Farm Wife

My friend Eppie is an artist and a musician and a writer. Though we're a generation apart, we've been friends since her mother-in-law introduced us back when her kids were little. On this Sunday afternoon, we were among those gathered on the courthouse square to support a fund-raiser for the people of Ukraine. Her life path has brought her back to Potter County in the last year after a period of time in Tennessee and Washington, D.C.  She and her family are bringing new life to her husband's old family farm, a dream-come-true for him but for her - not so much.

She told me she'd spent spent the morning holding onto their sheep as their hooves were trimmed. "They're not the wooly sheep, they're the hair kind," she related with a roll of her eyes. "I'm really NOT a farm wife." 

A farm wife! It was my turn to roll my eyes as the memory of a long-ago farm wife surfaced. I promised her I'd share this essay I wrote 40 years ago for a writing workshop. It is titled "The Farm Wife."

He told me I wasn't much of a farm wife. 

Now it must be understood that I am the fourth generation of family women to stand at my kitchen sink, to dig in my garden, to stock those rough shelves in the cellar with rows of jars of home-canned vegetables and fruits, to hang sheets on the clothesline, to gather lilacs in the spring and apples in the fall. 

The women who came before me were farm wives. They fed the chickens and gathered the eggs. They put on their coveralls and barn boots and milked the cows, and threw the hay. They planted and weeded and hoed and harvested and canned. They cooked meals that are still legendary on Crandall Hill. They baked wonderful bread – and not just any bread. They baked salt-rising bread. They drove trucks and tractors. Their floors were shining and their windows sparkled. They sat under the shade of the maple trees and snapped beans and shelled peas, and with their strong, capable hands, did what had to be done.

When it comes to me, it must be understood that I am a town girl. I don't like farm animals - actually I'm a bit afraid of them. I'm allergic to hay. When I first came to the farm, I knew nothing about gardening and all I knew about canning was learned with Miss Ora Goodrich standing over me, making sure that my hair net was firmly attached to my head. I knew little about hanging clothes, nothing about driving a truck or a tractor.

But I loved living in the country and soon there were diapers flapping on the clothesline behind the house. I remember one day when they all blew away and I had to collect them from the field!

I planted a large garden and although it was weedy, I harvested baskets of tomatoes and green beans and was very proud of the jars slowing filling the shelves in the cellar. I baked my own bread – but not salt rising. I learned to drive the truck - though it was only Ranchero, however, with an automatic transmission. Sometimes I would gather the eggs. When it came time to butcher the chickens, I dipped them in the boiling water and plucked them.

I have come a long way. But it was a summer afternoon and the baby was asleep. The breezes blew the laundry on the clothesline. I was waiting for the pressure to go down in the canner. I could steal a minute with a book under the lilac bush.

The little guy was the neighbor's son. His father was doing some work on the horsebarn and sometimes he would come along with his dad and swing on the swings and play in the sandbox. I looked up from my book as he peered over my shoulder. "Reading?" he asked.

"I really like to read, Stevie," I answered without looking up, trying to discourage any hint of conversation.

"Well," he said. "You're not much of a farm wife." 

 

Tea Kettles

I performed my bi-annual cleaning and polishing of our kitchen cupboards today as the rainy day sent me inside to work The kitchen we resurrected in this old farmhouse has high ceilings and a space above the modern cabinets where I display family heirlooms and other things I enjoy from a distance - an old cookie jar, the beautiful re-purposed old canning jar decorated with lilacs painted by my friend Olga, and an assortment of old pitchers. 

There are two tea kettles up there - the Revere ware one that simmered endlessly on the burner-with-a-brain on Thelma Metzger's kitchen gas range and this one from my side of the family.

from Allegany County, N.Y. to
Potter County, Pennsylvania

I remember this old kettle holding a potted plant on the terrace in our backyard when I was a teenager. Some years ago, my mother decided I should have it. She tucked a little note inside that told its history. It had belonged to her grandmother, Abbie Collins Fish who lived in Whitesville, Allegany County, New York.

My grandfather (W.D. Fish, known as Golly to his readers in The Potter Enterprise) writes of its storied history in one of his newspaper columns.

"Mother's old tea kettle - Golly has it. We are going to write about that antique utensil some of these days, of how Mother, a great reader, would let her light kettle melt its seams while she was all wrapped up in a story or article, and she would have to return to the very old and very heavy kettle to use until the sum of money was available to buy another."

Happy Mother's Day!

Addendum April 15, 2024

Scanning old photo negatives (these from the 1930s) brings serendipitous surprise!

 I've marked it with an arrow so you can see my great-grandmother's tea kettle on the gas heating stove in the front office of the old Potter Enterprise building.