Old farm houses and making a home vs. homemaking

It’s a well-known fact in the farm community that when you move onto a place, you don’t do it for the house that’s there.

Many a flowery handkerchief has been ravaged by farm women throughout history because of that fact.

Farm women and men gaze at the same kinds of things: the amount of storage and space allowed in the buildings of their choices. The women size up a home in that way, and farmers size up the outbuildings (the machine shed, repair shop, livestock facilities, etc.).

By Karen Schwaller

not. After all, the farm home is not where the money is made. But as history goes, it isn’t always made in the outbuildings either.

My parents had been married a few months before they moved out to a farm.

Mom said when they first brought her mother out to see where they would be living, Grandma cried as she walked around the house.

er other rodents claimed residency there.

Mom wasn’t a fan of the house either, but, she was in it — with a new wedding ring on her finger; so she knew she’d better get to work.

we turned out of the driveway to see what that was all about. The house was moved, and there was electrical and plumbing work to do, along with hardwood floors to uncover and every room to paint.

Women get the home that comes with the farm, whether she strikes gold or

She didn’t cry because of the home’s beauty and spacious living quarters, but because of a small house that had not been lived in for a while, with the exception of a few obvious neighborhoods of mouse families—and whatev-

LAND MINDS, from pg. 2 when I start, it’s going to get hot and I was going to be out there all day anyhow.

I had taken my shirt off and put the tractor in road gear and sped down the field lane. The morning air felt cool against my hide. I had even taken my cap off to let the breeze flow through my hair.

The cornfield I was going to was in the northwest corner of our land. The land had a row of trees running along its half-mile length. Dad called it the avenue because it reminded him of the tree-lined avenues in the city. He also called it that because he liked saying things like, “Well, just the other day I was walking down the avenue.”

The entire month of June was devoted to cultivating. Cultivate, cultivate, and then cultivate some more with a day or two thrown in to toss bales. I hardly had time for anything else. Because of all our acres of corn and beans, I sometimes went out after supper to cultivate.

My days were long and hot, but at the end of the day when I lay in bed with the cool night air blowing in from the open window, I had the satisfaction that I had accomplished something.

Before I dropped the cultivator in the ground, I looked around and said,

“There is no better artwork by man than a cornfield early in the morning.” I had been cultivating for a few days now, but when I came home at noon, Mom gave me grief about being out in the field without my shirt or cap on.

After our noon meal, I promised to wear my shirt and get something on my head. I soaked my shirt and cap in the water tank before heading out with the tractor. If I couldn’t look cool, I would at least feel cool. With the hot afternoon sun baking me on the tractor, it didn’t take long for the shirt and cap to be completely dried.

Even in these Sahara-like conditions, I didn’t mind being out here. I was alone with my thoughts while watching the rows of corn continually going by the shovels of the cultivator. No one talking; no one around. It’s just me in the middle of this big field. I’m so glad to be out of school. I’m working with the soil. Let the elements rain down on me. I don’t mind.

What makes a time nostalgic, I think, are the feelings of warmth, joy and safety which surround the memory. In turn, it can bring comfort to the everyday like July’s corn fields — knee high or otherwise. Would every quiet dream climb wild.

Laura Cole is the staff writer of The Land. She may be reached at lcole@ TheLandOnline.com. v

She plugged mouse holes in drawers and walls, extracted mouse nests, flounced rodent raisins out, and scoured until her red 1940’s/50’s kitchen linoleum was only pink. She hung a little wallpaper and before long, the house passed her litmus test. A few children later, Mom and Dad added on to the house with a basement and another addition … and remained married throughout all of that renovation — happily or not, as it goes in home remodeling.

I also married someone who lived on a farm. The farm had an old small house which was built in the late 1800s. By this time (the mid 1980s), the foundation was in tough shape and the mice were invading like young children do when they know you’re in the bathroom. It was a battle of wits with chess-like strategy, waiting to see where the mice would appear next.

To this day, when I see beet roots in the garden, I want to go running into the night.

In an unexpected twist, our neighbors, who had moved to town, said they wanted something to be done with their much larger country home and asked if we would buy it.

Our kitchen door was still swinging shut behind us and the gravel flew as

And as with most families with young adult children, they soon move out following graduation. But not in our family. When our kids graduated, we moved out — and on to a nearby place where the selling point was a machine shed that could hold the indigenous people and farming tools of a small country. Yet the house hadn’t been lived in for some time.

I began to get the same shivers my mother had gotten all those years ago. We eventually tore that house down and built a new one. Home builders say people design homes differently as they get older, and that is what we found out.

As our home was being built in a way that we could live in it as we aged, I called a college friend of mine who was excited about her upcoming trip to California to spend a week on the golf course with her husband. Her life was so different than mine.

I told her I was excited about the high toilets in our new farm house. She must have wondered when I lost my way.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net v