Posted by Sundi Hayes in Being a farmers wife, she put substantial meals on the table three times a day, the first one being before sane people rollover in the morning, let alone actually get out of bed. She kept a garden, did the laundry – which was line-dried, performed typical farm chores like milking the cows, raised two kids, had a strawberry patch bigger than her house and was one of the craftiest people I knew (as in made cool things by hand).
I’m sure some of that seems standard to a house wife today – except in my memories it was 35 years ago!
Without a lawn service she tended multiple flower beds around the house and mowed the yard…most likely because her husband was tending the fields and didn’t care how tall the grass was.
The garden was in a pasture far from the house and she didn’t have a sprinkler system. In fact, I recall filling buckets and barrels full of water and trucking them to the garden.
By the way, the line dried clothes were by choice. She actually did own a dryer.
Not one stitch of food on her table came from the freezer, save the meat, which was most likely a product of the farm and kept in a deep freeze in a building detached from the farm house.
The can goods were kept in the cellar along with bushels of potatoes. I can’t think of a single canned fruit or vegetable she didn’t have down there. When I say canned I don’t mean off the shelf of the grocery store. I’m actually talking about jars which is called canned when you do it yourself.
The meals she created weren’t just for her family of four – especially during planting and harvesting. I remember spending almost as long packing up the food as we did cooking it. We’d truck it out to the fields too. I remember the fresh baked Monster Cookies – chunky peanut butter, oatmeal, M&Ms, raisins AND chocolate chips. I still have that recipe somewhere…
Over the years she accumulated eight grandchildren. One of them was me.
All that just to tell you my mother was born and raised on a farm. She named me Sundi (pronounced sun, like our star, plus de as in details) because Sunday was her favorite day of the week. It was her favorite because she got to spend it with her dad. Go figure.
Sometimes I wonder if I could have pulled off a Carol or Maxine – after my grandmother.
Nibbling away -
Sundi
What a great story! I love stories of how people got their names.
Of course, I have the “old lady” name, which fits since I was named after my grandmother. I have great memories of her, but I always hated the name…until I got into my late teens and liked having something different. Of course, I still wish it was a “cool” name, not an old-fashioned one, but I do love the looks I get when people put the name with me. I may be getting older, but I am not old!