The Move

1954 ~ Our first summer on the Tumbleson Place 

The day we moved to the country my mother had a baby. I was nine years old. My dad hauled the furniture in a pickup truck to the farm while my mother went to the hospital and delivered my baby brother without him. Fathers weren't allowed in delivery rooms back then so maybe it wasn't so odd.  It still seems pretty unlucky to me, but I don't remember anyone ever making a big deal about that part of the story. My sisters and I were dropped off to spend the day at our soon to be adoptive grandparents home in Wellfleet. I guess everything was pretty uneventful except my youngest sister and I were recovering from the mumps, which didn't play out well over the next couple of weeks.

Our move was from a small white frame house in the city to a small white frame house on a farm. One on a corner lot in a town and the other a dryland 160 acre farm.  The house in North Platte had a sandbox in the vacant lot next to ours, a rope swing from an elm tree, a lilac bush beside the clothesline and hollyhocks along the alley fence. On the farm near Wellfleet

1952

there was an alfalfa field, corn field and pasture with cedar, cottonwood, mulberry and plum trees planted within about five acres around the house that was called the yard.  There was a lilac bush at the back of the house, a spirea by the front door and a small currant bush that yielded the best berries for jelly. Our driveway, lined in the summer with sunflowers, was nearly a quarter mile long separating the barbed wire fenced pasture from the fields.

The huge difference was the bathroom. There wasn't one. Not really. There was a tiny room the size of a closet in our parents bedroom which had a toilet. Period.  Oh, we did have one other bathroom, an honest-to-god Outhouse! The rest of the bathroom was a shower head in the utility room, which also housed a wringer washing machine, a Bendix dryer and an electric cream separator.  A water pipe was attached to the wall with a showerhead on top.  The water splashed out into the room where you stood over the drain, no stall, no shower curtain, no nothing.  Stripped naked, wet and freezing was not our mother's idea of blahblahblah  (As you will learn, there were quite a few things about the farm that were barely tolerable for her.) It wasn't long before my dad put in a cheap metal stall in the corner. My sisters and I took baths in a tiny wash tub in the kitchen for a while before we got the real shower stall. We were nine, seven and five years old.

I liked the house in town a lot.  It had a nice cozy living room. The entire time we lived there a picture hung above the davenport of a man selling chickens to a peasant woman. I still have that picture. My sister and I shared one bedroom, but I moved to a room in the basement when my youngest sister was born. 

1952

My mother fixed it up making an apple green quilted bedspread.  I can still recall the padding wasn't very thick and the stitching not too straight. It had a multicolored striped ruffle that matched the curtains and the skirt for the dressing table which was made out of orange crates. There was a toilet in a tiny closet at the end of the adjoining playroom, sort of like the farmhouse we moved to, only this house also had a regular bathroom. 

When we first moved to the farm the four of us kids shared a bedroom, my two sisters in bunk beds, I had a single bed and the brother in a crib.  Three years later, when the second brother was born, my bedroom was again moved to a makeshift room, this time at the end of the enclosed porch. It was separated from the rest of the porch with a curtain hung on a wire. It wasn't heated.

First Drafted Summer 2010. First Revision May 2020.