The little man of the mountains, my daddy, continues his tale of the houses and buildings in the canyon. His story today is of the chicken house and buildings beside the hill
When the family lived under the burned-out mountain on the other side of the S. weet Grass, they had some shelters for chickens and rabbits.
The report was that weasels and mink killed some of the rabbits. My father did too. His were dressed out and sent to the kitchen. When they moved to the new location in 1925 the rabbits were turned loose. For several years traces of Belgian Hares could be seen in the wild rabbits. I don’t know what kind of shelters they had for the livestock. But they kept chickens there and Mother and Laddie, the Great Dane-Grey Hound, tried to keep the hawks under control. When the dog was in the yard, he protected the hen flock.
the youngest child of the family with “under the hill” behind
Very early on, maybe by moving day in 1925, a log chicken house was built for the new site. This was kept in service until well into the end of 1940 when a new building was erected, and the old building was torn down. Both of these faced the main yard and were under the hill side. The newest one was made of logs sawed on three sides. It sat about 75 feet from the boundary fence. There were two more structures along the underside of the hill. The one closest to the road running up the hill was a cellar. A cellar was an important part of almost every farm or ranch. I think that its mark still remains. In town most houses had a basement. Out in the country root cellars were necessities. They were dug in the ground below the freezing line. Ours was dug into the hillside. The back of it was well underground. The entrance to the cellar was made of two rooms about six feet square with connecting doorways. A mound of dirt covered these two entrance rooms. These helped keep the frost out of the back part of the cellar which had bins for potatoes, carrots, beets, and some years a few cabbage heads. When the outside temperature was twenty or thirty below zero, a kerosene lantern was set up in the produce room. By the time spring weather came potatoes and beets tasted musty and the carrots took a long, long time to cook.
A small red sided board building stood between the root cellar and the chicken house. This was a granary. A sizeable bin across one end held a pile of wheat for the chickens. Sometimes a sack of oyster shell and Purina mash for baby chickens sat on the floor. One year a lumber customer from Two Dot left a heap of potatoes there. The ones that lasted until cold weather were moved to the cellar. Once, when a band of sheep was being taken out of the mountains, Kenneth Fallang left a fat lamb in the granary for Mother.
A brooder house about twelve feet square was put up between Ernest’s Bunk house (George’s) and the incoming road.
My Guest Author, my dad, continues his project as he talks about the houses in which the family lived in the canyon. It wasn’t just people who needed housing, the animals did too, and Uncle Dick said some of the animals were people, too.
Now, that puts the family indoors, makes a bunk house for the work crew, and facilities for school. However, folks needed the help from the horses, milk from the cows, meat from a fatted calf, eggs from chickens. All of this protected by a dog. This meant housing for the horses, the cows, the hound dog, and the poultry. I’m not sure which shelter came first, likely a chicken coup and then shelter for the work horses or Suzie the black Jersey cow with horns. Sometime in Suzie’s life she was given housing privileges in that small log building that was moved and recycled to make the schoolhouse for Sister Ellen, Brother Jack, Cousin Billy, and Buster Woods. A cow shed and barn was built between the house and the property line. The front corner of the barn was about where the power pole now stands.
When I hit remembering age, we had Jitney and two teams of horses. Jitney was a buckskin mare mother got in a trade for two of Daddy and Ernest’s cows. Nina and Dolly were Daddy’s team. They were named after Nina Bea and Dolly Grey who were schoolteachers. Ernest’s team was named Punch and Schraeder. They would have been named Punch and Judy, but Judy died and was replaced by Schraeder – a half-eunuch horse named after Aunt Luella’s husband. The back corner of the barn housed two red milk cows that followed Suzie. They spent their energy fighting with each other. Their fights may have caused Delight to have a crippled calf.
The work horses had rooming rights on the front side of the barn. There were two or three two-horse sized stalls, a grain bin and room for hay, harness and horse-riding tack. One time Father went to a farm auction sale and bought what he thought was oyster shell for the chickens. When he got home, he opened the sack and found that it had rolled oats instead of oyster shell. He emptied it in the grain bin not knowing that they were poisoned oats[1]. The next evening Ernest fed his work team a scoop of grain. We were eating supper when there was a bang and crash sounding from the barn. One horse had fallen to the barn floor, the other horse was weak and trembling. The next several hours were spent doctoring poisoned horses.
A big barn was built in the early mid-thirties. That barn is still standing. A sizeable hay mow ran down the center of the barn. The north side was for horses and the south side was for two to four milk cows. They had their heads fastened in stanchions. A sizable calf pen and a maternity ward were on the cow side. There was also a walk-in bin for ground grain.
One day Baby Mary Jane tagged along with me when I put the feed out for the cows. A ruckus came from the bin. A weasel and a large rat were in a battle on top of the mound of grain. While I was filling mangers with hay, Little Sister Mary picked up a kitten and threw him in the bin with the rat and the weasel. I said, “Oh no!” and dropped the hay fork and ran down to rescue kitty Alexander.
When I got there the kitten was standing on the heap of grain trembling over a dead rat and a dead weasel. Baby sister thought she had a super kitten.
Most years we bought a couple of weaner pigs. We kept them in a pen near the door to the cow barn. They were fed a slop of separated milk and cooking scraps followed up with some ground grain. One autumn when the pigs were getting fat and lazy, the grain was poured out before they got the slop bucket full of milk. I was about four years old and was walking by the pig pen when one of the pigs choked to death. He took a jump at the fence, squealed, and fell over. I squealed and ran to the house for pig help. The hired man cut the pigs throat and we had fresh pork two months early. The schoolteacher, Mrs. Tippit, wouldn’t eat the pork. She went back to town a few weeks later, and that was the good news for the school year.
[1] Oats treated with strychnine were used to poison gophers, woodchucks, rats and mice.
I’m of the opinion that birthday presents should be given to the mother instead of the one having a birthday. Don’t you think your mom deserves a gift? After all, what did you do besides be born? You were given a gift at birth – the gift of life.
With the coming of a new baby not only does the baby receive the gift of life, but that baby is a gift to the family, the community, and even the world.
Six years ago, an eighty-nine-year-old man received a present – a newborn baby girl. Little did the baby girl know that she received a great present, too – an eighty-nine-year-old man. They were kind of one in the same – two peas in a pod.
Three years ago, a ninety-two-year-old man promised a two-year-old girl that he would stick around for her third birthday party. He did, but then he left this world that same day. Even though the little man no longer lives on this earth, his gift of life continues to live in many of us. He left behind great treasures for us to find and nuggets of gold to mine.
We have the reminder in a little girl who exudes life that the gift keeps giving.
(And you pass by this way, you might see a little girl driving her electric tiny four-wheeler, standing behind the steering wheel, squealing, “Yee haw,” as she bounces through the yard.
Yep – a birthday present. Apparently someone didn’t get the memo about the mom getting a present, though mom did look kind of cute behind the wheel!)
To continue the history of Ward houses in the canyon, my Guest Author, my dad, was the first new addition to the new house, house #3.
The sawmill was set up on a hill and a flume was built to carry water from the spring to the sawmill. Then they built the house. It was their third and final house, one that would last more than eighty years. They moved into it in 1925. It would be the first house I lived in. Sister Ellen had lived nearly two years on the wrong side of the creek. Fortunately, she moved with them.
This was the house when it got fitted with a front yard. The structure to the right may have been a woodshed. The bunkhouse was set up on the right side of the yard. Of immediate importance was the bunkhouse, a chicken house, the mill building, a barn and a shelter for the automobile. I’ll tend to those later, but, first, I’ll give description of the house pictured above and its updating by additions and improvements.
The new 32′ by 24′ house was built on the sunny side of the valley where even the shortest winter day was six hours long. Logs were laid up. Each log reached full length of the wall. When the builders got to the right height for the door and window frames they sawed in door and window openings with a two-man crosscut saw. The house faced east. There was a door in front, about midways, and a door on the north side. The two front windows were about four feet from the floor. They were two feet high and four sashes long. A brace across the room held the Coleman gas lamp. The building was partitioned into three rooms and a pantry. The pantry was about eight-foot square. Its walls were ten and twelve inch boards standing on end like a palisade. Two rooms on the south end of the house ‑ each about twelve-foot square ‑ were used for bedrooms. The walls on the bedrooms were beaded tongue and groove. Above them was a ceiling of inch boards which made an attic storage area. The boards had been put up green. When they dried, they left wide cracks and the dust and debris fell into the bedrooms below. There was no ceiling over the great room. This made it a rustic A‑frame showing the rafters and the roof boards. It was supposed that the house would be used for four or five years depending on how much timber could be bought on the railroad section. When the railroad sold Ward and Parker the square mile of land and two more sections with it, the house took on a more permanent aspect.
The right back corner of the main room had a palisade – like partition (boards set up on end) to make a pantry cut off from the kitchen, table, and cook stove. An important inside job ‑ one for stormy days ‑ was improvement in the kitchen. The twelve-inch shelves didn’t make good storage space even if there was a walk-in pantry. “Niter” was needing some cupboards. Ward and Parker hand planed the boards and built a cupboard. A confrontation with a rat contributed to this project.
Pack rats thought frontier cabins were built for them. They considered pantries and cupboards their shopping malls. The new log house at Ward and Parker’s sawmill didn’t have a cupboard. Instead, the northwest corner of the main room in Ward and Parker’s log house was the pantry area. In the back of the pantry twelve-inch boards served as open shelves for plates, saucers, cups, pots and pans. This made an open market for rats.
Not only did the rats collect a share of the groceries, they also collected shiny buttons, silver spoons, spools of thread, ladies’ stockings and what not. Often, they would leave one of their treasures in exchange. For this reason, they were known as “Trade Rats.” However, the Trade Rats weren’t trading even, and Mrs. Ward was out to settle their hash. She set some traps. The rats stole them, but they made so much noise at their night games that it kept Mr. Ward awake. He leaned the twenty‑two Winchester against the wall and kept a light handy. He’d not only settle the rats’ hash, he’d make hash out of them.
One night a fuss arose in the pantry. It came from the top shelf behind the rows of sticky fly paper which hung down from the rafters like long sticky finger curls. Bud Ward grabbed the rifle. Babe took the kerosene lamp. When they pulled the pantry door open, the rat jumped off the shelf and hit the roll of fly ribbon which swung against another. Then the whole outfit flew through the air and crashed to the floor. The rifle went off at a flying object. It shot a hole in the roof. The rat, disguised with the fly ribbon, made for the door and got the right‑of‑way as the hunters didn’t know what they were up against. Soon after that the pantry had to go. The building, which was partitioned into three rooms and a pantry, would soon be trimmed back to just three rooms.
Bud Ward and Ernest Parker hand planed some pine boards and built a cupboard. After seventy years the trade rats succumbed to Deacon’s rat poison, the house slowly disintegrated, but cupboard was still in good shape. Babe Ward could rejoice. She got the best of the last trade.
The stovepipe you see in the above picture was connected to a black cook stove which had an oven regulated by a stove damper that directed the smoke to circle around the oven or go immediately up the chimney. The stove had a hot water reservoir at its right end and a warming oven on top which held a frying pan and various cooking pans. The pancake griddle hung on the wall. A square eight-foot palisade made a pantry for dish shelves, storage for sugar and flour cans, lard pail, und so viter.
A handmade table was in front of the pantry and cook stove. A bench bordered the sides of the table and a chair sat at each end. Our main lighting system was a Coleman gas lamp that hung from a rafter near the table. Sister Barbara was born in 1927. The prospects of a family increase were celebrated with a slab-sided addition to the original building. The addition was used as a storage area. It also housed a washing machine with a wooden tub. The dasher was driven by a cogged lever which pumped back and forth. A Sears, one-cylinder gas motor furnished the power for the machine. The exhaust pipe ran out through the side wall. The engine made a loud pop, pop, pop when it was running. When it got up the right speed it would take several rests between the pops. Baby sister, Barbara, learned to talk in the washhouse. Her first words were spoken to the popping engine. “Shut up. Shut up.”
In my remembering age (a few years after the cabin was built) there was a partition back to the left of the front door and between the door and the window. A chimney had been cut midway of the house beside the partition. A fifty-gallon barrel was modified into a heating stove. It did a great job in the wintertime. Frost would coat the windows, fingers of ice would run across water in a bucket alongside the east wall, but the stove would glow red. We would sit and watch it and feel secure through the winter nights.
The partition behind the heating stove was divided into two bedrooms. Mama and Daddy had the room on the left (East) and the children had the room on the right. The partition walls were painted an icky pea green. An attic was made over these two bedrooms. The stair ladder to the attic was next to the bed in the children’s room.
It was a “No, No,” to climb up the ladder and jump on the bed. Once when mother was in the garden or at the clothesline, my brother, Jack, swatted my bottom for committing this “No, No.” That was the lightest swat and the most heart-breaking swat I ever received.
Later a parlor and bedroom were added on at a right angle, midway of the cabins back wall. The parlor housed Father’s desk, a cot, and a piano. This had to be about 1929 because Mother had bought the piano from the Melville Hotel and the teacher, Miss Wall, gave Mother piano lessons there. This room was wainscoted with short slabs. Feed sacks covered the wall above the wainscoting. The sacks were sacks sealed with glue sizing and calcimined an off-pink color.
The next addition – two bedrooms, an entrance hall, and a place for a bathroom – really changed a cabin into a house. This was added in 1932 and plastered by Riley Doore. The pea-green partition was torn down.
Running water had been brought into the house. Wisely enough, a septic tank and sewer drainage were put in before the water was turned on. A coil of water pipe placed in the cook stove was connected to a tank in the bathroom. Then we had hot and cold running water – and a lay-down size tub. These replaced the two buckets of cold water, a slop water bucket under the kitchen sink and the round tin tub that had served faithfully on Saturday nights.
During the last half of the ’32-33 school year, the front corner room of the new addition served as a school room. Sydney and Margaret Brannin, and the teacher, Miss Drake, commuted to school horseback the last half of the school year, and old Spider carried Ellen and I to school at the Brannin ranch the first half of the school year. During the following summer the bunkhouse was sacrifice and recycled to make a schoolhouse halfway between the ranch and the sawmill.
Even with improvements some of the house was in trouble. In the original log building the bottom logs were laid on the ground. In time those logs started to rot and the floor joists followed it. Something had to be done. Some of the original floor was taken up and the rotting base logs were replaced with cement. [1]
Later improvements included a rock fireplace which was built around a “Heatilator” which circulated the warm air. We hauled rocks and hauled rocks and hauled rocks. Father fitted them together to form the rock fireplace. His descriptions of this job were apt. “We hauled in three loads of rock and hauled away four loads.”
Somewhere about 1939 a picture window was added on the east side of the house. A smaller picture window was on the west. The spindly Geranium cuttings by the front window took on new life and made blossoms in the wintertime. Shortly thereafter war broke out in Europe. “Battleship Linoleum” covered the floor and, with firearms mounted on the west wall, the house was ready for come what may!
[1] There was a pile of the diggings on the west side of the house. When Uncle Ed gave us a large green Hubbard Squash, I planted the seeds on that mound of dirt and raised a sizeable green squash bigger than most pumpkins.
The Ward family quickly outgrew house #1 which led to house #2. With two kids and a third on the way, along with the parents and Ernest, house #2 was getting crowded. My Guest Author, my dad, talks about the second dwelling of the family.
Here is a picture of house #2. Another old picture shows that the sawmill was set up in the central background. The two green trees beside the house had somehow escaped being burned. The skeletons of the burned-out forest lined the steeper side of the mountain just a few feet to the left of the cabin. When the first sizable rain came, the mountainside had no mulch to absorb the rainwater. A flood, black with soot and floating debris, threatened to wash down the house. For the next four years the burned-out timber colored the logging crew black and gave the laundress a difficult job. To add to this, it was hard to spend winter on the south side of the creek where the sun only came over the mountain four hours a day. By 1925 the twenty-foot log cabin was getting crowded. Weasels and mink ate the pet rabbits, and a bear stole a hundred-pound sack of sugar. Mother was ready to move. When the railroad company offered the chance to buy green living timber on the sunny side of the valley, they moved to what would be the permanent location.
Do you suppose she (“Niter” as Bud called her) got pregnant so they would build her a larger house in which to live?
Memories shared by Guest Author, my daddy, as told to him by those who experienced these events.
The promise of wedding bells was in the air. Their first sawmill duties included sawing lumber for the needed housing. The very first house they built was a frame building set up near a year-round spring[1] about three quarters of a mile further down the valley. The frame house huddled beside half a dozen trees across from the split top cliff-rock that borders the little spring creek.
This is the house that is pictured wrapped in snow with a digging crew on its roof. The next day (?) Ernest floundered his way through snow to get a midwife at the Brannin Ranch. My brother, John Carrington Ward, was home delivered here by his sweating, praying father. This was March, 1917.
On April 6th of that year the United States declared war on Germany. Both Ernest Parker and Bud Ward enlisted in the army and were sent overseas with the Army Engineers. Their experience with the sawmill proved beneficial. In France Ernest Parker would work a timbering crew, and Robert Ward would be Master Mechanic and sawyer of railroad ties and road and bridge timbers. Mother and her baby moved back to the Brannin ranch for the duration of the war.
When the next winter came it didn’t snow. The summer that followed had little rain, and a brush fire broke out near the falls of the Sweet Grass. The south side of the valley burst into flame. Two kids, Lloyd Rein and Benny Green, were riding in the Olson meadow. They saw the smoke and galloped up to tell Gordon (Langston) and Bill Briner who were working on the line fence between the Olson field and Brannin’s. Gordon left to collect some firefighting tools. Benny, Loyd, and Briner headed toward Brannin’s. They got there just as Babe Ward jerked the saddle off Dick Brannin’s horse, threw the saddle in the wagon for the Rein crew to deliver, jumped on the horse bareback and streaked over the hills toward Tronrud’s and the nearest phone to report the fire.
Within a few hours the mountains on the south side of the river were burned off from near the falls of the Sweet Grass to the Brannin Beaver ponds. When Ward and Parker came back from the war the mountains were still smoking. The scars of the fire dominated the valley for thirty years. Half of the available timber had burned. Some of the ‘wobbly” fire fighters, imported from the IWW Mine Union at Butte, nursed new blazes to augment their income. Bud Ward’s first civilian job was to dress in his army uniform, carry a rifle and ride shotgun for the lead Forest Ranger when he told the Wobblies they were fired. They looked at the glint in Bud’s eyes and decided to go back to Butte.
Blackened tree skeletons covered the south side of Sweet Grass Canyon. The Forest Service offered a permit to salvage the burned timber. The sawmill was set up on the shady side of the creek and a temporary cabin built on government land in a clearing at the foot of a burnt mountain. This was a place to live, but it wasn’t a house of Mother’s dreams. The next one would be. Soon the Ward and Parker sawmill would be back in business.
Question: how can you run a sawmill when the trees have all been killed by fire?
Answer: You salvaged the trees, turned black, you spit black and made blackened laundry for the laundress.
The mountain land not already settled was divided between the Northern Pacific Railroad and the National Forest. This meant setting up a sawmill on government land on the south side of the mountain about half a mile southwest of the Brannin holdings. They built house #2 near a spring that gushed clean water out from the blackened hillside. This was a log house, the sawmill was set up nearby, and some rabbit pens and chicken coups were built. The mink and weasels killed the rabbits. Hawks raided the chickens, and Mother and the Grey Hound-Great Dane dog battled the hawks. Brannin’s pet bear broke into this house and stole a fifty-pound sack of sugar. The sack tore open and left a trail of sugar across the floor. Later Uncle Gus killed the bear.
[1]The largest spring burst out of the ground at the foot of a meadow. When the sawmill was moved to its more permanent location on the hill above where Gommie’s house would be, a quarter of a mile-long flume was built to carry water from the spring to the sawmill where it would flush out the sawdust from the sawing operation. A smaller spring, coming out of the steep hillside was later boxed in and a pipe laid to carry water to the house (in the 1940s.).
One of the projects I assigned my dad several years ago was to write the history of all the buildings past and present at the Ward and Parker property in the Crazies. These written memories were the first part of that series. By my Daddy.
There are many places in this world which seem new to us, but someone has been there first. So it was even back up the creek on the Sweet Grass. I know of no one finding rings of rocks that had outlined teepee locations, but Indians had been there. There was a grave sized mound of dirt on the lower end of the rocky flat about 3/4th of a mile down the valley from where we lived. Mother thought it was an Indian grave. Nobody checked it out.
When I was ten or eleven years old I found a large buffalo skull and a brown-flint spear head that had fallen into the crevasse of an outcropping cliff beside the creek that ran out of the year round spring that furnished water for the house and sawmill that my father and his partner would build. Part of the flume they had built to carry water to the sawmill ran across the top of the outcropping cliff. If the skull and spearhead had not fallen into the cleft someone would have found it 10-12 years before I did. An Indian hunter was here and left his mark.
I carried the skull home and Barney Brannin used it for one of the porch decorations for the Brannin Lodge. I played around with the spearhead, throwing it and maybe pounding it with a rock. It ended up becoming lost. I think I know within fifty feet of where it is. In my mind I can see an Indian brave leaving his skull and spearhead as an offering to the Master of the Hunt. As late as the 1940’s there were still signs of early pioneers. Old logging trails wandered through the fire-killed trees near the Horseshoe Prairie. One could see the stumps of trees they had cut for the Northern Pacific Railroad. I saw a man’s name and a date carved in the base of a burned-out stump. I think the date was in the 1800’s. Someone said that ties cut for the railroad were floated down the creek in high water. Maybe so, Ed Brannin had floated saw logs down the Sweet Grass to his sawmill near Basin Creek.
C. M. Rein had a sawmill at the foot of the steep mountain west of Bruin Creek where Section 17 corners sections 18, 7, and 8. This may have been set up before 1900. We pastured cows and calves in this back corner of Section 17. I don’t think Barbara and Ralph have ever used it for a pasture. Sometimes the younger generation is wiser than their elders.
One place we knew as the “Logging Camp” was across the valley from Gommie’s Lake at base of Bruin’s Hump. Ed Brannin or C. M. Rein used this twenty or thirty years before Daddy and Ernest did in the 1930’s when they were sawing out the standing of fire-killed timber for house logs. The material from living trees would warp, and the bark on the green logs had to be peeled off. The dead timber made tough, non-shrinking timber that already had the bark removed from it. The “bunk house” cabin that nephew George uses was built from logs sawed from fire killed trees. Others went to John Moss and Carl Bussey houses on the west side of Big Timber.[1]
For years a rotten log and the remains of a cellar pit could be seen on each side of the road near the line fence west of Gommie’s Lake. The cellar pit and rotting base log was still visible in the 1930’s. Likely the place was used by the tie cutters of the 1800’s. This is where Bud Ward and Ernest Parker set up a cookstove and slept on the ground.
Ward and Parker’s had purchased a sawmill from Ed Brannin. They set it up at the far end of the open land up the valley from Gommie’s Lake.[2] This was in 1916. Setting up the mill was their first construction project. They dug a watering pit for the steam engine in the swampy ground beside the field and laid down a track for the sawmill carriage to run on. In this picture the sawmill would have been located just right of midpoint of the far edge of the field. The stump in the foreground seems to be pointing at it. The place for the cook stove would be at the tree line just off the picture.
[1]My Freshman year of high school Barbara, Kitty and I boarded with a Mrs. Smith in the Moss house. Mrs. Moss’s green trimmed Kalamazoo kitchen range helped pay for the Moss house.
[2]Nearby a rotted log showed where a cabin once stood. Nearby was a pit and mound of dirt where a root cellar had been built. Likely these were remains of a camp used in the late 1800’s by workers cutting ties for the Northern Pacific Railroad.
This morning while on my walk, I saw a few blackberries in bloom. That can only mean one thing here in the south: Blackberry Winter is just around the corner. In fact, cooler temperatures have been predicted for this weekend. Come to think of it, there were a couple of cooler days last week. Maybe that was Blackberry Winter, but the azaleas are blooming, and dandelions, and columbine, and daffodils, and the roses are budding. Maybe it’s one of those winters. I’m so confused!
Before we had the weather channel or meteorologists to give us the twenty-four-hour weather report, we relied on the old timers to “read” the weather. They could look at the sky and tell us what kind of weather to expect. My ancestors recognized the signs by observing nature’s phenomenon. They took note of when trees and plants leafed out and bloomed, when birds appeared, habits of bugs and animals, temperature and wind changes. Farmers knew when to plant their crops and gardens, when to take cover for a coming storm, and when the seasons were about to change. Now we turn on the TV to get the latest predictions – ones that often do not come to pass.
As spring officially arrives, here in the south every cold snap is given a name. I have often wondered the validity of some of the “winters” in the South. There are “winters” when locust, redbud and dogwood trees start to bloom, and when blackberries begin to blossom. There is a whippoorwill winter when whippoorwills can first be heard before the break of dawn. (I love hearing the whippoorwills call out, “whippoorwill” as the last tone of their song lifts skyward.) There is even a “cotton britches winter” which was when the old farmers changed from their wool britches to cotton britches as summer hit full force.
Dogwood blossoms
We just had Dogwood Winter and the proof is in the dogwoods that are almost in full bloom. Blackberry Winter is upon us I guess and the anticipation of ripe berries in July when the June bugs appear makes my mouth water. Moms and kids will brave the chiggers to pick berries and by evening, they will be eating fresh blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
I guess it’s about time to set out those tomatoes but first I have to figure out which winter this is.
The technology deal these days can be a bit overwhelming. Every time I get used to something it changes. It’s no time at all before my computer is bogged down with data and I need more space. External hard drives are uncooperative. Sometimes I hit a button I didn’t even know existed and it changes filter bars or tool bars, or font sizes or adds additional screens or takes them away. It can be unnerving.
Do you remember the childhood mechanical drawing screen in the red frame with white knobs? I couldn’t drive it much better than these newfangled electronics. My brother was a master at drawing intricate detail pictures with the etch-a-sketch. I couldn’t even draw a straight line. He could create pictures of a rodeo rider hanging sideways on a saddle on the back of a bucking bronc, nostrils flaring and mane blowing in the breeze. I would say, “Don’t erase it!” But he did. He just grinned that evil grin, shook the contraption and voilà – it was gone. Magic! The only problem was, if he shook it again, the picture didn’t come back. There was no reset button.
The other day, I was typing in “Notes” on my iPhone. I deleted a few words and Shazam, it erased something I didn’t want deleted. Now what? There is no redo or undo button. So, what was the solution? That was a no-brainer. I Googled it and clicked on the first link.
That couldn’t be right! Surely you don’t just shake the phone to reveal the box to select undo typing! I tried it and it was definitely true. The words I erased magically reappeared.
Sometimes it would be nice to erase some things, and other times it would be nice to undo what we just did.
Just as I suspected, the Tooth Fairy’s daughter did not get to keep her tooth in her mouth until her birthday. Let me tell you how that all came about.
The Tooth Fairy, in her normal day disguise, and the family went to a birthday party. It was not the party of a six-year-old, but rather, a birthday party for two seventy-year-olds. That makes one hundred and forty years (if you’re counting). I guess if you can’t choose your own birthday to pull a tooth, a one-hundred-and-forty-year birthday celebration is even better!
Looking in her daughter’s mouth, her mom thought the tooth should be extracted. The new tooth was already shining and trying to push the old tooth out. It was then that the Tooth Fairy (in disguise as the girl’s mother) went into action. After giving her daughter the chance to pull it, the Tooth Fairy took over, reached in and jerked out the offensive ivory. Voilá! It was out in a flash.
Now, as you may have deducted from my last story, I know the Tooth Fairy and she is quite the frugal tight wad, or a conservative spender if you prefer. When the little girl got home, she put the tooth under her pillow. The first thing in the morning, she checked to see if her tooth was missing. It was! And in its place was – guess what? – yep – a one dollar bill. What ever happened to inflation? I guess that’s better than the .25 cents I got as a kid.
That little girl was so excited. When she retold the story to me, she said, “And guess what I got. A ONE – DOLLAR – BILL! I know the Tooth Fairy is real!” You would have thought she was given a million bucks.
I told her to keep the tooth and show it to her mom and dad and grandparents and she just might get some money from them, too. Alas! Her tooth is no more. The Tooth Fairy took it. The Tooth Fairy might be cheap, but she is smart. She knew her daughter might try to cash in again.
So, if any of you have doubts about the reality of the Tooth Fairy, I have on good account from a five-year-old, soon to be six-year-old, that she is real. And that little girl knows, because the Tooth Fairy paid off!
