The Outhouse

Our ‘bathroom’ was brand new to us as the old one was about to fall down, and my Dad was hired to build us a new “two holer”. This was located several yards east of the house. The path to this ‘outhouse’ (ice cold in the winter and hot as blazes in the summer - yes, hold your nose) was illuminated at night by the moon (we had to use flashlights - watch your step and take your own means of hygiene with you - often a Sears-Roebuck Catalog or something similar) and in the daytime as you sat there, you could watch spiders busily working on their webs; at night you would wonder where they were and what they were doing. I’ve often wondered how many people suffered spider bites (and wood splinters from the so-called seat) on their buttocks ‘in the good old days’.

 In the dead of winter, we might have to brush a little frost or snow from the seat before sitting. But summers were worse. Ventilation was lacking in the outhouse, so the door was often left open when in use. After all…we were almost a mile from any neighbor, and you could hear a car coming up the road in time to push the door shut or take care of the bottom and pull the pants up and greet them if they pulled into the drive.

A bag of lime was usually kept inside the door and when you were finished with business, instead of flushing, you dumped a cup of lime down the hole. Worked like a charm to keep the flies down as well as the smell!

It wasn't always necessary to walk to the outhouse at night. Many, many flowers planted off the porch, were watered at night, ha. And who can forget the pot? Pot back then didn't mean a weed to be smoked. The pot under the bed was for nighttime convenience, be it an old coffee can or a decorated porcelain utensil.

Until next time....

Little House On The Prairie is a winner!

The History Channel Club had a contest reciently for three free History DVD's and I submitted a photo of the house and a short story about it. Yesterday, April 25th, I recieved a message that it was one of the winners!
I hope you will check it out and read some of their many articles of our past histories in America!
 http://www.thehistorychannelclub.com/

Visit this Prairie to see where we lived!

 May is a great time to visit the Prairie, a sea of green grasses sprinkled with red, purple and cream-colored blossoms of Indian paintbrush, arrow-leaved violet and cream wild indigo. Summer brings a constant succession of flowers from pale purple coneflower to rattlesnake master, gayfeather and butterfly milkweed. Regal fritillary butterflies float from flower to flower in search of nectar, while slender glass lizards bask in the warm sunlight. Dickcissels, sedge wrens and Henslow’s sparrows nest among the plants.

A visit to their web site http://mostateparks.com/park/prairie-state-park,  will give you driving directions and a list and dates of the many guided tours you may take while there.

When you go, tell the Park attendant that you read about them through my blog!

Until next time….

Laundry part 2

 I Separated clothing into whites (those cloth diapers that had been rinsed and soaking), mediums, dark and really dirty (like rugs, barn clothes, grungy rags). Saving the delicates for a separate wash, or hand wash them.
 At the end of the washing time, I stopped the washer, turned on the wringer and put the clothes through it one piece at a time.
 As soon as I got all of the items from the washer, I turned it back on and put in the next load of laundry.
I repositioned the wringer over the rinse tub and rinsed the finished load by swishing it up and down or side to side in the rinse water, running the rinsed items through the wringer and into the second rinse tub or a waiting basket, and then repeating the action.
Hanging the clothes on the line out north of the house was sometime a challenge. I would put baby Mike then only 2-3 months old, on top of the wet clothes in summer time and Ken would walk beside me hanging on to my skirt. ( I don’t remember ever wearing trousers! It just was not done by women then!)

With the laundry hanging out to dry I would use the rinse water to mope the kitchen and back porch floor, then carry it outside and pour it on what flowers I had planted around the back porch during the summer months. Water was conserved a lot because if the cistern went dry (and sometimes that happened a lot during dry weather, because we only got what rain water drained into it from the rooftop of the house) Morris had to get Uncle John’s truck and put a large tank on it that he had for this purpose, and go to Liberal, which was about 7 miles away and haul a tank of water back and put it into the cistern.

Later Morris bought a thing I plugged into a socket and put into the washing machine to heat it! I know now that it must have been very dangerous; however I burned it out without ever getting burned from it myself. They discontinued that item in later years.

After the clothes dried on the clothesline I would carry them in and iron. There were no permanent press clothes back then. Morris wore Overalls when he was farming. I usually didn’t get around to the ironing until the following day. I didn’t like to iron, so lots of thinks were just hung on hangers or folded. I had three pair of pant stretcher that you put in the legs of the pants while they were damp and as they dried it left a cutting edge crease. I usually starched those work clothes because the dirt usually washed out of them better if it was on top of that starch. Our clothes had that clean smell of the sweet Prairie flowers when I brought them in to fold. How nice those sheets smelled on the first night when you crawled into bed. By the time the days work was finished I was ready for that bed too! Now if only those babies would sleep through the night!

LAUNDRY FOR TWO BABIES

This is a book about people who are shaped by the places they live and the times they've lived through.  I hope I have painting a portrait of the place we chose to live in and loved.

Laundry and bottles for two babies was not easy. Formula had to be mixed. Bottles had to be washed and sterilized, then stored in the frig.

Morris had purchased a used wringer washer with an electric motor on it and a double tub on a stand.

These sat out on the back porch. I had to pump a large pan of water at the pitcher pump that was on the left hand side of the sink, then carry it across the room to the small apartment sized electric stove to heat. While the water heated I had to fill the two rinse tubs with water. No water hoses then. Had to pump and carry it bucket by bucket to those tubs that were also on the back porch. When the water was hot I carried it out to the machine on the back porch, then filling the swishing tub with dirty clothes that hit the suds one by one with a satisfying plop and burble. Like a hungry monster, the washing machine pulled the clothes downward into the steaming, soapy water. After a moment, they’d rise like undersea monsters, pale colors and shades of white, mounded like the smooth back of some undersea creature… then they’d swish and swoop downward, only to rise and do it again.

THE NEW BABY ARRIVES

I was expecting our second child and suffering from a cold in late March of 1954 and my doctor, Dr. Gregory from Webb City, thought I needed to be closer to Mom and the hospital, so I stayed with my Mom and Dad in Nashville, MO., while Morris went back to our apartment in Kansas City, some 150 miles away, to finish working for Santa Fee Trailways, loading trucks at night on the docks.  Morris came down from our little apartment in Kansas City for the weekend on Saturday April the 24^th. We had just gone to bed when I started having contractions and we knew it was time to make that trip to the hospital in Webb City. This baby was a little bigger than his older brother had been at birth and the doctor thought I was going through more than usual pain so they did give me something for it.

Michael Dwaine Johnston arrived at 12:25 A.M. on Sunday April 25^th, 1954, weighing in at 8.07 lb. He had a vigorous voice and active legs. They always gave new babies foot prints on their hospital certificate and somehow his was blurred and it looked like he had 6 toes on one foot and my Dad laughed and told me that he had 6 toes on his feet. Of course I had to check that out the next time they brought him in for me to feed him.

The Ranch house was not quite ready for us to move into it, so I went home to Mom and Dad’s on the third day. Morris came down the next weekend and installed a little two-burner  wood stove that Uncle Big (Judson Johnston, who owned 160 acres just north of the land John owned) loaned to us.

It was May when I finally managed to move up to the Ranch. That was my first night, and Michael’s first night in our House On The Prairie.

The west wind howled against the house, making if feel colder than it was and the heat from that little wood stove felt good as I sat and rocked baby Michael in my little rocker next to that warm fire as it was cool for this time of the year. Little Ken, who was only 16 months old cried and cried, as he had been my baby and expected for Mama to rock him and give him his bottle. He stood by my chair and could not give up, so Morris picked him up and carried him to bed with him and soon he stopped crying and fell asleep in his daddy’s arms.

Making a House a Home

Excitement grew as I contemplated having my very own house instead of the small, furnished apartment we lived in. My Dad was a carpenter and Uncle John hired him to repair the old windows and he installed a doorframe from the living room into the south room that would be our bedroom so that we could have a door to shut. The framework was boxed in to create shelves on both sides of the doors into the bedroom and from the living room into the kitchen also.

With the room measurements we picked out wallpaper for each room. We met with the local Baptist preacher who was also a paperhanger and he gave us a price for doing it all. However when the time came to settle up, his price was more than what we had calculated, however we settled on a compromise and paid him for the job.

We accepted donated furniture from all the family. We had Grandmother Johnston’s old round oak table

 and a set of four  chairs.

 Some were held together with bailing wire but we didn’t mind.

Our son Ken, age 16 months, was given the old family high chair that had been used by all the old Johnston children. Uncle John, Judson (Big), Isabel, Bill, Tom and Jake! I’m sure Morris and his brothers Bill and Richard had all used it when visiting Grandma and Grandpa Johnston too.

 We managed to scrimp together $25.00 and bought a bedroom suite from Duncan’s Furniture at Arcadia, Ks. It was a Walnut veneer set with a high backed bed, a chest of drawers and a dressing table with mirror.

Morris put in a pitcher pump over an old sink just inside the east door into the kitchen. It had no drain, just a bucket under the sink to catch the water you might dump down it. Of course someone had to carry the water OUT that ran down the drain into that bucket, so that kept us from using too much water. After all, we only had a cistern that caught rainwater from off the roof of the house. This water ran down through a filter that was made of sand, charcoal and rock, then into the old well just east of the porch.

I don’t know how we could have made it without all the help we got from our families. Both my Mom and Morris’s Mom gave us a kitchen cabinet.

 

 Morris’s Mom gave us a small apartment sized electric cook store. The wallpaper we had picked out for the kitchen was a red plaid and I made bright red curtains with black rickrack for the windows. We bought a black and red squared linoleum for the floor. How bright and clean it looked.

Our baby was due the last of April and I had a cold the last of March and my doctor, Dr. Gregory from Webb City, thought I best not travel back to our home in Kansas City, so I stayed with my folks at Nashville, Missouri  while Morris went back to Kansas City to finish working and packing our belongings up for the move to the ranch.

Anticipation grew as I knew we could not move into our little home on the prairie house until this baby arrive and our family had prepared it for us!