Life Was Like That

This is the sixth of a series of little books describing what life was like for a little girl in rural Vermont during the 1940s. The one-room school, the tar-paper hunting shack on the mountain, all the animals that were part of my growing up years, the people that made life what it was back then, the little chapel, the woods and meadows that graced my life and the backyard gardening that fed us throughout the year-these I have written about in my earlier books. They were part of the 1940s Vermont I knew. Grampa's and Gramma's farm was a small dairy farm. Long before my time Grampa had a hired hand or two. Then as his sons and daughters grew, no hired hand was necessary. My mother, like most farm girls in her time, pitched in with the milking and plowing and the various other tasks of farming. She could harness and drive a team of work horses as well as any man. Time is a continuum, however, and gradually Grampa's sons and daughters married and started families and careers of their own. Yet the family stayed together. All Grampa's and Gramma's "children" built their homes on the farm's land. Grampa continued his farming, but on a smaller scale, and his sons pitched in on weekends and evenings as needed. Mama and her sister, young mothers with children and homes to attend, helped with the farm work only occasionally, such as meat processing at butchering time. That family farm tradition continued through my generation. My brother and boy cousins helped our Grampa with the farm work, though not with daily regularity. But whenever Grampa needed them, or if he was doing something especially interesting or "fun," they pitched in. Sometimes the entire family worked together, men, women, and children, for example, during potato harvesting. Those were special family times. My girl cousins and I occasionally got involved with lesser farm chores, but it was usually just to "help" Grampa or Gramma because it was interesting and fun for us. I cleaned stalls, scraping manure into the gutter in the dairy barn, and I fed grain rations to the cows, and helped groom the horses, but only once in a while, just because it was fun to be with Grampa. I helped churn butter and press it into the special shaping boxes, and I gathered the eggs and helped bottle the honey because I enjoyed working alongside Gramma, but I didn't do these chores every day, just once in a while when I popped into her kitchen or her back yard as she worked. My regular chores were at home. I cleaned our hen house and fed grain and lugged pails of water, but only those years when my older brother and I shared poultry projects or when he was away at 4-H camp. With the exception of helping with the vegetable garden-planting, weeding, and harvesting-and with other family projects shared by us all, my routine chores were household tasks under Mama's scrutiny. Girls were expected to do house-cleaning, cooking, and sewing. And that's what my sister and I did. In this little book I have devoted a chapter to laundering, because this household chore was a major task for my younger sister and me. It was quite different from how it's done today. I think the modern reader will find this interesting. Another chapter tells of the various childhood diseases we all experienced. We had one childhood disease after another. It was simply part of life for a kid in the 1940s. It was just the way it was, before modern antibiotics and vaccines. Life was not all work, and we were far from angelic. It seemed important to include a few stories of some of the mischief and mishaps and life lessons we learned while at work and play. My intent in writing this series of books has been to provide my grandson a "window" into the life of a girl who grew up in the 1940s in rural Rutland, Vermont, my childhood-a bit of his family's history. I hope that other readers enjoy these little recollections of the past as well. They tell of life as it was.