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INSURANCE AGENCY INC.

David Barsness, CPCU

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Sue’s Album

A symphony of photos

and fewer than a thousand words

at www.VictoriaGazette.com

Look at Mom’s Hands

Dedicated to the sunshine of truth,

the moonshine of meeting deadlines,

and the starshine of Victoria.

         All around the house there was a wire fence, held up and held together with big round wooden posts spaced a few feet apart.  “It kept the kids in,” said Mom.  The wire fence was attached with horseshoe nails to the posts.  Mom and I remembered that’s where we hung the socks when we washed clothes.  Each sock fit through the squares of the wire fence and the wind never took them.  The long wash lines were strung near the fence, between other wood posts, with a wren house propped on each end.  I remember a squeaky latched metal gate to the front door. 

         Said Mom, “The chickens pretty much stayed out of the yard.  We never fenced them in but they never left the farm.  When we wanted to catch them for butchering, we’d go out in the trees at night and hook ‘em on their legs and hold ‘em until we had two or three in one hand and then put them in old wooden crates until morning.”  I myself remember being part of the moonlight chicken crew.

         The next morning Mom would haul heavy five-gallon pails of hot water from the basement in the house, out to the machine shed, and Grandma Opdahl would drive over to help feather and gut and cut up the chickens.  The work table was a big wooden hayrack and we all stood and worked at it like an assembly line. 

         In the 1980's, Mom used a big gas heater to heat water outside to clean chickens. She had run across it in on a trip to Belgium and brought the big heavy contraption home on the plane.  Said Dad, not too happy at the time about the purchase, "Every time we were in the airport, all the bells went off.” 

         I said to my parents, “I didn’t know we were dirt poor.  I thought we were kind of rich because we ate well compared to my school friends, who hardly ever had steak, and our house was nice, inside if not outside.  Said Mom, “Everybody was poor.  We were all in the same boat.”

         How could they afford a trip to Belgium?  Stated Mom, "We did it anyway.  And the boys were already farming."

         “Now we sit here with two houses," said Dad, who didn’t say that they were beautiful houses -- the one at home on the farm much expanded and renovated into a four-bedroom, four-bathroom, modern kitchen, three-car garage home with big lawn bordered with now large evergreen trees, planted individually by hand by my parents, and watered daily by Mom with a long hose stretched across the yard.

         Dad didn’t say that their brick home in Texas, which they designed, had a giant-size master bedroom and bath, a spacious guest bedroom and bath, a Texas room, a handy laundry room (a drain was not needed), and a two-car garage, all on one level in a golf course community.  He did say, “I never thought we’d end up this way.  Harold Opdahl sure helped me out.”

         For Dad’s birthday we went to P.F. Chang’s for dinner.  They had never eaten at that relatively new restaurant a few miles from the Alamo Country Club.  We shared shrimp in lobster sauce and ahi tuna.  They liked it and subsequently introduced the place to their Texas friends. 

         The next morning, Saturday, March 5th, 2011, Dad’s actual birthday, we sat for two hours at Whataburger, a fast food restaurant just down the road, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., drinking coffee and visiting with their friends who also had the same morning ritual.  Fern and Deloyd of Gibbon sat by us. 

 

Click here to continue “Look at Mom’s Hands.”

The Victoria GAZETTE

May 2014

Dad would drive a manure spreader into the cattle yard and shovel the manure by hand into the wagon.  When the roter stopped working, and the manure wouldn’t spit out onto the field by itself, Dad said he just drove out and sort of dumped it on the field.”