The Family Pecking Order -- A Memoir

Chapter 8: On the Farm

My Daddy and all his brothers and sisters were born and raised on this farm, living in the big farmhouse which still stands today. They grew up working the land, plowing the fields, sowing the seeds, and harvesting the crops. They raised cattle, hogs and chickens for meat and filled the smokehouse with smoked hams and cured bacon. Planting, weeding, and growing an enormous kitchen garden not only provided fresh vegetables for the daily dinner table, but provided enough surplus for canning and preserving fruits, vegetables, juices, sauces, pickles and relishes to serve with meals during the winter. Grocery stores and supermarkets were not part of their experience. Country folks were self-sustaining in those years. They grew their produce and raised the animals needed to provide food for their families.

And they shared the experience of waiting with their father for the arrival of the new brothers and sisters that were born right at home. Hospital births were rare in those days, and family doctors still made house calls. The local midwife was sometimes called in to help with the delivery. A new mother's "confinement", the polite, Victorian term for the postpartum period, was spent at home in her own bedroom. Mothers, aunts, sisters, or older daughters helped with the normal household chores and the younger children until she was able to be on her feet again. Sadly, sometimes her nine months of pregnancy were in vain. The rate of infant mortality was very high in those days. But the cycle of birth, life, and death was a normal part of living on a farm.

As did the majority of his brothers and sisters, Daddy married and moved away from the farm to raise his own family of us six kids. A couple of his sisters stayed in the same area, but most of them moved to other cities in Indiana with their new husbands. Daddy's brothers that married tended to stay in the same area to raise their families. But several of his brothers, including Uncle Fatty, never married and lived on the farm for all their lives. As the years passed and his brothers and sisters grew older, they began to die one by one, completing life's unerring cycle.

When Mother died, Daddy was left alone. It was not sudden because Mother had been sick for a few years. Doctors first discovered a brain tumor for which she had surgery and recovered. After that, she had various problems with her stomach and digestive system, and recurring headaches from the tumor which had begun to slowly grow again. For a few years after Mother died, Daddy lived alone in a lot of different places. First in the small house he and Mother had been renting, and then for a while he rented a small apartment in town. Eventually loneliness began to catch up with him. He wanted to get back to something familiar, may even re-connect with his roots.

Daddy moved back to the farm and lived there with Uncle Fatty until Fatty died. The arable land around the farmhouse had been sold off years before when Uncle Fatty could no longer manage the physical work of farming. Now other farmers plowed the fields and raised the alfalfa and feed corn. Uncle Fatty, Daddy, and one of his sisters, Esther, owned the farmhouse and the several acres that remained around it, still keeping the original homestead in the family.

Aunt Esther lived in a small house on the outskirts of town, and had been a widow for many years. She and her husband had raised two sons and had several grandchildren. After Uncle Fatty died, my brother Jim and my oldest sister Barbara helped Daddy to buy Esther's share of the farm. Because she was in the early stages of dementia, Aunt Esther was very difficult to deal with during this period. Barbara said she gave them all fits and was downright hateful at times. In fact, it left such a bitter taste in Daddy's mouth that he refused to allow Esther to come into the house again. They eventually became totally estranged from each other, and as far as I know, never spoke to one another again before Daddy died.

Aunt Esther was a fraternal twin. Her brother, my Uncle Bud, was the other half of the set. Uncle Bud farmed several hundred acres of land not far from the original farm where he grew up. He always seemed kind of curt and hard to talk but he had a really sweet wife. Her name was Helen and I remember wondering how she could stand being married to him. But I was just a kid when I had these thoughts and was probably not seeing a true picture of their relationship. They never had children. Aunt Helen always seemed wistful and a little sad when she was around the kids at family gatherings. I supposed it was because none of the children were hers. Aunt Helen died before Uncle Bud and like my Daddy, he seemed lost without her and passed on about five years later.

Then the only two left were Daddy and Aunt Esther. About a year after Daddy's death, Esther passed on too. I felt sad that she had ended her days rather badly, estranged from her last-living sibling and with dementia overtaking her mind. I did not go to her funeral and, in fact, only heard several months afterwards that she had died. I must confess I never missed her. Not like I still miss my mother and Aunt Louise.