The Feedsack Dress

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