there are as many versions of this story as there are little towns & villages.
my little town has a large family which functions as a benefactor to the community, in providing jobs for many people, and in giving directly to community projects and the like. the family is prosperous, and involved in many things.
it was not always so.
a generation ago, the generation of my youth, life was tough for this family. there were many mouths to feed, and there were many lean times. times in which the family ate the same meal for weeks on end, because while potatoes were on hand, little else was. a member of that family, let's just call him bob, recounted that one day his dad found a case lot of pablum, a name given a baby food, reputedly of easy digestion. bob recounted that the family ate the stuff forever, and while sustaining, (and apparently even good at his recollection), it had the undesirable quality of being a bit less than solid when excreted, and very hard to get off of one's bottom by cleaning w/ toilet paper.
"gooey poopie," we called such stuff in my family. it just smears all over.
that got us all off onto stories of winter subsistence in milton freewater in the old days, and also on life in rural north dakota and minnesota, from which a lot of people around here hail. like samuel johnson said of scotland, apparently north dakota and minnesota are good places to be from. to a man, none missed the snow and cold very damned much: i didn't hear anyone reminiscing about cross country skiing across barn lots at 30 degrees below zero, and a 35 mile an hour wind out of the northern canadian prairies. not one.
i mentioned the winters spent on chili beans, meal after meal.
this got bob off on the topic of beans. apparently he and his little family lived on beans months on end. and, being a family mostly of boys, with a very hardy sister or three thrown in for good measure, they gradually got around to playing with bean farts, a readily available and inexpensive toy.
i would guess, based upon my own experience with three brothers, that the competition got down basically to noise in terms of loudness, noise in terms of flatulence, and odor. it's a pretty elemental deal, playing with farts. (he made no assessment as to whether the girls played, but girls in this family, of all generations, have been pretty hardy souls, and i suspect that they played right along.) we all considered this.
and, then bob apparently switched topics, as he began to talk about a little shetland pony. he allowed as to how this little pony was preternaturally intelligent, and allowed as to how they were as much raised and disciplined by the pony as the pony was by them. it seems that one day bob and his brothers hitched the pony up to a small wagon or cart, and that when the pony had been hitched, its butt end less than feet away from their faces, that the pony farted. prodigiously. and, with much killing effect, in terms of odour. (to which fact i can attest, horse farts can be pretty rancid.)
bob swears that the pony, finished with farting, then turned his head to regard them, and the results of his handiwork, and being pleased with same, the pony grinned at him. grinned. bob did not mention whether he chuckled, in malice, derision, sheer joy and/or bumptious humor, or otherwise.
i cannot imagine that it would have been otherwise.
bob says now that he realizes that when a child the family was "poor." he says he did not then know what poor was, nor worry about it very much. although the diet got a little meager over the winter, so did everyone else's in town, and though they hadn't much money, neither did anyone else. he recounted that one day his dad ordered all able bodied souls, e.g., young males, to go help a neighbor sack and bring in potatoes. everyone, e.g., the young males, groused about this until his dad made it explicit that shit hit the fan discipline would rapidly follow if they did not get their butts in gear and report to the neighbor for duty.
they did. some weeks later, all the boys were delivered a check from the neighbor. it could not have been much, trust me. from that day forward, says bob, he was solidly into work. it is something he never got over, and hasn't gotten over. though older than me by a few years, he works pretty steadily. he operates heavy equipment, does some excavation, and other things too numerous to mention.
how tough was growing up?
it seems that the family moved. mom & dad got one bedroom, the girls shared another, and the boys were given the responsibility for shifting for themselves. bob and another brother shoehorned a bed into the far end of a shed. no mention of where the bedroom ensemble went, as you shall soon understand why. two other brothers, let's just call them joe and danny, brought another bed into the structure, set it up, and found that about three foot of the bed (that's the way we talk around here, so you can just live with it) stuck out into the outside. you know, "outside," as not inside the confines of the shed. you figure out whether the room was closed, and how much "insulation" it had in it ... i figure whatever the "r" factor is for boards w/ gaps, is the "r" factor the shed had.
at any rate, it was a heavy winter, and much snow. bob relates the snow as being about 3 feet deep, but, i discount that. it doesn't snow or rain that much around here. at any rate, it was of little consequence for the boys, as their dad simply threw a tarp of the bed, and the boys slept under the tarp and their bedding, essentially outside. in the weather. bob said the neighbors were upset about the whole thing, but that they didn't much understand the fuss.
the family of that generation were small, well knit, wiry and very hardy. i went to school in the same class as sister joanie, and sat by her through grade school most of the time, but kind of lost track of her in high school. i would occasionally talk to her on the phone, and when i called her house, i could never tell who i was talking to, as all the family sounded just alike, ... , their voices were almost identical. oh, what a choir they might have made.
this family, ... , well, they were tough as nails. they were not mean. but tough. i always had visions of horror as to what might happen to me, were i to offend one of the sisters for some reason. (i didn't wonder too much about getting cross threaded w/ one of the brothers, hell, a simpleton could have figured that out.) i always figured that i would have gotten the peewillikers stomped out of me, and i figure at this juncture that was pretty accurate figuring.
the point is, the boys would not have set upon me as a gang. nope, they would have set on me one at a time, ... , the code of the west. but, in sequence. i figured that to be sporting they would use age to determine the order of precedence, starting young and working toward the older, one at a time, each one whomping on me as long as he had strength to lift his arms, and then giving way to a fresh brother.
for as many days as it took.
that's how i figured it would go, then. and, that's how i figure it would have gone, now.
no cussing. no threats. no yelling, or bullying. no kicking, or twisting noses. no cheating. no showing off or phony theatrics. just a good honest & quite thorough butt kicking.
what else could i have expected from boys who slept in the snow.
john jay @ 12.10.2013
p.s. read the post below, and then follow the link therein. quite funny, seeing a pony dressed in a very nice sweater. and, that's no "yarn."
Speaking of folks moving from the upper mid-west. There is a family around here whose parents came out to visit relatives in the late 60's. The kids got a call telling them to get a hold of a realator and put the farm up for sale. When the folks got home to Minnesota they promptly packed and moved to Selah!
Posted by: Rollie | December 11, 2013 at 06:07 PM
rollie:
my guess is they first saw selah in the dead of winter.
summer wouldn't have been so different.
john
Posted by: john jay | December 11, 2013 at 07:02 PM