I carried my ability to work hard, to be independent, to overcome challenges, into a successful career in public relations. I rechanneled my desire to be an artist from painting to writing. Most important, my family—parents, sisters and grandmothers—and the family values they taught helped me raise a good son into a fine man.
A wonderful childhood could not shield me from the tough stuff of life, particularly a painful divorce after 13 years of trying to hold my marriage together. But it did give me the tools, over time, to learn and grow from the experience. And I married again with optimism and a willingness to learn from my mistakes.
To this day, I enjoy creating something tangible with my hands—a farm-instilled value. Any day in which I bake cookies or dig in the garden or clean the house or trim the hedge is better than a day when I while away the hours reading. My husband and I garden, and I can and freeze the produce, but I acknowledge I will never keep up with my mother. At 91, she still put in a garden and ended the summer with fruit cellar shelves lined with pints and quarts of vegetables and fruits and meat she cans herself.
Someone asked me if kids growing up on farms today could have the kind of experience I did.
I hesitated. I wanted to say, sure. Kids still work on farms with their parents. Farm kids still absorb solid values working on the land.
But I stopped. After thinking about it for a moment, I had to say, no. Farm life as I experienced it is slipping away by the day. A farm of 180 acres—the size of our farm—would be hard-pressed to support a family these days. Today’s farmers manage thousands of acres instead of hundreds. In the late-1950s, some 1.8 million dairy farms dotted the landscape of the United States; dairy farmers were considered the backbone of the country. By 2007, that number dropped to 65,000.
The world has changed more than the 40 years that have passed since my years on the farm.
By the time I reached high school in the 1960s, the pace of change had accelerated. The Russians launched Sputnik and the space race shifted into high gear. Instead of a test pattern at midnight, television airs news 24/7. We watch wars fought in real time. The Internet and cell phones often make it easier to interact with someone halfway around the world than a family member in the next room.
So, no, even farm kids live in a radically different world than the one I experienced.
I also have to think my parents were unique. I still don’t know how they made us see work as a gift. Whether in the barn milking the cows, in the garden planting radishes or potatoes, in the basement butchering chickens, they were there and we kids were there, each of us involved, each of us important, each of us truly valued.
I have only to close my eyes and breathe in to remember the smell of a field of new-mown hay, flex my fingers to remember the feel of a calf sucking as it learned to drink, open my ears to the sound of my mother smoothing over a cooking mistake. Then I remember my dad sitting on the feedbox petting a yellow tomcat and I want to go sit by him again and talk about the work that has yet to be done.
Carol Bodensteiner left the farm when she went to college, but she has remained close to agriculture all her life, first as a farm magazine editor and later as a public relations counselor to the agribusiness industry. Her essays have been published in numerous journals. She and her husband live on an acreage near Des Moines, Iowa.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
Prologue
Country Hospitality
Sunday Dinner
A Cow Story
Mulberry Pie
The Harvest Auction
Turning Ten
House Chores
A Dangerous Game
The Country Fair And The Teddy Bear
Options
I Bet You A Million Bucks
Laundry Lessons
Another Cow Story
Economics 101
One Christmas
Making Hay
Ashes
Epilogue
About the Author
Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl Page 18