Wednesday, January 6, 2016

John Henry's Daughter- my earliest memory!

My Unbelievable First Memory:
Am truly sorry to have "stood you up" after building up your curiosity about my horrendous first memory - but we had a number of questions to answer online and opted to tend to business and are just now getting back to you, dear followers of our blogs.  

To set the scene - we lived on a very productive farm, with no electricity or indoor plumbing.   My Dad had a good herd of cows, mostly holsteins - they are the blavck and white ones which produce quite good volumes of milk - and we had one jersey, who produced richer milk - all of the milk was carefully carried to the milk house, which was cooled by water from a good well up near the farm house.  

Since we had no indoor plumbing, we did have a good "outhouse", which had two openings for grown up people to sit on- this was a well equipped facility complete and usually had a Montgomery Ward or Sears Roebuck catalog - from which people could tear pages to use for the obvious.  And 3 year old Esther (that's me) had a pet lamb.  And 3 year old Esther was not yet completely pottu-trained

So 3 year old E (me) decided to take her pet lamb to the outhouse, and make the lamb sit on one of the "grown-up_ openings.  Uh-0h!  Little me put the lamb up on the grown-up opening, and "oops", the lamb fell in!  Now, 3 year old E loved that lamb, so she climbed in after the lamb, and again oops!  She could not get out- so she yelled for help.   And wonderful, her 14 year old sister heard her - and with a huge effort, E was rescued, and taken up toward the house.  The only water available came from a nearby well with a gasoline pump - this water was used to cool the milk down by the barn, but under current circumstances, this very cold water was used to clean up Esther  -  and to this day, I still remember how very COLD that water was!!

Within a few days, my wonderful Daddy had made a small seat in that out house - just for my personal use, and told me how special that new seat was and to always use just it!!! And to never again get up on the big seats!  

Now how many of you readers can rival my very dramatic "first memory"?   I've wondered since where my mother was when this happened?  Maybe she was on the sofa with a cloth over her eyes.  

My Mother died at almost 100 - 28 years ago, and I never thought to ask her about this very traumatic event.    There are other early childhood farm memories that I'll also share with you, but none others are so very vivid in my old head.    

Any other comments would be just  anti-climactic.  Goodnight, all!

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