The Old House in Missouri - Chapter 3 - The People

From the moment we pulled into to town, the people were amazing. Neighbors came and introduced themselves and eventually we began to know a few people around town as well. These were country, down-to-earth, God-loving people who were always ready to lend a hand. They were farmers whether they lived in town or not. Many were elderly; most were elderly. The majority of the little town’s population was elderly as more and more the young folks left for the cities to find work or to live a life differently than what their families had lived. Some wanted to escape the hardship of country life yet in their escape they were truly leaving behind some of life’s simplest pleasures.

Not remembering who came first but in meeting our immediate neighbors, there was Sue, an in-town farmer’s wife who raised a family of nine. Her husband farmed for others, paid a portion of the crop and kept some for his family. Sue was an avid gardener herself and her garden looked more like a professionally farmed square of land. She would be out in the Missouri black dirt, sometimes near knee-deep as her bare feet sank in the dirty black mud while she worked, weeding and nurturing her crops that would help to feed her family each year.

Sue told us that she too was from California (convinced as was everyone else that we were from California) and this seemed to increase her affection for us. She would reminisce about her days growing up in a town near the Redwoods with a slight longing in her eye that expressed that she had not returned home in a long while. She was in her fifties with only two children left at home, one of which was a boy just a little older that my oldest son and the two immediately became best friends, they were inseparable.

Sue was always there to visit with and she stopped over regularly to bring us some of whatever she had extra. She also never failed to invite us to Sunday service or an occasional church picnic.

Then there was Wanda. Wanda was about ninety. She and her husband had owned a farm outside of town and when he passed away she had moved into town for convenience and bought a nice little house. The woman could work circles around me. I was thirty, she was ninety. She still drove and her car was a turquoise fifties model, maybe a Ford, still in mint condition. She and her husband had bought it new. It shone in the driveway outdoing anything else parked in the neighborhood.

Wanda would visit with us a lot in the yard because she lived right across the street so we saw her frequently. Some days she would come in and we would have a cup of tea. Other times I visited with her in her home. She was a character and pretty much had an answer for anything you wanted to know, or at least an opinion, she was strong-minded and determined (probably the reason she had lived so long, that and good fresh farm food). She was a stickler for watering the yard and I must say her yard was immaculate. Green and lush with flowers in every corner, by the road, in containers. “Always water in the morning,” she said, “nobody should have to go to bed with their feet wet.” She pulled, weeded, hoed, shoveled, watered, transplanted, dead-headed, all day every day. If you didn’t see Wanda in the yard then something was wrong and there would be cause for concern. Other days you would see her in her big old car heading down to the little grocer. Wanda got around. She rarely showed emotion but she was extremely fond of the kids though she was stern about it. In winters she would hire my oldest boy to shovel and clear her drive or to help her around the yard in the summer. She almost always had a trinket for me or the babies.

Then there was Ruth. Ruth lived up on the corner and was in her late eighties. Ruth also could work circles around me and possibly around Wanda. It was common place in the spring and summer to see her out with her push-plow plowing her garden. She would be adorned and covered in an old-timey bonnet that was no doubt a hundred years old. She was short and a little stocky with a dowager’s hump, so there she would be, bent over nearly parallel to the ground but holding up that plow. Most of the neighbors used power plows but not Ruth, she was old-school.

Ruth would have us over and when we visited Ruth there was a more formal air. Her house was nicer than the others, it was big and rambling and in near perfect condition for its age. An old two-story with a barn shape, original wood trim and beautiful molding, French doors, a formal living room, out-buildings, a lovely old kitchen, herb garden, pathways, and though formal still a very homey feel. We would dress up a little, just a little, to visit Ruth and I would force my husband into a white shirt (which he did not like to do but was willing for Ruth). Ruth was very moral, very old-fashioned. It was kind of like visiting with one of the Baldwin sisters from the Waltons; it just had that feel. Ruth also was widowed and had a son who visited on occasion from Colorado. He was a nice man and treated his mother well when he was in town but that was only on occasion and otherwise Ruth just didn’t have anyone much to visit with so we spent time with her when we could. She loved the babies too.

The neighbor woman we became the closest to though was Patsy and also her husband, Roy. They were catty-cornered to us. They had also been farmers, moved into town. Roy’s health was deteriorating with emphysema and he was a Korean War Vet as well.  Patsy would hire my husband to do odd-jobs for her around the house or yard. Once he was painting the exterior of their house and was stung by a bee. We did not know he was allergic but we found out quick! His chest swelled up, he could barely breath and it was fearful for a time that he was going to make it. He refused any trip to the doctor because that’s how my stubborn husband is and after a few days in bed, he returned to his healthy self. Though he continued to help Patsy, I do not recall that he painted for her any more, at least not near that particular bush.

Bees were crazy there. Once we came out onto the old wrap-around porch and there was a hive of bees hanging from the roof of it but they had no hive, they were just all together by the thousands, suspended in the air. Then it began moving. We did not know what to do so my husband went over to ask Roy. Roy said they had lost their hive and they were traveling to find another place to build. So we let them be (no pun intended) and the next morning they were gone. It was a sight I had never seen and don’t care to again. I was just glad that nothing set them off while they were passing through.

Patsy loved the kids, all of them. She came over to visit a lot. Sometimes I got the feeling she was just coming to see if I was alright or if I needed anything. She had three daughters and a son so she had a strong mother’s sense. I think she picked up on our struggles, our hard times as newlyweds (maybe even heard some of our arguing as all new couples do), or maybe she just knew in ways that I needed a mom and I didn’t have one. Someone to coo and guide, to share wisdom and advice or just a cup of hot cocoa. She sewed clothes for my baby girl. She kept an eye on our house when we weren’t home. No one locked their doors in our town, there was no need. The only key we had to the house was one old skeleton key that fit all the locks. But Patsy kept an eye out anyway as all good neighbors do and she was about the best neighbor anybody could ask for.

Eventually, Roy’s health took him away. It was a cold winter day and we had no sitter to attend the funeral so we kept my oldest boy home and told him he was going to have to do it. He was in the third grade and had never stayed with the babies. But he did well so that we could pay our last respects to Roy and be there for Patsy and her family. It was a military funeral and she was given the flag. It was a cold, blustery winter Missouri day and a hard one to get through. We were only gone an hour and the kids did fine. Not too long after that we found a local girl to sit when we needed to leave. It was hard on Patsy losing Roy and I don’t think she ever quite recovered. We gave her space and in time she came around again but by then her only son had moved back home along with his troubles and it was yet another break on an already broken heart. That spark in her eye was gone and it had left with Roy.

There were also some younger neighbors. There was Bonnie and Hank behind us in a mobile home. Local kids who married young and had stayed. Early twenties, maybe. They had one baby, a toddler. They liked us but they didn’t like us. I think we bugged them for some reason. Maybe just because we were outsiders, they weren’t as accepting as the old folks were. They started out trying to be friendly and pretty much invited themselves over for dinner one night. So I set dinner on my grandmother’s cherry wood table in the formal dining room. They came; we visited, chatting politely while all the time I could feel their eyes stealing glances around; at our things, at our life. Books on the shelves with titles like Music Therapy, Carl Jung, The Once and Future King, The Hobbit. Guitars and keyboards, recording equipment, and my husband’s prized bull head which he had painted after he found it in the desert on one of his sojourns for truth, from it hanging all sorts of his spiritual paraphernalia like feathers and necklaces that represented his part native heritage.

Hank was just a farm boy who married too young. He went deer hunting to feed his family. He worked at the local mill. He drove a beat up old pickup. Bonnie had been pretty in a plain way probably before her child (back when they were high school sweethearts) but had never lost the weight. Later though, she became committed and did lose the weight as she began walking miles each day, taking the baby with her in the stroller, all the way out on the highway and before long she was hard to recognize as the same Bonnie. She lost, toned and trimmed to a new look and with her new look came a frostier person. They still tried to be friendly though.

When our son was born, we had no one to keep our daughter. My older boy was back with his dad at the time so he was taken care of but there was no one to keep our daughter so my husband could come to the hospital. Out of desperation, we asked Bonnie during my frantic breaking of the water. She agreed but said she had to work so our daughter would have to go to day care with her son. We had no choice but to agree. Our daughter was taken to Bonnie and I was taken to a town forty-some miles away to the hospital. The arrangement was for our daughter to stay overnight with them. It was a disaster. Our baby girl had never been with anyone else, we had never left her with anyone. She cried and cried and could not be quieted. The day care had to call Bonnie to leave work to come and get her. Bonnie was not happy about this. The next morning, my husband brought our daughter to the hospital with him until he brought me and our son back home.

Oddly though a couple weeks later on our daughter’s first birthday, Bonnie asked if she could give her a party. Now I did not want this because it was her first birthday and I wanted to do her birthday. I already did not like Bonnie and the relationship was becoming more and more tense however I felt I could not refuse and offend her so we let her give the party. It was simply their baby and ours but she had a little cake and whatever else she had done. It turned out that while we were there, our daughter took her first steps. I was happy she had walked but not happy that it had been at Bonnie’s house. I was jealous I suppose. I felt like we were having to share precious time with someone who didn’t really like us and I never was sure why she offered the party.

As time passed, we spoke with Bonnie and Hank less and less. She did invite us one evening out to her father’s house in the country. I loved the house, it was completely rustic, full of wood-crafting which he did as a hobby, rocks he had hounded, feathers, all sorts of nature in the decor. Bonnie didn’t seem to close with her father; she had said he was a harsh man and would never allow her to cry. But country people can be harsh; they had to be to survive. Girls had to be tough to make it. And Bonnie was tough. She was one of those types I would have avoided in school for fear she would have beat the crap out of me.

After that, we rarely spoke anymore. Hank would drive by and pretend to wave. We jokingly wondered if he was waving or simply swatting a fly at his ear as he went by. It was hard to tell and he was a shy kid of few words anyway. We never fit in with Bonnie and Hank and we never would have. We suspected they thought us too different. I suspected Bonnie might have had a hint of jealousy. Hank may have been offended because my husband didn’t deer hunt, who knew. We could only speculate.

There were others nearby as well. There was Russ the preacher and a deputy, Ken a disabled trucker also a preacher. There were Mr. and Mrs. Oldham who were a sweet old retired couple across the street. He would visit outdoors with my husband a lot, mostly yard talk. He did though crochet, and I thought it strange that a man would crochet but I had never really thought that there might be men who would crochet. He said his mother had taught him and he enjoyed making things for his grandchildren. He always waved when he would putt by in his little red truck.

Those were the folks we came to know well just as neighbors and all proved to be fine people, Bonnie and Hank aside, but the real measure was when our youngest son was born,

When we moved to the country house, I was due to deliver that fall, in October. We had at least met most of the closer neighbors by then but the response of the people in town was simply overwhelming. This was a tiny town of only a little over three-hundred people, this was the country, and these were giving people. When our son was born, they came out of the woodwork. I had only just gotten out of the car with the baby as my husband was helping us in and they began to come. Some we knew, some we didn’t. But they had heard about the baby and wanted to bring something by. They had been waiting to see us pull up in front of the house. I recall Wanda was the first over with a handmade baby quilt and some toys. The quilt was beautifully stitched and in light yellow colors of patchwork. The toys, I cannot help but laugh, one was a dog chew toy, but I just thanked her and laughingly showed it later to my husband. Bless her heart, she meant well. Others came with food; covered dishes so I wouldn’t have to prepare a meal, cakes, and all sorts of food. One woman in a wheelchair sent for my husband to come to her house and we barely knew her and she gave us cash. Others brought diapers. People we didn’t even know were just showing up with gifts. It was the biggest outpouring of love that we had ever experienced. Their generosity and true caring was simply beyond words. We had been accepted as one of them; we had been welcomed into the community, though of course, we were still the people from California, we were also a welcomed family into their community, their lives, and their homes. It was a very warm feeling. 

copyright Cheryl Bruedigam 2016

The Old House in Missouri - Chapter 2 - The Kitchen

Time to settle in, unpack, rearrange, decorate and remodel. Remodel? Well yes. It was painfully obvious to my sense of decor that something much more lovely might lie hidden behind that awful wood paneling and those incredibly low and stark white ceilings. But first, the kitchen. We didn’t like where the kitchen doorway into the dining room was. If we moved it, we would have more room in the kitchen. Ah, the kitchen. I will get off track here but what a lovely large old kitchen it was. I did not yet have a cook stove and one had not come with the house. Shortly after moving in, probably within a week, we drove down to Texas to retrieve our belongings from storage as well as to what had been left me by my grandfather.

When we had gotten married my father had mentioned that he still had my great-grandmother’s stove (cook-stove he called it) in storage if I wanted it since I needed a stove. We had gotten it and used it briefly before moving to Oregon. I will never forget that day. It was stored at my dad’s mother-in-law’s house and no one was around to help us. I was pregnant so I could not lift. My husband got that huge heavy stove somehow by himself into the back of his Jeep of all things! I still to this day do not know how he got that stove loaded even though I stood there and watched him do it. I was so glad we had gotten it, it was a Cadillac of stoves. I can’t remember the brand or the model or the year but it was old and beautiful and huge and heavy. It was white porcelain-looking. It had four burners, an oven, and also a storage cabinet below for pots and pans and above that a clear area of space to work upon. It was a beauty and it fit right into our Missouri country kitchen.

Back to the remodeling, we started in the kitchen. There had been linoleum on the kitchen floor but I was convinced there was a wood floor beneath so my husband tore out the linoleum and sure enough there were wood boards though it was not pretty since it had been covered for no telling how many decades but it was rough and rugged and I liked it.

Right before I met my husband, I had visited my aunt and uncle in a small Texas town to where they had retired. They had purchased an old home and had it moved to some land in the country. My aunt had set about then to remodel and redecorate her country dream house. I had fallen in love with it the first minute I saw it. The antiques, dolls, white lace and linens, a country kitchen. I set out to do the same. At some point she and my cousin drove to Missouri to visit us in the country house and through the months and years there she began to send me little country treats. For Christmas one year she had refurbished my mother’s doll, wrapped her in a beautiful box of Christmas wrapping paper and sent her to me. I was so thrilled. She was so old and so beautiful and all fixed up. Another time she sent me handkerchiefs that belonged to my great-grandmother. She began sending me her favorite country recipes like homemade gravy, mayo, pickles, and my favorite, her lemon bread. At other times she sent handmade country greeting cards covered in snippets of material and one year she sent hand-made Christmas stockings for each of my three children with their names embroidered on the stockings. The stocking for my daughter was pink.

Our daughter had been born while we were in Oregon. We had spent only a fall and winter there. It was spring when we made the move across the country to the house in Missouri. We arrived the first week of April. It was muddy and cloudy and still cold. I was pregnant and due to deliver in October. We were not used to cold springs because we were from Texas. In Texas, spring is warm and beautiful (minus tornadoes of course). But cold or not, there was still much to do in the new old house.

The next order of business in the kitchen was the chimney above the stove. It had been plastered over and covered with wallpaper. I was equally convinced that there was more there than met the eye behind it. I wanted it stripped. Finally my husband got to work and this was a messy job. He pulled off all of the wallpaper and plaster to reveal a beautiful old brick chimney that lead, you guessed it, nowhere. But it was brick and it was cool so we just left it as it was. Possibly when the house was built in the early twenties, there had been a wood stove that needed ventilation and then in later years when the house had been remodeled, the chimney had been walled off. My kitchen now had a wood floor and an old brick chimney. We were peeling the layers away little by little to reveal its original, but now-hidden, beauty and more important, character.

Not every house has character but old houses do and this one was no exception. When we purchased the house, we received the abstract papers along with it containing all of the information about it dating back to its humble nineteen-twenties beginnings. We had been told by the realtor that the previous owner was an elderly gentleman who after losing his wife, had developed Alzheimer’s. His name was Vern. We were touched to learn about the owners and some of their history. Living alone with Alzheimer’s, the old gentleman had began to just wander off and his son felt he had no choice but to put him in a nursing home. He had been the school music teacher for years and had then retired. My husband loved the idea that the owner had been a music teacher for he too is a musician. It was sadly obvious that a woman’s touch had not been upon the house in a long while. There were still some scattered pieces of furniture and decor when we moved in and there was nothing of the feminine touch in them. We cleaned everything out of course and set about fixing up with our own things. I had my grandparents furniture including their living room suite and her cherry-wood secretary and dining set. The old house was beginning to feel like home.

After the chimney, it was time to move that doorway that led into the dining room. That was a huge mess. Behind the paneled wall were wallpaper and plaster. Inside the plaster were slats of wood. It all had to be cut away to make a new doorway. The entire house had dust drifting in clouds from the busted plaster. The sound of my husband banging away, removing the thick wall that had once been echoed for hours or days, I can’t recall. He boarded up the old kitchen entrance and built shelves inside of it on the dining room side. I decorated the shelves with old pink curtains in a rose print, draping them around the shelves and lined the shelves with lace. I placed my collection of tea sets on the shelves. The tea sets seemed happy to have a place at least to show themselves off. The rearrangement of the kitchen doorways created a solid wall in the kitchen and gave us more living space in both rooms. In old houses such as this one, the doorways were built into the middle of each room and you walked through one room to get to another. There were no hallways. But an addition to the kitchen allowed us the space to add the doorway to the dining room very near the outer wall instead of it being in the center of the room and taking away precious wall space. The other doorways to each room were also set like this but we left those as they were.

My husband’s next project was extending the kitchen and enlarging it through the old back porch that was on the house. This too was a job but he enjoyed it. He added quite a few square feet as well as room for my washer and dryer and room to have a large old country kitchen table which we purchased used. It was a table with character and a previous life, or lives. It was covered in scratches and even had some names carved in it but it was beautiful old wood in a rust-colored stain and I loved it. Some of my favorite memories of that time (as much as I really dislike cold weather) were winter mornings, being the first one up, coming into the kitchen and I had to light the stove from the pilot, so I would light the big old oven and open it up for a little extra heat to warm the kitchen. Then I would sit at the table and have my tea in the morning’s silence. I communed with that kitchen, it seemed to have stories to tell. The whole house had ten-foot ceilings as did the kitchen. I thought it odd though that the counter was really low, like for a short person, and I am pretty tall but the cabinets stretched all the way to the top of that ten-foot ceiling. They were white with old outdated metal handles but I just left them as they were. I would sit there on the cold mornings imagining a little short woman working away at her little short counter.

It was exciting to me to have ten-foot ceilings in the kitchen and I wanted to take advantage of that extra space so I told my husband I wanted one of those thingies to hang pots and pans from the ceiling. Now keep in mind that we had no money for redecorating. Everything that we used we found laying about somewhere. So in his ingenious, he suspended an old rustic broom handle and attached hooks to it. It fit right in with the old wooden floors and I was able to hang all my pots and pans plus some bunches of herbs.

My love affair with herbs was fairly new at that point. While in Oregon, my husband had taken me to an herb store and I was immediately in love. I didn’t even know what herbs were before that but I was like a kid walking into a candy shop. I didn’t know which herbs were which so I just starting picking out what to get; an ounce of this, a half ounce of that, just whatever I felt drawn to. I had a sack full of names I knew nothing about like St. John’s Wort, Mullien, Calendula and on and on. I bought a big fat herb book and set about learning all that I could about these amazing and mysterious plants that had been known to the rest of mankind for millennium. So I was completely stocked on herbs when we made the move to Missouri. My husband built me a heavy-duty jumbo rustic spice rack from redwood he had gathered in California, I mean Oregon (see they even had me thinking we were from California!) and I filled its shelves with bottles, jars, tinctures and salves and hung it in the old country kitchen. Oh my, such a small thing but I was in love and it was so exciting to me!

The roses and lilacs in the yard also provided an extension to my herbal love, the addition of flowers. There were so many rose bushes that there were too many to count and in the late spring they bloomed beautiful pink roses. I harvested them faithfully carrying in basket after basket, I had at least a bushel. One year I decided to make rose petal jam because I had so many but it takes a lot of petals to make the jam. My husband and his handy work once again came to the rescue because in addition to the petals to preserve, I needed rose oil and I had none. So in order to get the oil out of the roses, we needed what is basically known as a “still.” He rigged a still that looked something akin to some contraction that would normally concoct moonshine yet instead it coerced out the secret hidden oils of the roses, one tiny drip at a time. This was a timely process indeed and not for the impatient.  I finally got enough out to meet the recipe requirements which I was following and after all that and over a bushel of roses, I came out with one tiny jar of jam. It was too pretty, too hard-earned and too special to eat so I just kept it in the jar for decorative purposes on a kitchen shelf.

Working with the roses though led me to even more luxurious discoveries. I had no shortage of dried roses. I had begun drying all kinds of flowers. We had planted a flower garden and it bloomed in full by late summer and early autumn that first year. It was largely zinnias but zinnias are excellent for holding their shape and color.

Drying the flowers was another completely new process to me that I had to learn all about, much by trial and error. First order was to find screens to dry so the flowers can get air beneath them and dry evenly and well enough that they will not mold. There were some old window screens in our garage so we hauled them in and I filled them with flowers. In my inexperience, I did not know however that the pollens from the drying flowers would keep us sick with allergies for the months that I had them in the house. It’s all fine and dandy when you see the dried bunches of flowers and herbs hanging in the kitchens in the fancy spreads in magazine like Country Living but in real life, it doesn’t work. We were sick with allergies for months. I finally put two and two together and removed the drying process from the house to the cellar and we all felt much better and the flowers dried better as well as they were then completely in the dark. They need to be in the dark to fully keep their color while drying. The more sunlight, the less color they will hold.

After drying the flowers, I began looking for more ways to use them. I had since bought another big wonderful herb book and there were recipes and ideas for bath products and skin care. I loved this! I was in heaven once again. I had taught skin care for five years, I had been a professional model, and this was something I hated giving up. Finding myself transformed from a runway glam girl to a stay-at-home country herbal mom was never anything I could have ever imagined. As I have said our budget was tight, there was no money for makeup or fancy products. My husband didn’t care for them anyway as he is a real naturalist. Giving them up had been hard but after a while, I never even noticed because I was too busy with two new babies and all of our money went for diapers,  formula, and pet food (we had two dachshunds and numerous stray cats). So once I stumbled into the idea of making bath and skin care products, I was happy to give it a try. I also used the dried flowers in crafts and decorating. Once you get them fully dried, if using for decorating, the allergy thing isn’t really an issue any more after all the pollens have gone. To help with this and to keep them from flaking or falling apart, I would spray them with hair spray after they were dried, a rare commodity that I hardly used, so a can lasted a long time. I also sprayed my sketches with it but that’s another story. I will talk more on the specific crafts, bath items and recipes in the coming chapters.

We went two months without a refrigerator using only a cooler. To purchase anything larger than a loaf of bread required a trip elsewhere. We were located smack dab in between Des Moines, Iowa, and Kansas City, Missouri; an hour and a half drive to either. We found a used appliance store in Des Moines so that is where we headed. I wanted an old-timey fridge for the kitchen and we found one. It was probably a fifties model, the shorter, rounded kind. It was white so it matched Grandmother’s cook-stove and the cabinets. We did not have a truck to haul it in, only our car. Now my husband, as I have said, is very handy and ingenious. He did what I don’t think anyone else on the planet would have done. He removed the trunk lid on the car, stood it up in the trunk and loaded the refrigerator in the trunk. His then fourteen-year-old-daughter had come to visit a while and was in the back seat of the car. She was so teen-agedly embarrassed, that she stayed lying down in the seat the entire drive home. We looked like the Beverly Hillbillies out appliance shopping. We laughed about that incident for years but it worked and he got us our old-timey refrigerator and it was a perfect fit in my country kitchen.

The kitchen in that house became my haven for most all of my work was centered within its homey walls with its peeling early twentieth-century wall paper, its recently unearthed red brick chimney and the old farmhouse table that was happy to share its memories with us. My great-grandmother’s rocking chair sat in the cozy corner next to her cook-stove and I spent endless hours there season after season, loving every minute of it. Well, mostly.

Continue to Chapter 3

copyright Cheryl Bruedigam 2016

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

Add Some Elegance and Beauty - You Deserve It

Nothing wrong with a little elegance, and a little goes a long way. Whether it's roses or frills, just a touch can turn the mundane into the beautiful. Add some elegance to your home, add some elegance to your wardrobe and enjoy the beauty! We need beauty in our lives each and every day, it makes the breath catch and the heart soar as it feeds the spirit. 

Women have always loved to enhance themselves and their surroundings with whatever means or resources they had around them. In the fifties, women actually "dressed" whether they were going out or not. These days we're shopping in sweats or even pajama pants. We have drifted a long way from the beauty of our great-grandmothers as well as eons of women before them. So go ahead, skip the sweats, add some class to the wardrobe and buy yourself some roses. You are beautiful and you deserve it.

Time for a Little Spring Beauty

It is spring and I am very seasonal with my decorating. Thoughts have turned to light, airy, clean and crisp, with the colors of spring. Flowers are in bloom for clipping or for drying for that wonderful fall potpourri.

It is time to get out and hit the vintage shops and thrifts, yard sales and consignments for any new tidbits for decorating or including in crafts.

I have already made a white flower arrangement. 

Over the weekend I made a beautiful find; a lovely lace scarf (paired here with linen spray to really add a touch of spring to the bedroom)

So many options to add a simple touch of spring to your decor. Just lighten up a bit, add some nature or color and make it light and airy. You will feel the refreshment just like a breath of fresh spring air.