The Old House in Missouri - Chapter 1- Moving In

Chapter 1 – Moving In

It’s autumn. Every autumn I go crazy with projects, crafts, cooking, holiday prep, you name it. Today I was cooking the pumpkin from Halloween. I hate to waste them so I use every bit; the innards for breads and pies, and I dry the skin in strips for holiday potpourri. I used to roast the seeds for the kids but they are all grown and gone now. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I was cleaning out the inside of the pumpkin (the seeds and strings). The first year that I fixed a pumpkin, I was living in Missouri. Where previously I had been a suburban working mom near Dallas, I now found myself in the country as a stay-at-home mom on a very tight budget so then, as now, I thought not to waste the pumpkin.

We had purchased an old home in a small rural town (and I mean small and I mean rural) surrounded by cornfields and some trees in the very northern portion of the state. The neighbors were the best I have ever had. The women loved me and were extremely helpful. My pride though did not want to admit that I did not know how to cook the pumpkin. I just couldn’t bring myself to ask for help and this was before the Internet days whereas now you can just easily look up instructions or recipes online. So what I did was that I pulled out all the fibers thinking this to be the part to be cooked. I separated and roasted seeds then proceeded to make pumpkin bread out of the stringy fibers. It didn’t go very far but was enough. And you know, I could not tell the difference. It tasted every bit as good as pumpkin bread baked with the pumpkin meat the way it should be. The family ate it and all enjoyed my first batch of Missouri country bumpkin pumpkin bread.

It was in Missouri that I came of age as a woman. I moved there when I was thirty. I learned a lot about life in the simplest terms of living. Baking, canning, recycling, crafting and decorating, doing so much with no budget and making something out of nothing. Everyone we knew thought we were out of our minds for buying the old 1920s house sight unseen and moving all the way across the country to some hick of a town with a baby in tow and another on the way (in addition to my six-year-old son whose time was split between our home and that of his father). We moved on faith. Although it became a little scary driving in as we began to see dilapidated farm house after farm house on the back country roads that lead to the little town. Tumble-down homesteads begged the passerby to offer even a glimpse in passing for they were indeed humbled in their loss of life, farm and walls. It both saddened and frightened us as our thoughts turned to memories of the 1960s TV show, Green Acres, and Lisa Douglas’ big city move to a similar tumble-down shack. I envisioned myself burning cartons of TV dinners in the stove and some neighbor named Eb trying to help us and only making things worse. My husband was handy but from what we were seeing on the way, no amount of handiwork could restore the damage and neglect these once loving farm homes had suffered.

None-the-less we kept driving onward and before long we were pulling up to the house just purchased neatly through the mail from a realtor’s catalog that we had ordered. We breathed a sigh of relief, the house was standing, it was intact. Now for the inside, now for the water, the electric, the heat and so many things that strike fear in the hearts of the new homeowners. But as soon as we stepped in there was a good feeling.

The house had been “remodeled” so-to-speak but probably in the sixties or seventies. The carpet was that olive green and there was only carpet in the living room. The walls had been completely covered in paneling and the ceilings had been “dropped” and redone with whatever you call that particle board ceiling stuff that you see mostly in school rooms. What I call the living room was really a formal dining room, and what was the living room became our bedroom after a while. But at first we took one of the two small bedrooms. There was one bath. Everything seemed to be in working order although the wiring was old, it all worked. For heat there was one old standing gas stove in the dining room but it was decent and heated the whole house on propane. We had to rent what seemed a giant propane tank, a concept not too familiar to us, and that cost a lot of money to us then but there was no choice, it had to be done and filled with like five hundred gallons of propane.

We didn’t have much with us when we moved in because we had been briefly living in Oregon and had left our furnishings behind in a storage in Texas until we would settle somewhere. But once in Oregon, it never felt right to me so when my grandfather passed and left me a small inheritance, I was determined to use it to buy a home. We had no clue even how to begin. I think we saw an ad in a magazine for a rural realtor company and ordered their nationwide catalog. We didn’t have much to spend and Missouri was one of the lowest priced states in real estates. I think we called the company and they mailed us a brochure from the office in a larger town nearest the house. The house was on the back of the brochure. The brochure is still in my scrap book. The asking price was eighty-five hundred dollars. We didn’t know where to begin when it came to buying a house. So I called my dad and asked him what to do. He said offer them half of the asking price then they will come back with half of that and you go from there. So that is exactly what we did; we offered them half of the eighty-five hundred dollars and guess what? They took it! We purchased that little country home for forty-five hundred dollars.

The house sat on a double lot in a peaceful setting in a tiny town of three-hundred and forty people (we made three hundred and forty-three plus one on the way). The yard held huge maple trees, three of them that lined the front. There was a cellar house and due to the cellar, there was a mound of earth and that mound was covered in hundreds of huge old rose bushes that when bloomed was like walking through the arches to heaven. The color and the smell was beautifully hypnotic; so tranquil, so relaxing. There were also many large lilac bushes. In the front was a square of sidewalk with a huge space for a flower bed inside the square. The rest of the yard was open with plenty of space for gardening, kids to play, and dogs to run.

When we pulled up to the house that first day, we were in our car and had only a U-Haul trailer behind us since all of our belongings were in storage in Texas but the minute we pulled up to the house, people began to look. Cars and trucks began driving by to see the new people. One car had about four little old ladies in it. It was going past our house at a crawl, maybe five miles an hour as they pointed, speculated and no doubt reminisced of the past owners and days gone by. New people; young people, hippies some might have said due to my husband’s long hair and the guitar case being carried into the house.

When people would ask, we would answer that we were originally from Texas but had been living in Oregon. Well somehow it always got mixed up and we became the people from California. If you have seen Elizabethtown, it’s kind of like that; his other family kept saying his nuclear family was from California instead of Oregon. It was the same with us and this was about twenty years before that movie came out. Through the years even after they had come to know and accept us, we were still the people from California. My husband would walk in the grocery store or the filling station and they would say, “Hey aren’t you that fellow from California?” or “Hey, it’s that fellow from California.” They never got it right. For a while we tried to correct them each time but I think after a while we finally gave up and just let them think we were from California.

There was a lot to be done, not to mention the culture shock of moving to a farmland community though we were soon to find that a farming community had its perks from corn-on-the-cob to county fairs and harvest dances, it became a treasure that slowly unearthed itself within our lives. But first things first, the kitchen.

Continue to Chapter 2

copyright Cheryl Bruedigam 2016