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Look at Mom’s Hands

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8661 Deer Run Dr. * Victoria

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         After renting for 12 years, Dad bought the farm from Grandpa Opdahl in 1960.  Dad used to plant a lot of corn, raise soybeans, and bale alfalfa for the cattle.  “The last year I had corn was 1979,” he said.  “There just wasn’t any money in it.  I sold my corn drier for $10,000 plus a propane tank, to a guy from Gary, South Dakota, who was driving a Cadillac.  Three years later I went to a sale and there was my drier.  He was being foreclosed on.”

         From then on, Dad was solely into grain farming, no corn, no cattle, only wheat and soybeans.  He bought a used combine and did lots of custom combining for farmers in South Dakota, spending overnights away from home, sometimes hardly having a place to lay his head.  But it worked out, and it meant their Minnesota winters were free for traveling around the world, often with friends and sometimes alone.  They’ve been to China, Argentina, Hawaii, much of Europe, and other places.  Allan and I traveled to London, Paris, Normandy Beach, Belgium, and Holland with Mom and Dad in 1997.  It was a trip of a lifetime with a lot of laughing.

         Now we were travelling together to Tioga, North Dakota.  Mom and I often observed how far we could see across the flat land, for miles and miles, with no trees or hills obscuring our view to the horizon.  One time I commented on the big sky and how much of it we could see from our car windows and how different it was from looking out the windows of our home in Victoria.  Allan and I live in the trees and we can hardly see any sky, except for the rising and setting sun.  I had said how strange it was for me to see so much sky. 

         It brought Dad a memory of when he was in the Navy, which he had joined directly out of high school, before he and Mom got married.  “When I was in the Philippines, after a year, a group of us took a boat and went to shore,” said Dad, “and it was strange to see women.  We didn’t see any women on the ship and it was strange to see them again.”

         Mom piped in, “They even had legs.”

`        I told Dad that his story reminded me of Addie and Gunnar saying how strange it is to see so many cars when they come to Victoria.  People mainly drive pickup trucks in Tioga.  Jenny also says it’s now strange for her to see all of our trees.  There are few trees in Tioga

         Conversation continued in the comfortable Odyssey, meandering from here to there.  One time my mother said, “I always remember Mama sitting downstairs in the basement on a pile of corncobs on my wedding day, cutting up cabbage for my wedding dinner.  There was water in the basement that spring so she was sitting on a pile of cobs.”  Remember, that house didn’t have a drain, and water would seep in.

         After one of our stops for gas, Dad told us a story about when he and Mom had their motorhome,  maybe twenty years ago, which they took fishing with friends who also had motorhomes.  They would drive the big outfit and pull their fishing boat behind it.  Said Dad, “One time I filled my motorhome with half diesel fuel by mistake and I went into the clerk at the station and asked, ‘Now what should I do?’ and she said, ‘Pay for it.’  I filled the rest of the tank with regular fuel and it smoked like hell until it was all gone.”

         Then it was back to farming, this time to the days when Dad was a kid.  His parents, my Grandma and Grandpa Claeys, also farmed near Ghent.  As I said, their farms were only about a mile or so apart.  Said Dad, “Pa lost the farm in 1934 and borrowed $1,000 to get it back -- $500 from my Uncle Red Engels and $500 from my Uncle Andrew Claeys -- with $6,000 due in the fall.  That was 1942 when he bought it back.  When the banker came out to see if we had gotten the $6,000, Ma said to us kids, ‘Get out to the field and pitch manure.  Look like you’re doing something!  It ain’t for us we're doing this.  It’s for  you!’  She always said that."

 

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

The Victoria GAZETTE

May 2014

In more recent farming days of my parents, while the boys were running three combines, Dad’s job was to follow the combines and haul truckloads of harvested grain from the fields to their storage bins.