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.

Notes In Time

On those rare occasions when a trip to the city includes a visit to an art museum, I've learned to take what is offered me in those echoing galleries as a gift. I unwrap that gift slowly, expecting only that the artists' works will surprise and delight and challenge me.  

Nancy Spero's "Notes In Time"
Museum of Modern Art, New York City

And thus it was Nancy Spero's "Notes In Time" grabbed my attention, stopped me and continues to wind its way into my thought weeks later.

The artist was from my parents' generation. She was in her late 40s when she created this massive work in the 1970s. At that time, I was a young woman, a young woman who, even then, resented being referred to as a girl.

As a female child in the 1950s and 1960s, I carried with me all of the expectations of being female in those times. Even the high school guidance counselor (a man, of course) suggested to me that a girl should choose something like secretarial work, nursing or teaching - something to get you through until you married.or to fall back on if, God forbid, your husband were to die.

I'm the young woman who went off to nursing school after high school, the old-fashioned kind based in a hospital. It was made very clear from the very first day we sat in the classroom in our starched blue and white uniforms that the nurse's role was to be "handmaid" to the doctor - and the doctors were, of course, all men. Did we really have to stand up every time a doctor came into the room? It was my first hint that perhaps Guidance Counselor Patterson had steered me in the wrong direction.

Spero has described "Notes In Time" as shocking. And to me, indeed it is. Shocking to see the images scattered across the panels and read the words. But she also describes it as celebratory. And to me, indeed it is also a celebration - a celebration of the opportunities that unfold for women today and, at the same time, a celebration of women who refused to be imprisoned in the constraints of society in their times.

My mother first went to work outside the home when I was well into elementary school. We were a large family and living on the income of my father's six-day-a-week job in addition to odd jobs he took in his spare time, became impossible. Watching my mother going to work every day in a man's world as a linotype operator, I assumed that she got that job only because her father and brother owned the newspaper. 

But when did I learn that my mother was, instead of the stereotype of the boss's daughter, a competent, hard-working, respected part of a team? That she stood side-by-side with those guys in their ink-stained Carhartt's and donned her own printer's apron. She sat in front of the towering linotype for hours at a time, her fingers flying across the keys, then depressing the casting lever that would result in a hot line of type coming down the chute into the tray. She made the transition from letterpress to offset printing. She managed the mailing list and the weekly distribution of the press run. She was even given the title to match her skills -  Mechanical Superintendent. And, indeed, she was my role model as I became the next boss's daughter at the newspaper after walking away from nursing school.

Just For Fun

My newspaper editor grandfather didn't care much for the Beatles. He writes in his weekly column:

A beatle or a beetle -

What the difference? Both are merely annoying insects.

The next week he dabbled a bit in Latin. 

Golly remembers a heading used by one old fashioned sheet: "Multum Items in Parvo Space"

He learned its meaning as many brief notes in a small space.

Now as Golly sees on the TV screen a bunch of mop-heads, he thinks of "multum" hair and "parvo" brains.

Evidently he wasn't the only one ... even the basketball coaches from Oswayo Valley didn't care for the Beatles.

A second place finish in the Homecoming Parade for the Senior Class in the fall of 1964.

The Roulette Drive-In chose to run "A Hard Days Night" with The Three Stooges.

Meanwhile in Galeton, the teens were excited to go downstairs to the balcony to see the film!

Smitty didn't open his Record Cellar until 1968 so the 5 and 10 was the place to get your hands on the newest releases.

What We're Told

It had been attached to my bulletin board in Niagara Hall at Penn State Behrend, this anti-war poem by e.e. cummings.   And over the years, Arthur and I have often applied the 'nipponized bit' fragment to particularly bone-headed behaviors we've observed - even in ourselves.

Today with another kind of war - the war against that relentless two-year-old, Covid 19,  the poem resurfaces.

It's been two years in the long life of my mother, the woman whose husband was born in the midst of another pandemic all those years ago.  Two years for the two-year-old granddaughter in Alaska who knows nothing of the times before.  Two years for the big grandchildren, their carefully planned routines upended and new ones often requiring face masks.  Two years for our offspring and their partners, responsible now for these children in a world where even a trip to the grocery store could seem perilous, where day care and school are canceled. A world where working from home added layers of complication and layers of convenience too.

And it's been two years for us too. At first we couldn't find hand sanitizer and toilet paper. At first we learned how to wipe down the groceries from the store. At first we turned to the sewing machine to fashion our face coverings. We heard about shut-downs and lockdowns, essential workers, social distancing, testing, CDC, FDA, MRNA, PCR, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson.

In these two years of a worldwide health emergency, we've been told many things, and some of those things we've been told we believe.

(I've written about the worldwide pandemic in other posts, here and here. )

*The final lines of e.e. cummings' poems refer to Manhattan's dismantled Sixth Avenue elevated tracks, which were bought as scrap metal by Imperial Japan three years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Gobbler's Knob

I've been a little obsessed lately with Gobbler's Knob. Where's that you say?

Here's how my grandfather (W.D. "Golly" Fish) wrote in the Potter Enterprise of this place so close to his heart.

"Gobbler's Knob, with its feet all wet in Nine Mile Run and its head amid the clouds. Wonder if that mythical gobbler of Paul Bunyon size will frighten visitors and native alike, as he calls his harem? Or will they delight in his mighty call and stand entranced, rooted to the mountainside!"

" 'State Park for Winter Sports To Be Opened By January On Denton Hill'  We will stand for the above heading except the Denton Hill part of it. According to our speedometer it will be four miles east of Denton Hill. Since it will be only about a half mile from Golly's Folly, probably octogenarian Golly will be there the opening day with his skis. Ha, ha, ha."

"Golly reached the top of Gobbler's Knob the other day – away up where the ski enthusiast will take off – come next skiing season at Denton Hill State Park. He took a long look down one of the runs. It was steep and a long way down to the bottom of Nine Mile Valley. Packed snow, with woods on either side! The thought of pushing off – Golly wanted no part of it. He might have felt differently 40 or 50 years ago. However, there will be plenty of folks – old and young – who will take the power tow, reach the pinnacle of lofty old Gobbler's Knob and let loose! Zip! And there you are!"

November 1959

 

The view from Gobbler's Knob late 2021

It's been years since skiers zipped down from Gobbler's Knob. The ski area has been shuttered since 2014. The sign still says Denton Hill State Park and it's still within the State Park system. Just last week, officials from DCNR opened up the shuttered lodge and hosted a session to offer up Gobbler's Knob to development as a four-season "Adventure Center." The state is looking for concessionaires to work with them in a public-private partnership.

I am hoping that this suggestion, posted on the Save Denton Hill facebook group, will gain some traction.

"How about a ski resort with a little soul? Maybe just run the poma, a little grooming on the hill below it for beginners. Just clean brush and manage glades on the upper mountain for those who like to earn their turns. Allow car camping and you'll have a pretty hardy group of skiers who currently drive to VT and NH to car camp and ski glades. Very little overhead costs, and you won't create a Disneyland atmosphere (like is happening everywhere Vail and Alterra buy up) in the middle Pennsylvania's more secluded, wild and beautiful counties. Ascutney in Vermont is a good model to follow. As is Brattleboro or Cochran's in Vermont. All family or township owned. Some managed by volunteers. 

My grandfather wrote this in July 1958, as construction of the ski area was underway:

"Just now, however, we are thinking more about the new winter sports area than famous Ole Bull and his famous Stradivarius. Golly can close his eyes and see hundreds of colorfully clothed skiers dotting the Nine Mile mountain, Gobbler's Knob, – some descending at high speed –some on the uphill tow, some taking a spill, some at the lodge for a snack or a coffee break, or to get warm at the great fireplace filled with blazing logs. Great doings in the Nine Mile Valley – come next winter."

Christmas Eve 1970

 

It was cold and snowy that Christmas Eve as a group of high school classmates gathered, heady with the intoxication of being with familiar pals at the midpoint of sophomore year of college - though I can't say whether other intoxicants were in play. Sophomore always brings to mind the high school teacher who related sophomore translates to wise fool, though I cannot remember which teacher.

And so we went to The Reverend's rambling old house, a familiar hangout for us, to spend the evening away from the watchful eyes of our parents, before duty called him to preach the sermon for the combined Methodist-Presbyterian candlelight service at 11.

 I see the red velvet maxi skirt Susan wore that night, hand crafted by her mother who was often found sitting at the Singer sewing machine in the corner of the den in their big foursquare house on West Street. And the care taken in curling our long flowing locks - mine tamed with Clairol's heated rollers - the off-white ones with the spikes.  Debbie's  hair was perhaps her natural color by then. Carol, always the lady, with her legs clad in panty hose and neatly tucked to the side. I was hiding in the back, always self conscious, and next to me Arthur. Not a classmate, he was new to our group. It was six months into our relationship and six months before we were married by that same Reverend.

Even the boys were dressed up - Jeffrey with his special tie-dyed striped jeans and a baggy sports jacket. He had affected pipe smoking - this one with tobacco, no doubt. Dan chose a striped sport shirt and there's Tom, comfortably lounging in oxford cloth and denim. Keck in the back, wearing a brown bulky sweater that was a bit too long in the sleeves. Was his hand raised to instruct The Reverend as he struggled with Susan's Instamatic camera or was he directing the action as he so often did?

This photo surfaces every five years or so as our Class of 1969 marks off the years since graduation with a reunion, and we pore over the faded photos in albums and scrapbook memorabilia to remember.

The Reverend kept a framed copy with him as he moved on in 1972, first to Mansfield and then to Ohio and finally back to Coudersport. It was found among his effects after he died.*

*I find when mining memories for writing practice, the universe often coughs up other so-called ticklers. Yesterday I came across a letter from The Reverend, dated December 23, 1981. I share some of his closing words here:

"I often think of you both - particularly since I have a Christmas Eve group picture taken in 1970 I believe. You are two of the nine people in the picture. Yes, Debbie Lewis is in it too, in case Jane wants to know. The picture is displayed in my living room. My love to you both. God bless you all."

Update: I published a post to begin 2025 today recalling a neighbor from childhood. She was Louise Dudley- always Mrs. Dudley to me. She was a member of the Presbyterian Church, and came to be a friend to The Reverend. He featured her writing in his book "Poets Of Potter County" and often used her poetry for special occasions at church.

During our gathering that long ago Christmas Eve, the Reverend received a phone call with the news that Mrs. Dudley had died that afternoon. I share here her Christmas poem: