Down the road from Grandma’s, Floyd’s brother Alvin lived in a third farm. They had quite a little empire. Alvin had a son named Dick who was my age and turned out to be one of my best friends through high school. He hated the farm almost as much as I did. He was really into music (rock and roll was just starting). I was a reader. This was before I started getting interested in music myself. We would have endless arguments (friendly) about what was better, records or books. Turns out, I ended up liking both of them. I never saw Dick after we graduated from school, but I later heard he was gay. I bet that made the Kader’s happy. Looking back, I can sort of see that happening, but at the time, it would have never entered my mind that he was leaning that way.
The house we lived in had electricity and running water, but for the first couple years, there was no toilet. We had to go out back to an outhouse that stood 50 yards or so from the back door. And remember, this was Michgan and in the winter, you had to shovel a path through the snow to get to the outhouse. It was fun!!! My mother finally put her foot down and made Floyd build a real indoor toilet. We were so happy when that was finished and I could take showers and be warm. That was the first time we had hot running water, too. Before that, all hot water had to be heated on the stove and dishes and faces were washed from the same big bucket-like container that always sat on the stove with water in it.
We also didn’t have central heat. We had a wood-burning stove that stood in the dining room and supplied heat for the entire house. There was a cooking stove in the kitchen, but that didn’t heat too much unless you were standing right over it. My bedroom was upstairs and in the winter time, I depended on what heat would rise up through the exhaust pipe that passed through the wall of my bedroom. I would wake up in the morning to get ready for school and I could see my breath in my bedroom. It really makes you hurry to get dressed and get downstaires where it’s warm.
Since we used wood burning stoves, a lot of the time we spent every year was gathering wood. A couple hundred acres of our land was woods and we would get on the tractor, pulling a little wagon behind and go into the woods looking for trees that had fallen down and could be cut up in pieces for burning. Floyd would take a chainsaw and cut the logs into round pieces and then it was my job to take an ax and split the round pieces into wedge shaped pieces that would fit in the stove. I would prop the larger piece of wood against a tree stump or another piece and then, holding the piece with my boot, bring the ax down and split the wood. Every pair of shoes and boots I owned had little cuts in the toe of the shoe where the ax hit the shoe instead of hitting the wood. It’s a wonder I still have all my toes and didn’t cut something off.
We would collect the wood on the wagon and when that was full, we’d haul it back to the house and stack it outside where it would wait until we needed it. A daily task was going out to the woodpile and bringing in a hugh armful of wood to stack next to the stove to be burned. This was something we did every day, sometimes, several times a day all winter long.
You collected wood in the winter time because in the summer you were busy with other crops. We grew hay to feed the cows. We grew wheat and corn (who knows what for). I think the animals ate those, too. In the summer, I would ride along on a big hay wagon that was attached behind a hay bailer. The hay would be picked up by the machine (Floyd doing the driving), the machine would form the hay into bails (weighing about 75 pounds each) and spit them onto the wagon that was hooked on the back where I was riding. Well, unless someone picked up the bail and stacked it neatly on the wagon, after 2 or 3 of them, they would fall off on the ground, so it was my job to collect the bails and stack them on the wagon. Not too hard for a 16 year old, but pretty miserable, just the same. Once the wagon was full, we would return to the barn where a long conveaor belt thing would carry the bails up into the barn where they were stacked again. If all went well, you grew enough hay to feed the cows through the entire winter. If the crop fell short, then you could be in trouble if it was long winter and you didn’t have enough feed for the cattle. There were years when we had to buy hay to finish out a winter because the barn was empty and the cows still needed to be fed. This hurt profits and made everybody unhappy.
Dad