The Feedsack Dress

Saving a city under siege

Yesterday, November 9, 2009, Germany celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a concrete barrier that separated West Berlin from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The communists built the wall to prevent their own people from “voting with their feet.”

The Allies divided Germany at the end of World War II, with the Soviet Union taking control of eastern Germany, except for a section of Berlin, Germany’s greatest city. June 24,1948, the communist government closed off West Berlin, attempting to force its 2 million residents to its will by stopping the flow of food, fuel, and other essential goods.

The United States responded two days later with an airlift of supplies. For more than a year that airlift remained one of the most dramatic ongoing stories in the Weekly Reader. Even when the communist government gave up and lifted the siege, it maintained a strict control over who and what went into and out of West Berlin. In 1961, it began enclosing West Berlin in a high concrete wall.

I remembered reading the dramatic stories about the Berlin Airlift in the Weekly Reader when I visited West Germany in October 1964. Two friends and I traveled across East Germany to West Berlin by train. Apparently the government limited the number of trains, for it was so crowded that we stood much of the way. Scowling conductors and guards checked and rechecked our papers.

We heard wonderful music and saw the exquisite bust of Nefertiti, but West Berlin—perhaps because a chilling rain fell almost constantly—seemed gray and bulky and self-obsessed. The fabled pre-war charm had vanished amid new buildings and heavy traffic and busy people. 

Then we took a bus tour of East Berlin, going through the infamous Checkpoint Charlie. East Berlin made West Berlin look great. On the communist side we saw some bleak new Soviet-style cement apartment buildings, many blocks of unmaintained old buildings, rubble from buildings bombed during World War II, and little activity on the streets. The people looked drab, depressed, destitute. We were relieved to return West Berlin.

I hope there’s still a Weekly Reader to tell kids why everyone should celebrate the collapse of the Berlin Wall and of Soviet-imposed tyranny.

 —Carolyn Mulford 

Choosing books from different states

When I was a child, my family never traveled anywhere you couldn't reach between the morning and evening milking. I learned about other places from books.

You can find a list of recommended children's books from the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands at www.loc.gov/bookfest/2009/toolkit/educators/greatreads.html#mo. Click on a state on the map or scroll down through the list of states and books below the map.

Last summer each state's Center for the Book selected a book as its recommended read at the 2009 National Book Festival. The national Center for the Book at the Library of Congress constructed the map, "52 Great Reads About Great Places." 

Click on Missouri and up comes The Feedsack Dress.

—Carolyn Mulford

Roasting marshsmallows on Halloween

In the late 1940s Halloween wasn't a big deal in Missouri. We didn't drive from farm to farm to trick or treat. The costumes we wore to the one-room school consisted to of little more than a pirate's eye patch, a paper hat, and a sword carved from a stick; a ghostly paper-thin sheet with eyeholels; or a cowboy hat and a holster set.

The teacher might bring in a pumpkin to carve, but anyone who planted pumpkins used them for pies, not jack-o'-lanterns. Instead we cut jack-o'-lanterns and witches on brooms and ghosts and black cats from construction paper. We pasted these above the blackboards that ran across the front of the school. 

Some of us would bring in candy: colorful and super-sugary corn, black- and orange-wrapped taffy kisses with peanut butter centers, and caramels. We might counter the sweetness by eating the apples we bobbed for in a round tin tub.

The 4-H Club livened things up at night with a bonfire. 4-Hers would gather dry branches and sticks and build the fire somewhere it couldn't spread, typically in someone's fieldsor on the gravel drive at the school. Almost all of us carried pocket knives, and we'd find slender branches about four feet long, strip them, and whittle points at the tips. As the flames died down, you put a wiener on the end of your stick and held it over the coals. Usually we ate the hotdogs burned on the outside and cold in the middle, which described us as we huddled around the fire in the cold. 

The best part was the dessert, marshmallows roasted on the end of the sticks. I never minded if mine got burnt, as long as the inside melted to a gooey mess. Nothing matches the feel of a melted marshmallow on the tongue and the chilly night air on the skin.

—Carolyn Mulford

Speaking at the Longview Literary Festival

Writers and readers are coming together October 2-3 at the Longview Literary Festival in Lee's Summit, Missouri. The fun takes place at the Metropolitan Community College-Longview.

At 11 a.m. Saturday, three of us will be sharing our experiences in writing in different genres. I'll talk about moving from writing nonfiction to writing historical novels for young people and mysteries for adults. The others will discuss romance, westerns, and sci-fi.

At 1 p.m. Saturday, I'll explain why I wrote The Feedsack Dress and read from it. If you're nearby, come say hello.

—Carolyn Mulford

Celebrating books, including The Feedsack Dress

Anyone who thinks books are extinct should go to the Mall in Washington, D.C., September 26, 2009. There 100 or so writers and 120,000 or so readers will take part in the ninth annual National Book Festival.

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress sponsors the event, and President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama serve as honorary co-chairs. Writers of diverse genres come from all over the country to talk about their books, with readers often overflowing the giant tents set up between 7^th and 14th streets. 

This year The Feedsack Dress is part of the festival. The Missouri Center for the Book selected it as the state’s recommended read. Every state chooses one book. Children (and others) attending the festival pick up a free map, “Discover Great Places Through Reading,” at the Pavilion of the States and go to state booths to receive a stamp or sticker and information on books from that state. On the back of the map is a list of “52 Great Reads About Great Places,” and that list includes my middle-reader novel.

I’ve attended the festival several times, and it’s a great day for those who love books. As usual, the program this year is outstanding (see www.loc.gov/bookfest). Among the writers who will be speaking are Judy Blume, Kate DiCamillo, Jon Scieszka, Lois Lowry, Douglas Brinkley, Sue Monk Kidd, Ken Burns, Michael Connelly, Walter Mosely, James Patterson, S. J. Rozan, Lisa Scottoline, John Grisham, John Irving, Nicholas Sparks, and W. Ralph Eubanks.

If you go to the National Book Festival, please stop by the Missouri booth and pick up a bookmark for The Feedsack Dress. 

—Carolyn Mulford

The last of the fried chicken

My mother stopped frying chicken about this time of year. The chickens we’d raised over the summer were becoming too tough to fry. 

Every spring my parents bought about 150 newly hatched chickens and put them in a brooder house roughly 15x15. Chickens peak on the cuteness scale in their first week or two of life, and their fuzz feels soft as a teddy bear. 

My sisters and I eagerly awaited the chicks, but they require a lot of work. You have to keep them really warm. We used kerosene heaters in our electricity-free brooder house. They required very shallow, narrow water containers so they wouldn’t fall in and drown, and those and the food containers had to cleaned and refilled frequently. 

Chickens have tiny brains even when they grow up. Baby chicks tend to stampede right over each other when alarmed, and our opening the door of the brooder house for the third or fourth time a day would stampede them. Sometimes chicks got smothered. One of our unpleasant jobs on each visit was looking for dead chicks. 

Chicks become less cute and less vulnerable as feathers sprout. That’s fortunate. We raised some to replace our aging laying hens, but many ended up on the table. By mid summer my mother would point out the meal of the day scratching in the dirt by the brooder house or in the barnyard and one of us would catch it. In those days people still talked about chicken every Sunday, but we had fried chicken most July and August days. 

My mother killed the condemned chicken by holding it down on an old stump with one hand and chopping off the head with a hatchet with the other. She’d fling the headless animal away to keep it from throwing blood on her as it thrashed around—the proverbial chicken with its head off. She would have hot water in a big bucket at hand, and when the chicken stopped moving, she would grab it by the legs and dunk it until it was soaked. That made it easier to pluck the feathers, a smelly and tedious job we all hated. 

By fall the survivors lived in the hen house. During the winter an older hen who didn’t lay regularly came to our table about twice a month as roasted or boiled chicken. 

We named most of our other animals and gave them a bit of the affection you give to pets, but we never named the baby chicks. You keep an emotional distance from your dinner. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

Launching an anthology

We have a long tradition in this country of aspiring and established writers banding together to support and educate each other. Another part of that tradition is publishing a literary journal of those writers’ work.

Each year the Columbia Chapter of the Missouri Writers’ Guild publishes an anthology of poetry, short stories, and nonfiction. More than half the group’s members submitted entries for Well Versed: Literary Works 2009, and local writers and writing teachers read the anonymous entries to determine whose work met the standards for publication. 

The judges selected more than 60 submissions, enough to produce a 180-page book. The chapter printed it by uploading a PDF to CreateSpace, an Amazon affiliate, and the book is available at Amazon.com ($10 plus shipping), Columbia Books, CCMWG events, and a few writers’ conferences.

To launch Well Versed, CCMWG and Columbia Books are holding a book signing 2-4 p.m., Sunday, September 13, 2009, at 1907 Gordon Street, Columbia, Missouri. Contributors will read selections at 2:30.

Contributors also are reading and signing at the Longworth Literary Festival, Mel Aytes Education Center, Metropolitan Community College-Longworth, Lee’s Summit, Missouri, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., October 1-2.

The contributions vary in form, content, and style, offering something for almost any reader. I can’t review the book as I’m biased. I was the managing editor.

—Carolyn Mulford

Milking the cows in the 1940s

Cows dictated almost all Missouri farm families’ schedule in the 1940s. You couldn’t go anywhere until finishing the morning milking and you had to be back in time for the evening milking.

Before electricity came to our farm, we usually milked eight or nine Jerseys and Guernsey by hand. My parents sat on stools and squirted the milk into a bucket. They finished the morning milking before breakfast, and before dawn much of the year. Kerosene lanterns hung provided the light. You had to be careful because the loft above the cows contained hay, and any spark could set the whole barn on fire.

My sisters and I helped only with the evening milking, doing the most in the summer when my father worked late in the fields. We drove the cows from the pasture to our red barn, put ground grain in the wood box in front of each cow’s stanchion (boards that closed on her neck and kept her in place), pumped water from a well into a tank, and occasionally helped clean out the manure trench.

Electricity let us double and then triple the size of the herd because the milking units, which attached to all four teats at once, increased the speed and ease of milking. My jobs didn’t change much, except that we didn’t have room to put all the cows in the barn to milk at once. Most were eager for their turn, both to have their bulging udders emptied and to get their feed. Some of them knew their names. One of us would open the barn door and holler the name of the next cow and she would hurry in and to her place.

Naming thirty cows gets to be a challenge. If my father bought a cow from a farmer, he named it after the farmer’s wife. If a heifer calf was born to one of our cows, she might get her own name or be named after her mother. At one time we had Spot, Spot 1, Spot 2, Spot 3, Spot 4, Spot 5, and Spot 6. They all bore similar markings, and they were all more nervous than our other cows. A couple of them (4 and 5?) were hard to tell apart. 

Most dairy cows, particularly Jerseys, appear serene, and they gaze at you with beautiful brown eyes. Nice as they are, the necessity of giving them priority twice a day year after year is enough to drive you off the farm.

 

—Carolyn Mulford

Riding the yellow monster

The first sight of a yellow school bus at the end of summer brings beautiful memories to some adults.

Not so for me and for many who lived on farms and had to ride for miles over rough gravel roads to get to high school in the 1940s and 1950s.

We bounced and slid around on the metal seats. In warm weather, we burned up. Windows opened to let in fresh air produced a gale that tangled hair and scattered loose papers. In the winter, with windows closed and fogged over, we froze.

My sisters and I were lucky compared to most. We lived only five miles (twenty minutes or so on the bus) from town, could catch it right by our driveway, and were among the last students picked up. We had to stagger to the back of the bus to find seats, but we didn’t have to walk up to a mile to meet the bus before the sun came up. If you weren’t at the appointed spot when the bus pulled up, the driver drove on.

Some kids rode more than an hour in the morning and again in the evening. For months they left before the sun came up and got home after it set.

However long the ride, we all arrived home to do homework and chores.

For years my parents and our neighbors fought the closing of our one-room school for grades 1-8. One reason was that it provided a center for the community. Another was the dread of putting little kids on that yellow bus.

—Carolyn Mulford

Eating watermelon

Few things taste better than cold watermelon on a hot August day, even if you chill it only by placing it in a tin tub and pumping cold well water over it. 

When I was growing up, we rarely ate watermelon indoors. Instead we’d sit on the steps of the back porch and my mother or father would cut a slice the length of a giant melon for each of us. Then we’d assume the position: legs spread wide, elbows on knees, and both hands gripping the rind. That way the juice and the seeds dropped onto the steps rather than onto us. If the juice dribbled on our bare feet, it didn’t matter. We’d clean off at the well. 

One steaming hot day when I was working in the hayfield with my father, my uncle, and my great-uncle, my father sent me to a nearby watermelon patch to fetch a ripe one. I didn’t know how to thump to test, but a melon that had come off the vine was ready. The only one I found weighed more than my eight-year-old arms could manage, but I staggered out of the patch and across the stubble toward the haystack we were building. As I neared the haystack, the watermelon slipped through my fingers and burst open on the ground. I was humiliated, but the men laughed and assured me it didn’t matter as we had only our pocketknives to cut it with anyway. 

That warm watermelon was delicious. 

 —Carolyn Mulford