The Feedsack Dress

Catching fish in winter

When I was small child, I tramped after my father as he did farm chores no matter what the weather. He liked having me along, and my mother appreciated having me out of the house.

One frigid December day he needed to break the ice on a pond so the cows would have water. My mother bundled me up with pants, leggings, coat, cap, an encircling scarf, overshoes, and doubled mittens until I could barely move. I didn’t have to worry about losing my mittens. They were linked by a cord that went through the sleeves of my coat.

My father carried an axe and a heavy five-gallon bucket as we half slid down a rough, sloping trail to the pond. The ice was several inches thick. My father went out a few feet to make a hole. He made sure I stayed well back. As a boy, he’d been walking along swinging an axe and accidentally chopped off about half of his little brother’s nose. (They found it, rushed him seven miles to town in the wagon, and the doctor sewed it back on.)

A hole had to be more than a foot or so long and wide, big enough a cow could drink and big enough it would take a while for water to freeze over it. I was thoroughly chilled by the time my father finished chopping.

 Then came the second chore: harvesting the catfish that swarmed to the hole. My father dipped in the bucket to get some water. Then he flipped the fish out with the axe and we dropped them in the bucket. He stepped away from it to fetch a big fish. My feet slipped on the wet ice, and one leg went into the hole. I yelled and my father grabbed my arm and pulled me out. That ended our fishing.

My feet and legs felt like ice before we got to the house. My mother said a few lively words to my father as she stripped off my wet clothes, wrapped me in a blanket, and parked me in front of the kitchen stove, the warmest place in the house.

The dunking didn’t make me ill, but I lost my enthusiasm for winter fishing.

—Carolyn Mulford

Smelling a feedsack dress

After reading The Feedsack Dress, library consultant Wicky Sleight, St. Louis, sent me the following note with her own recollections of a special problem.

I grew up on a farm in Carroll County (Carrollton) Missouri. My mother made my dresses out of feedsacks. I have always told my children that no one would sit by me on the bus because of the smell. You could never quite get that smell out no matter how many times you washed it. My husband contended it was a “rural legend.” My daughter always pictured me in a burlap sack. So, I have ordered four copies, one for each of my three children (30, 32, and 37) and one for my best friend, Carol. They will be wrapped for Christmas in feedsacks. 

Carol (now in Corvallis, Oregon) was a “townie.” When I talked with her this week and told her about the book, she recalled when she was invited to a birthday party by the class snob, her “Veronica.” Carol’s mother told her she was taking socks as the present. Carol protested and her mother said, very sternly, “Carol, these are perfectly fine socks.” 

Twas ever thus.

Doin' the tradin'

In the 1940s my parents went to town every Saturday to do the tradin’. They didn’t actually trade for anything, but those words lingered from the days when their parents or grandparents did. 

Usually the first stop was at the Missouri Farmers Association, where my mother would sell eggs and my father would buy feed or cattle salt. Often we’d go across the street to a filling station to buy a nickel bottle of pop—grape, orange, or strawberry more often than Coca Cola or Royal Crown Cola. All floated among ice in a red cooler tank. 

Then we’d park on the square or as close to it as we could get. My sisters and I would rush to the two dime stores, Woolworth’s and McClellan’s. Each had a toy section in the back. Few things cost more than a dollar, big money to us. We did a lot of looking and little buying. The stores sold dime comic books, and we would buy the latest issue of a favorite: Little Lulu, Nyoka the Jungle Girl, Archie, The Long Ranger, Donald Duck. We traded these with other kids in our school. 

My father visited the dime stores’ candy counters, a series of glass bins from which the clerk dipped candy to put into small white paper sacks and weigh. He always bought roasted Spanish peanuts and about half a pound of each of three or four candies, including circus peanuts, orange slices, caramels, cinnamon drops, lemon drops, licorice, mints, and chocolate peanut clusters. He made a game of adding up the total in his head before the clerk could do it on her adding machine. 

The other major visit was the grocery store, usually the one on the north side of the square. The whole store was about the size of a small-town McDonald’s today. My parents told the clerks behind long counters what to take from the shelves. 

My parents spent about half of their time in town chatting with neighbors and friends on the square (especially the shady west side) or the courthouse lawn or sitting in the car to say hello to whoever passed by. Farming was lonely work, and talkin’ was as important as tradin’. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

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