Hello friends! I have decided to start a blog, after being challenged to do so by Dusty, one of my husband’s buddies. It all started when my granddaughter Lauren was visiting me. She is 11 and we have many conversations. I told her that life was very different when I was her age, and that I had written a story about it, called “One Day at Grandma’s House.” I read it to her and she really liked it and wanted to take it to school. Of course she forgot to take it.  So now I am publishing that story here, so she can read it, take it to school, or whatever she wants to do with it.  Also in this first posting, I will include a little poem called “Three Dozen Cousins.”  I was counting up one day how many cousins I had on one side of the family, and discovered there were actually 36 of us! So I wrote this little ditty and called it 36 cousins, that is I called it that until my cousin Susie called and said, Three Dozen Cousins! Of course she was right. So the following are for Lauren, Susie and Dusty.

ONE DAY AT GRANDMA’S HOUSE

A long time ago, before I was a Grandma, I was a little girl.  When I visited at my Grandma’s house on the farm, I had a busy day.

          I woke up in the morning and it was still dark.  Farmers got up early to milk the cows.  Grandma got up early to cook breakfast.  I got up to help.  I set the table and Gram cooked oatmeal.  I put the butter on the table.  It was a round, hard hump with little dents in it.  It was homemade butter that Grandma made herself.

          It was bright and warm in the kitchen, and dark outside.  Grandma said, “Would you like to go back to bed?”

          I said, “No, I want to watch Henry drink his water.”  Henry was the hired man, and before breakfast he drank cups and cups of hot water.  He said it cleaned out his system.  I watched.

          When Grandpa and Henry came in from the barn, they ate their oatmeal and talked about pigs and corn and cows.  Then Grandma said to me, “Would you like to get the hermits?”  Hermits were big, soft brown cookies that she kept in the cookie drawer.  They were Grandpa’s favorite kind.  He liked them for dessert for breakfast, but I didn’t like them at all!

                    After breakfast, Grandpa went to work.  He was a mailman.  Sometimes he took me with him, and we would stop the car along the road and put letters in the mailboxes.  Then we would wave at the people coming to get their mail.

          Mostly I stayed home and watched Henry light his pipe.  He lit his pipe all day long.  He scratched the wooden matches on the button of his overalls.  “I don’t think your pipe works very well,” I told him.  “Maybe you should get a new one.”  He would just laugh and scratch another match and light it again. He scooped lots of matches into his pocket from the red matchbox that hung on a nail in the kitchen, then he went to the barn to do his chores.

          After Grandpa and Henry were gone, Grandma and I got dressed and made the beds.  I helped her do her work like washing dishes and feeding the rest of the oatmeal to the dogs.  Then I looked around.   It was fun to sit in the sunny window and talk to the bird in the cage.  Under the window there was a big shelf of books to read.  I liked to turn the funny little spout on the big silver coffeepot.  It was right beside the dish of lemon drops.  Grandma had high cupboards full of dishes for company, and low cupboards full of treasures I could play with if I put them back.

          I had lots of things to play with if I followed the rules.  “Don’t touch Grandma’s desk unless she says you can.”  It was a wonderful desk.  The drawer had paper clips and a stapler. Best of all, there was a typewriter.  I could type all the words I knew if I only pushed down one key at a time. I could use one sheet of paper.

          “Don’t pound the keys.”  That was the piano rule.  In the piano bench there were piles of sheet music with pictures of pretty girls on the covers.  I pretended I could play the music.

          There was a big square register in the middle of the floor. “Hot registers are dangerous, and you must never put a lemon drop or ANYTHING ELSE down the register!”  I was a ballerina dancer when the hot air blew up under my dress.

                  I didn’t like to drink milk at grandma’s house.  It tasted funny.  It didn’t come in a glass bottle from the milkman like it did at my house.  It came in pails that Grandpa and Henry carried from the cows in the barn.  They poured the warm milk into a magic machine in the little white milk house.  The machine had spouts.  Milk poured out one spout and golden cream came out of the other.  I held my nose so I couldn’t smell the warm milk.

          After the cream was out of it, Grandpa carried milk back to the barnyard and poured some in a long, wooden trough for the pigs to eat.  They climbed all over each other to get the milk.  They acted just like pigs! “Stay outside the fence to watch the pigs, so you won’t get hurt or muddy.”  That was the barnyard rule.

          Feeding those pigs kept Henry busy.  Sometimes he fed them pig food he called “slop.”  It looked like dirty milk and water mixed with cereal, but when Henry called, “Sooey, Sooey,” the pigs came running and gobbled it up.  They thought it was delicious.

          Sometimes Henry built a fire under a barrel outdoors and cooked beans for the pigs.  He poured in pails of water and pails of beans and stirred it up with a shovel.  His beans had to cook all day long.  They smelled good!  When they were done and cool, he shoveled them into the pig’s trough.  He held out a shovelful to me and said, “Would you like some?” “I don’t think I want to eat your cooking,” I told him.  He just laughed and lit his pipe again.

          Feeding the people kept Grandma busy.  She whipped up the cow’s cream with her egg beater to put on cake.  She churned it up in her churn to make butter.  She put it in flour to make biscuits, and donuts and twistees for me.  Twistees are funny donut shapes that you could guess what they looked like, then take a bite and guess again.  “Stay far away from hot grease so you won’t get burned.”  That was the rule while Grandma fried doughnuts in a smoking pan of grease.  

          I could sit in the corner and watch the baby chicks.  When it was cold out, Grandma kept her baby chickens in a box in the kitchen to keep them warm. They were little furry, yellow balls that peeped.  I could hold one if I was careful not to squeeze it.  The chicks had a little dish of seeds and a little dish of water. I had donut holes and twistees.      

           In the afternoon, I played with the pump in the yard and looked for apples.  Out by the driveway there was a well with a hand pump.  I could pump very hard, then  put my hand under the spout.  The water squirted out a little hole so I could get a drink, and get all wet.  That was fun.  Grandma said, “You’ll catch your death of cold.  Come and get dry clothes on.”

                Over the fence, by the house where the chickens lived, there were lots of apple trees.  I looked for red apples with no worm holes.  “Don’t eat green apples, they will give you a stomach ache.”

          “Come Boss, Come Boss,” called Henry.  One by one the big cows came to the barn to be milked.  Sometimes I got to go to the barn at chore time.  That’s what we called the barn work, “chores.” “Stay far away from the cows so you won’t get kicked.”  I sat on a high stool, and Grandpa and Henry sat on little stools to milk the cows.  The barn cats came for their dish of warm milk.  The best part was giving the baby calves their bottles. They got a bottle just like babies do, but with a bigger nipple.

          After supper, Grandpa read the paper and went to sleep with his glasses on his nose.  Henry sat in the squeaky rocking chair and listened to the ballgame on the big radio with a yellow dial.  Then they both went to bed early, because they had to get up early to milk the cows again. 

          Grandma and I fixed my bed.  I had a magic bed at Grandma’s house.  In the daytime it was a hard leather couch.  When it was bedtime, we pulled and pushed and it was a bed for me.  As I got sleepy under the covers, I could see the piano and the sheet music.  I could see the big, warm register.  I could see the desk and the typewriter.  I could see Grandma, reading and reading in her chair.

THREE DOZEN COUSINS

 I have three dozen cousins!  We’re a big happy bunch.  It takes my mom and six aunts just to feed us all lunch.

 With so many children no one is able to sit us all down around the same table. Our Grandma’s idea is really a winner. We sit on the stair steps to eat Sunday dinner.

 Games are great fun to play with my cousins.  I play with just one, three or four or a dozen.  We fight and play tricks, we pout and we wiggle; we run through the house and we shout and we giggle.

 My gang of cousins are all different ages.  Joe can just read the pictures, Jon can read all the pages.

 Big families of cousins have to share lots of stuff, like with ice skates and  cookies… there’s never enough.  And pants shoes and dresses keep going around; my new Tigers sweatshirt is Tom’s hand-me-down.  Scoldings we all get, “can’t blame it on one.”  We pout for a while, then get on with the fun.

 Your cousin’s dad is your uncle, his mom is your aunt. Like parents, they tell what you can do and can’t.  If you stay at their house and get into trouble, you find that your aunt is like your mom’s double.  She’ll punish and scold you, but after stories are read, she’ll hug you and kiss you and tuck you in bed.

 Do you have a cousin or three or four?  Or five or six or 12 or more?  Then you have a big family, and I have a hunch, that when you visit at Grandma’s like our noisy bunch, a room full of aunts fixes your lunch.