Farm Girl Read Online Free

died, first Ford then Bernice.
    Aunt Bernice, like most of the Markers, saved her money and invested carefully. She had almost $100,000 when she died in 1970.

Young John Marker

The old farm

The new farm

Chapter Three:
The New Farm

    As a child, I lived on a new farm in Webster County, Nebraska, near the Kansas border. My parents had lived nearby on a farm with old buildings and a little three-room house, but now that they were expecting a child, my dad built a nice house. He wasn’t a carpenter, he had someone else do the work. It cost about $2000 for the house back in 1916. Sears Roebuck would send out books about their houses with floor plans and descriptions. Mother drew her own floor plan based on what she saw in the Sears Roebuck book.
    My parents moved there two weeks before I was born in 1917. They kept the old place and hired someone else to work the land. Uncle Ford’s farm joined ours, so he and my dad often worked together.
    Our farm was eight miles from the closest town, Inavale, which was very small, only 120 population. Our post office was in Inavale, and the mail carrier usually managed to deliver the mail in all kinds of weather, the mail routes being kept in better condition than some of the other roads.
    Our house on the farm was two stories plus a basement. In the basement was a pressure tank. Water would run from the windmill into that tank, and from the pressure tank it would be pumped into the bathroom and kitchen. We could flush the toilet, very unusual at that time. Most people didn’t have running water in the house or an indoor toilet.
    Upstairs in the bathroom was a clothes chute that went down the basement to a basket. Mother had her washing machine down there, an electric one with a ringer. She’d rinse clothes in the big concrete tubs of rinse water, then run them through the ringer and rinse them again if necessary. We hung the clothes out to dry on the heavy wire fence that surrounded the yard. She had a clothesline, but that was outside the yard so she always just hung them on the fence. In the windy Nebraska weather, the clothes dried fast.
    The fence had a wide, wire gate that opened for coal to be brought into the coal bin down the basement. We didn’t use the coal furnace much, because the kitchen cookstove kept us warm. It used corn cobs and to hold the fire we’d use coal.
    We mainly lived in the kitchen during the winter. I had a bed in my parents’ room off the kitchen and slept there when I was younger. When I did sleep upstairs, I didn’t want to be up there by myself, so Mother would sleep up there with me. I’d dress downstairs and run up to bed, it would be so cold.
    For hot water, Dad had an oil heater in the basement that he lit on Saturdays for our baths. One time he lit it and it exploded, catching the kerosene tank on fire. Dad grabbed the burning tank with his bare hands, carrying it up the basement stairs and outside before anything else caught on fire.
    His hands had to be completely bandaged, with Arnica salve to help relieve the pain. I’d help Mother change the bandages and saw the skin peeling. He couldn’t work for at least two weeks, so Mother had to milk the cows and put the hay out for the animals. Uncle Ford did any other work for Dad during that time.
    Under the basement stairway a Lolley engine ran the power to give us electricity. It was a half basement, the other half was just dirt under the house. An area about two feet high under the floor joist and the finished basement, Mother used for storage of boards, old dishes and pans, things she didn’t want to throw away. She hid it with a curtain, so we always called that area “under the curtain.”
    One thing about our house different from most farmhouses was a tunnel going from the basement to a storm cave. In case of a tornado, you could get to the storm cave from the outside or through the tunnel. When Mother was a little girl, her family’s sod house was destroyed by a tornado, so she