By seeing where he worked, by seeing what he saw when he painted, I could figure out how to paint like a real artist.

  On the day of our trip to Stone City, Mom finished packing a lunch and Grandma Jensen put away the last of the breakfast dishes as we girls changed into clean shorts and shirts. The sun was up full in the sky, the heat undeterred by the least wisp of cloud. Sweat beads collected under my bangs, trickling between my shoulder blades as we piled into our black Chevrolet sedan. Jane sat in front between Mom and Grandma because she always got carsick, leaving the back seat to Sue and me.

  Earlier that morning, Dad filled the car up from the barrel of gas he used to fill the tractors. Gas was 24 cents a gallon in town; it was cheaper bought in bulk. Plus, Mom wouldn’t have to stop for gas on the trip.

  “We’ll be back in time for milking,” Mom said to Dad as she stowed a picnic lunch in the trunk, climbed into the front seat and turned the ignition. Sue and I knelt on the back seat, waving out the window at Dad who disappeared in the cloud of dust stirred up as we motored up the lane.

  Mom drove often enough—to town for groceries, to 4-H meetings on neighboring farms, to Sunday school activities. But driving was, for the most part, Dad’s job, a man’s job. Some of the neighbor women didn’t drive at all. When Mom got behind the steering wheel, she gripped the wheel with both hands and never let go. Her back was ramrod straight and she leaned slightly forward to better see the road and anything that might be on it. She held this at-attention position until we arrived at our destination, whether 15 minutes or two hours later, all the while chewing vigorously on a stick of gum.

  As Mom negotiated the two-lane highway and rolling hills of eastern Iowa, we entertained ourselves with car games, most of which depended on one of us being the first to spot something. We competed to be the first to see Burma Shave signs—words of wisdom on boards nailed to successive fence posts. We read in unison. “Big mistake … Many make … Rely on horn … Instead of break … Burma Shave.” Each completed sequence resulted in giggles and groans and a frantic effort to write down the words to tell Dad when we got back home.

  We also kept a list of cars from other counties. Grandma had a prodigious memory for lists and could recite all 99 Iowa counties by name and number. She knew that Adair County was Number 1 as well as she knew that Jackson County was 49, all the way up to Wright County at 99. So each time we spied a new number, the only county designation on license plates at that time, she told us the county name.

  As w
e rolled over the last hills before the slow descent into the valley to Stone City, Sue and I pushed forward, craning to see everything as soon as humanly possible. Before long, our heads were fully in the front seat even though our bodies were technically still in the back. Bathed in the dusty golden sun, the valley was, I would come to learn, just as Grant Wood painted it—hilly corn and hay fields, trees in the fence rows—the ideal scene people visualize when they think of rural America.

  When we finally arrived, I was vaguely disappointed in a way I couldn’t quite define. Stone City was only a few buildings really, all made of big yellow limestone blocks from a local quarry. Billowing limestone dust followed us along the gravel roads and when Mom pulled into the churchyard at the top of a hill, yellow grit filtered out of the air and settled silent on the car. Dust already on the grass and the leaves of the huge, old oak trees surrounding the church made it seem as though we saw everything through a warm, amber filter. In the penetrating July sun, dust stuck to our sweaty bodies.

  “Don’t run in the church,” Mom called, as we kids rushed inside while she and Grandma walked at a pace suited to the heat. Inside, the thick limestone walls provided cool darkness and a brief escape from the heat and glare of the sun. Golden light filtered through the tall, stained glass windows, creating a soft glow on the worn pews. We tiptoed down the aisle, dragging our fingers along the top of each pew. I gazed up at Christ on the cross. The light, the feel, it was a place I might have painted if I’d known how. It did not occur to me to wonder about Grant Wood.

  In truth there was not much to see since Stone City was not a functioning town. There was an occupied house or two, no museum, no real store although there was a Coca-Cola machine into which we each slid a dime and pulled out a bottle of pop drenched at once in beads of moisture. While Mom and Grandma sat in the shade on a limestone bench, my sisters and I chased around under the trees, in and out of the buildings, threw sticks into the stream that ran through the valley. We were unimpressed by the few faded prints of Wood’s paintings Mom discovered hanging on the dusty walls in the dark, cobwebby recesses of one of the buildings.

  Within a short while, Mom got us all back into the car and we drove to Anamosa to the Grant Wood School, a one-room schoolhouse not at all dissimilar to our own. Nonetheless, we looked at everything, found desks that fit us, imagined for one second being painters because Mom suggested we should. How to become a painter was still a puzzle to me. The hills Grant Wood painted were our hills. His schoolhouse was like our school. His life—at least as much of it as I could see on this trip—seemed like my life.

  As we tried one desk and then another, laughing at the strange familiarity of another country school—though one that turned out someone famous—how could we have known what was happening at home? We live our lives unaware of events happening around us that are destined to shape us.

  By the time we came out of the school, Mom had unpacked our picnic lunch. We ate sitting on the dry grass in the shade of the car. All the car doors stood open to let the breeze—the only air conditioning we had available—blow through. The last syrupy sweet sips of my Coke bordered on being as hot as the sun reflecting off the car, but as I rolled the thick, green glass bottle between my hands I decided I liked it that way. I leaned back against the car, closed my eyes and breathed in the warm, dusty air, enjoying a day that was not so different from every day on the farm but that was, at the same time, very different.

  In no time, Mom packed everything back up and we headed home. Sue and I lay down, head to head, our bare feet on opposite window frames, the wind whipping through the open windows warming and cooling us at the same time. We’d be home in time for milking at 5:00. Grandma could easily have supper on the table by 6:00.

  Lying on the seat, my feet up against the window, I watched the sky cloud over and thought about the dew on the grass that morning. Maybe it would rain anyway; sometimes it did in spite of the signs. The closer we got to the farm, the heavier the clouds became until they were so thick and the sky so dark, it seemed like night.

  “There sure are a lot of cars,” Grandma observed when we were only a mile or so from the farm. Sue and I sat up as Grandma kept a running total of the cars we met.

  “There are,” Mom agreed. “I wonder if there’s a fire somewhere?” she added idly.

  Her comment set all of us to scanning the horizon for smoke. I recalled the recent fire on a neighbor’s farm that burned the house down in the middle of the night. The family had kids our age and we’d listened in open-mouthed awe as they described escaping the house in the middle of the night wearing only their pajamas, scooting down the stairs on their butts because the stairs were too hot for their bare feet. They got out okay, but after that, everyone talked about keeping hard-soled shoes by your bed just in case.

  The closer we got to our farm, the more cars there were. Grandma could barely keep up with her count. This many cars in late afternoon in rural Iowa was truly an uncommon thing. Mom gripped the steering wheel even more tightly in the face of this unexpected rural rush hour.

  As we drew closer to our lane, we realized many of those cars were turning in, driving up the hill to our farm.

  “Oh, no!” Mom exclaimed, her back and shoulders radiated anxiety as she edged forward into the steering wheel. Because it was so overcast, we had not seen smoke. Nor had we seen flames. Still, my skin crawled with snakes of fear at the sound in Mom’s voice. I wanted her to propel us immediately and directly home by her will, something I know she’d have done if she could.

  We made it up the lane to see our yard full of cars. All our neighbors crowded the yard along with many people I didn’t know.

  Fire had destroyed the barn full of new-baled hay by the time we got there. The fire department arrived in time to keep the fire from spreading to any of the other buildings and now they were still spraying water, pulling down what was left of the charred roof and poles. For many hours neighbors drove tractors dragging chains through the smoldering hay to make sure the fire was out.

  Spontaneous combustion, I heard the men say as I ran back and forth from the house to the barn with the sandwiches and thermos bottles of coffee Mom and Grandma made as fast and as easily as if they’d been planning all week to have several dozen visitors. Somehow in all that new hay, the men stacked a few bales that weren’t completely dry. The moisture made heat as the hay dried. Heat trapped in the middle of the stack built up until it spontaneously started the dry hay bales on fire. All that work, the new hay barn, all up in smoke. Anxiety and excitement mixed up inside, giving me a painful stomach ache. Watching Dad, I could not see past the soot and rivulets of sweat running down his neck to how he felt.

  The next day some neighbors returned and worked with Dad to clear away the rest of the burned-down building. There was nothing left of the hay to salvage.

  That afternoon, when she was sure the fire was out, Mom brought us kids down to the barnyard. On any other day, we would have raced ahead, but now we clung to the safe haven of Mom’s side. Almost afraid to look, we edged around her to stare at the remnants of charred beams and sodden hay bales. Mom stood shaking her head, her lips in a tight line, her hands resting on her hips, the hem of her cotton shirtwaist dress rippling in the breeze. As worry crinkled around in my stomach, I looked up at her. What did this mean to us? I didn’t know.

  After a bit, Mom reached down and picked up a piece of charcoal left by the fire. She stared at it for a few moments, then smiled at me, “Artists use charcoal like this to draw with. You could give it a try.” I looked down at the charcoal and up at Mom. Then I knew it was all okay.

  Over the course of the summer, Dad built another hay barn to replace the one that burned. And by the end of the summer, the new barn was filled with hay. What this cost or how he came up with the money or where the hay came from, I don’t know. I do know there was no insurance. Dad and Mom didn’t talk about things like this around us kids. They just managed.

  I spent many days that summer
trying my hand at charcoal drawing. It did not take long to learn that charcoal drawing, like other kinds of drawing and painting I’d tried, was not a talent of mine. Those failed artistic attempts left me with a sense of loss and a smoldering creative yearning that rekindled time and again over the years.

  As a child I saw limited options. Art was drawings. Over time though, in part because of that summer, I came to realize that creativity takes many forms and charcoal can be used for writing as well as drawing.

  My folks swept away the ashes and built a new barn. It took me considerably longer to replace one creative dream with another, to let go of my interest in drawing and to replace my paintbrush with a pen.

  Epilogue

  “You know you’ve been gone from the farm a long time when you get nostalgic about milking dairy cows,” my sister said, shaking her head as she read one of my stories.

  I chuckled. I guess that’s right. Only time can soften the memory of getting up every single day at 5 a.m. Only time can turn milking cows into an event you joyfully anticipate. Only time can make you remember with fondness the cows that kicked in irritation whenever you attached a milking machine, leaving bruises all along your forearms. Only time can erase the feel and smell and taste of a manure-caked, rain-soaked cow tail slapping you in the face. Well, actually you may never forget that!

  It’s true my memories are made more beautiful by a golden glow that shines brightly on the positive, while shading the negatives with forgetfulness. But all the stories I’ve written are true, to me at least.

  When Dad and Mom retired from the farm in the early 1970s, they asked me if I wanted to take over. Married for four years, with a child of my own, my life and career on another track, I said no. I return to that decision again and again, sometimes with regret, playing little ‘what if’ games in my head. More often I accept the reality of a husband who would never have been content in farm life. But always, yearnings tug at my heart. The farm life I lived with family close and values solid, always pulls me back. To me as a child, life was simple and pure. And I saw that life as best. It gave me the foundation to become a productive adult.