The Feedsack Dress

Working extra hours in winter

Heavy snow meant a lot of extra work on the farm, much of it involving the milk cows.

On spring, summer, and fall evenings, a milk cow came into the barn to a stanchion (usually the same one each day), received some ground grain in the box in front of her, got milked, and went back out to the pasture. When heavy snow or serious cold came, my father kept the cows in all night. Since we had more milk cows than stanchions even when my parents were milking by hand, we had to drive the first ones milked out of the barn and into the shed attached to it. The barn wasn’t heated, but the heat from the cows’ bodies usually kept the temperature above freezing.

In the winter the cows received extra feed. One of my jobs was putting the proper measurement of grain in their feed boxes and supplementing it with hay. In the summer we spent weeks putting up hay in giant stacks in the field or in the barn’s hayloft for the cows to eat from in the winter. Fresh hay has a wonderful aroma, but after months in the loft it becomes dusty and musty. Even so, it was fun to jump from the loft into the piles we threw down.

During the day my father would use a pitchfork to load hay from a stack onto a wagon, pull it with horses or the tractor to the field or shed where the cows were sheltering, and unload it.

Because the cows stayed in the barn overnight, he also spent extra time shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow and trundling it to the manure pile. You didn’t smell it much in winter because it froze. In the spring he would spread the manure on the fields. It’s great fertilizer.

Some people assumed farmers had it easy in the winter, but the snow and cold pushed anyone with dairy cows to work the usual sunrise to sunset.

—Carolyn Mulford

Remembering Sarge Shriver

R. Sargent Shriver, one of the great men of the 20^th century, died January 18 at age 95. Every major news publication and program gave highlights of his fruitful life. Much more unusual, many reporters who covered him during his years in Washington expressed their fondness and admiration for him.

I share those emotions. I didn’t know him well, but he made a strong impression on me when I first met him in 1962 and on a dozen or so occasions over the years.

Fifty years ago Sarge received the unenviable task of carrying out one of brother-in-law John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign promises: to create a Peace Corps that would send American volunteers to work in developing nations wanting their help. Many at home and abroad thought the idea would never work.

After watching for a year to see if this dream could become a reality, I signed up, received two months of exhausting training, and went to teach English in the only high school in Wollo Province, Ethiopia. The 275 Ethiopia I volunteers doubled the high school faculty in Ethiopia overnight.

Not long after my group of 17 or 18 had settled in, word came that the Peace Corps director was visiting volunteers. We were a harrowing day’s drive from the capital and oversight by staff, which was just the way we wanted it, and didn’t expect Sarge Shriver to show up there. One morning I received word that he had landed at a little airport down the mountain and would meet with us at the teahouse (a tiny booth from which the janitor sold tea) during our break.

I can’t remember whether we sat on the ground or someone managed to find some chairs, but we sat in a circle. He peppered us with questions about our needs at our houses, at the school, in the community.

Here’s what struck me most: He listened. He gave every person his complete attention. He cared what we said.

He didn’t stay at the school long. The headmaster came running down to the teahouse too late to meet the President’s brother-in-law. He left town before the governor learned he was there. Sarge came to see what he could do to make our experience better and our work in Ethiopia more effective, not to be a diplomat or politician.

I saw those same personal and professional qualities as he carried out the war on poverty and went on to other service.

He was an idealist and an optimist. He was a leader and a pragmatist. He was intelligent and joyful. He cared deeply about individuals and about people. He devoted much of his life to improving the chances of the least advantaged in this country and many others. He gave hundreds of thousands of Americans the opportunity to serve their country.

Sarge Shriver was a rare man.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Warming the bed at night

When the temperature plummets to single digits, I always remember how cold penetrated our farmhouse in my childhood. No one who grew up on a Midwest farm in the early or mid 1900s forgets going to bed and getting up in numbing cold.

We spent most of our waking hours in the kitchen. When I was small, most of our heat came from the wood-burning cook stove. After electricity came and my mother bid a happy farewell to that, we kept a tall, round, black coal stove in the kitchen. One of my chores after school was to go to the coal shed and shovel all I could carry into the coal bucket.

During the day we shut the three bedroom doors. My parents would open up our two doors a little before bedtime, but those rooms remained giant ice boxes.

We’d change into our nightclothes in the kitchen while my mother heated water to boiling and filled a hot water bottle for each of us. A bottle was actually a reddish rubber pouch with a screw-in stopper. She would wrap a scrap of old blanket around it and put it in the bed to warm it. When we were ready to leap in, we shifted it to where our feet would be.

My parents banked the fire for the night and got up before we did to feed it. I don’t remember shivering for long in bed. We slept under a mound of blankets and comforters and quilts. Surplus wool, khaki-colored army blankets formed one layer. They were rough and ugly but warm.

I haven’t seen a hot water bottle for years. They warmed winter nights in my childhood, and I hope I never see another one.

—Carolyn Mulford