Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl

by Carol Bodensteiner

  “I can’t. I just can’t,” I whimpered. Tears filled my eyes and I swiped them away with the back of my hand.

  “Humph!” he growled. “Guess I can’t trust you.” Virtus glared at me for one thousand-year-long second, turned on his heel and stomped away.

  That was it? He wasn’t going to tell? I could not believe it. As quickly as the threat was there, it was gone. Within a few days, we were having lunch together again under the box elder trees, playing catch, running foot races around the school.

  In the course of the week, I’d paid off roughly $2 of my million-buck bet. With those $2 went more than a pound of self-respect. Though my parents, my sisters and Miss Fowler never found out about my step across the line into theft, dishonor and shame, the scars were indelible. I never bet a million bucks again, nor a hundred, nor any amount I was not prepared to pay on the spot with cash of my own.

  Irving and Virtus didn’t stay with us for a whole year. Their family moved on. My sister Jane recalls them as “nice fellows,” dirt notwithstanding. Virtus wrote a letter to me once after they were gone. He signed it “your friend.”

  Laundry Lessons

  “We have to try it again. Here’s another shirt,” Jane said as she plucked one of Dad’s blue work shirts out of a plastic bag full of shirts—clean, sprinkled and rolled—all ready to iron. “Start with the yoke,” she directed.

  I grabbed the damp shirt out of her hand and flopped it onto the ironing board. “I know where to start,” I huffed. I knew to start with the yoke, then iron the collar, then the left sleeve and cuff, front and back, then the right sleeve and cuff, front and back, then the right front, taking particular care around the buttons, then the back below the yoke, and finally the left front, again taking care with the button hole placket where it was so easy to iron in wrinkles. I knew all this and I was tired of practicing.

  Recoiling, Jane threw up her hands. “Don’t get mad at me. We have to get this perfect.”

  “I know,” I sighed, contrite as I smoothed the shirt out on the silver ironing board cover and picked up the heavy iron. “Let’s go through what we’re going to say again.”

  “Okay,” Jane said. “Let’s start.” With that, we both stood straighter, mustered bright smiles to our faces, and beamed at our audience: Mom who stood with her back toward us as she fixed dinner, and Sue, who was lying on the floor with one arm over the dog, balancing the book she was reading on her chest. Sitting at the table with a pan wedged between her knees and a knife in her hands as she peeled potatoes, Grandma was the only one paying Jane and me the least attention.

  “Today we will show you the proper way to iron a shirt and fold it to store in a drawer or to pack in a suitcase,” Jane said.

  Picking up our planned patter and making eye contact with the audience as we’d been taught, I said, “We start by ironing the yoke and collar.” Then, as Jane described step-by-step what I was doing, I ironed the yoke and collar before moving on to the sleeves.

  When our county extension agent, Mrs. Ruth, came to our last 4-H meeting to teach all of us to iron shirts, she suggested that ironing a shirt would be a good team demonstration for the county fair. Jane had looked at me just as I looked at her. What a good idea! Both of us dreamed of doing so well at the county level that we would be selected to take our demonstration to the state fair in Des Moines. The dream was enough to lure us into preparing a demonstration every year. Success had eluded us so far, but this was another chance.

  4-H programming cycled through the home and garden arts, each year focusing on a different skill set we needed to master before we married and set up our own homes—gardening and canning, home decorating, sewing, cooking. Each club member chose individual projects to demonstrate mastery of what we learned. We entered the best of our efforts into the county fair. Some projects were ‘once and done.’ You couldn’t refinish a table more than once, for instance. Others we did over and over. Sue made so many batches of chocolate chip cookies one year Dad took to calling them ‘rabbit turd cookies,’ and though he never met a cookie he didn’t like, he never again picked up a chocolate chip cookie with much enthusiasm.

  Jane and I often partnered for team demonstrations. Two years older than I, Jane was capable of more complicated projects but she teamed up with me because it was more convenient than getting together with another club member who might live miles away. Plus I wasn’t totally incapable of learning, and Mom probably made her.

  We launched into the shirt ironing project with enthusiasm. That enthusiasm was soon lost in the repetition of preparation. We had practiced our demonstration on six shirts already that day. The biggest challenge came in folding the shirt. The reality was that we never folded shirts at our house. Hung on hangers, the top button secured so the fronts didn’t sag and rewrinkle, shirts lined the closet rods. None filled dresser drawers, and virtually the only vacations we ever took were day trips to visit relatives. Even when we went to Wisconsin to visit our relatives on Dad’s side for a confirmation, a wedding or a funeral, we left the farm after the cows were milked in the morning and got back before they had to be milked at night. Packing a shirt just wasn’t necessary.

  Who knows why we chose to fold the shirt for this demonstration. Maybe we dreamed of taking a vacation someday that was longer than a day. Maybe we imagined packing our future husbands’ shirts for a vacation or business trip. Maybe we came away from Mrs. Ruth’s suggestion thinking it was something we had to do. Maybe we thought it was an added challenge to the demonstration, successful completion of which would push us over the top in the judges’ eyes and the state fair trip would certainly be ours. For whatever reason, folding the shirt was an element of our demonstration and we kept at it, no matter how vexing.

  We had learned to iron using handkerchiefs and dish towels, expanded our skills as we pressed open seams for sewing projects, and now sought to perfect the art on Dad’s shirts. There were plenty of opportunities to practice. Every week there was a basket of ironing that came out of the week’s laundry.

  Laundry began on Saturday when we stripped the sheets off our beds, gathered up bath and kitchen towels, and retrieved socks and underwear from the back of our closets and under the bed, throwing it all down the laundry chute by the bathroom door. We kids made up our own beds, pulling the fresh sheets out from between the mattress and springs where Mom put them after they were washed and dried so the replacements were handy when it came time to repeat the chore the next Saturday.

  On Monday, Mom pulled the wringer washer and rinse tubs out into the middle of the basement, sorted the laundry into piles, and worked her way through load after load.

  As my sisters and I grew older, we helped with the laundry but only with hanging clothes up, not with the actual washing. I wanted to help wash the clothes, but Mom said, ‘No.’ She told the story I’d heard a gazillion times about Grandma getting her arm caught in the wringer. Wide-eyed, with goose bumps prickling my arms, I shuddered, “Ewww! How did she get it out?”

  “She hit this release button.” To demonstrate, Mom banged the release and the two rollers flew apart. “You have to be careful when you feed clothes through the wringer not to get your arm caught.” Even when she let me feed a pair of pants or a shirt into the wringer, she watched the entire time. The release button was also banged when too much cloth fed through and choked the wringer, a problem an inexperienced kid could make happen with relative frequency, particularly when it came to Dad’s heavy denim work pants.

  It fascinated me when Mom banged the release and the rollers flew apart. Each time I imagined it was my arm and I wondered how it felt to have your arm flattened between those hard, black rollers. Would my arm look like Wile E. Coyote after he was run over by a truck? Would my arm pop back to its original shape moments later?

  The story about Grandma’s arm in the wringer was only slightly less horrifying than the story about Grandma when she became distracted one day as she worked at the sewing machine and stitched right through her f
inger. Apparently Mom thought I could not be careful enough, because she never let me do the washing. I did not, however, escape the sewing machine, where I learned to create all of my clothes except for underwear. And I did not escape hanging up clothes or bringing them in from the line after they dried.

  In the winter, Mom hung everything from white sheets to Dad’s heavy denim work pants on the lines that stretched between the rafters in the basement. The effect was that of a maze of clothes with a smell that mingled damp clean with wood smoke from the furnace.

  When I was little, my sisters and I rode our tricycles ’round and round’ the stove and in and out of the piles of laundry. If Butch wasn’t outside with Dad, he chased around the stove after us, barking until Mom told him to be quiet. Then he nosed at each pile of clothes, as though checking to see that all family members were accounted for, circled around three times and lay down next to the furnace where pretty soon he’d be asleep, his feet twitching from time to time as he chased rabbits or cats or cows in his dreams.

  In the summertime, we hung laundry on the clothesline in the backyard. When I was tall enough to reach the clotheslines—maybe when I was about 10—Mom pressed me into service lugging heaping baskets of clean, wet clothes upstairs to the clothesline. Before hanging up a single item, I wiped each line clean with the rag stuffed in the corner of the clothespin bag. It was easiest to reach the center of the line and that’s where I began hanging clothes, counting on their weight to pull the rest of the line down far enough that I could reach it.

  Each item had its own proper way to hang, a way I learned from watching Mom. Matching the seams to create a crease as they dried, I hung Dad’s work pants with one leg clipped to one line and the other leg clipped to a parallel line. Shirts hung upside down, clipped at the side seams, sleeves hanging toward the ground like so many kids hanging by their knees from the jungle gym. Displaying our underwear where hired men or visitors driving in our lane might see them embarrassed me, so I made sure to hang these items on the lines between the sheets and shirts.

  Hanging up laundry was not my favorite thing to do. The damp sheets were cold and clammy when they flapped in the breeze against my back and legs as I hung more clothes on the next line. Still, after I clipped the last sock out of the last basket onto the only remaining two inches of clothesline, I had to admit the result looked pretty good. And when I went to bed between clean sheets, I slept with dreams drenched in sunshine and fresh air.

  When the laundry was dry, we folded it as it came off the line. Baskets of laundry disappeared into dressers and closets at the end of the day. In those days before permanent press, much of the laundry was ironed before we put it away. Since this was also before steam irons, all that laundry had to be sprinkled before we took to it with a hot iron.

  For sprinkling, Mom took out a little aluminum pan, filled it with cold water and with her finger tips flicked drops of water onto the shirts, hankies, dish towels and pillow cases she rolled up and put back in the laundry basket to be ironed on Tuesday. If Mom thought there was any chance the damp clothes would mildew, she put the sprinkled clothes in a big plastic bag and stowed it in the refrigerator until she was ready to iron.

  On Tuesday Mom setup the ironing board in the kitchen, brought out the basket of damp clothes, and everything from hankies to shirts became wrinkle-free under the heavy iron. As soon as she was confident we would not burn ourselves or the clothes, Mom began our ironing education on her dainty hankies and Dad’s rugged farmer handkerchiefs.

  Tidy stacks of pretty, floral hankies with scalloped edges filled a corner of Mom’s top dresser drawer. She always had one or two fresh hankies in her purse and as we grew older, hankies were tucked into our purses before we went to church or out on dates. Dad used a multitude of handkerchiefs each week. Red or blue paisley print handkerchiefs large enough to serve as a scarf on my head were standard in his work pants pocket. More refined, white cotton squares, some sporting his initials embroidered in the corner, replaced those hardworking squares when he dressed up for church, weddings or funerals. Because we all used so many, hankies and handkerchiefs were an excellent choice for Christmas presents.

  Ironing hankies, removing all the wrinkles, folding them neatly in half and then thirds, ironing each fold into a sharp crease, creating a neat stack to go back in the dresser drawers was like giving a little gift each week to the person who would use them.

  When Grandma Jensen came to stay with us, which she did every summer, she took over the ironing chores. She ironed hankies, too, but not her own. Each night, she washed her hanky in the bathroom sink and plastered it on the screen of the bedroom window to dry.

  In the morning, Grandma donned one of the cotton shirtwaist dresses she wore every day. She pulled on nylons, rolling them down to just above her knees, and covered her pure white hair with a silver net. Finally, she plucked the now-dry hanky from the window screen, folded it and put it in her pocket.

  When Jane and I took on the 4-H shirt ironing demonstration—and for one summer claimed squatter’s rights at the ironing board—I can only imagine what Grandma thought.

  As tedious as the hours of ironing could be, they were also the hours when Grandma watched ‘her shows’ as Mom always called the soaps.

  A dedicated follower of the perpetual heartaches and never-ending trials of Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light and As the World Turns, Grandma set the ironing board up in front of the TV in the living room. Piece by piece, she drew shirts and pillowcases and hankies and dresses from the laundry basket, stretched them on the ironing board, flicked water with her fingertips and eliminated wrinkles in our clothes while the characters in her dramas solved the problems in their lives. Every week the basket of ironing was full again with the same laundry; every week the soaps offered the same problems to be solved. Because of Grandma, the hopelessness of soap operas and the never-ending challenge of laundry are tied together forever in my mind.

  Grandma had her own way to iron. She could have taught Jane and me a lot about ironing had we asked her. But we didn’t ask. And she didn’t offer. That summer, in one swoop, we commandeered both her job and her reason to spend time in front of the TV.

  As we practiced, shirt after shirt crossed the ironing board. Either Jane or I could have ironed a shirt flawlessly in our sleep. After each shirt was ironed, we folded it, oh so carefully, smoothing each crease until our shirts looked just like the ones we saw in stores. We practiced what we would say and how we would stand until I could do Jane’s part of the demonstration, she could do mine.

  Beyond teaching the basic skills, 4-H was designed to mold each of us into confident presenters and leaders. Along the way we learned other lessons. Unintended lessons.

  One year, I tackled bread baking. Mom baked six big loaves of white bread every week and I expect it was no accident it came out of the oven and was set to cool on the bread board under a white cotton dish towel just before we walked in the door, home from school. The warm, yeasty smell of just-baked bread drifted out of the house and drew us in as irresistibly as if we were hummingbirds seeking the nectar in red flowers.

  “I get the heel,” I shouted. Mom sliced off an inch-thick heel. “I get the other one,” Sue said. Without ceremony, Mom turned the loaf around and sliced off the other end. It never bothered Jane to take the next slice in. Mom put the butter dish and knives on the table and we sat, slathering on butter that melted at once into the warm bread, eating slice after slice and spilling the adventures of the day.

  Homemade bread was on the table for every meal. Dad expected it. Mom complied. It stood to reason that learning to bake bread would be a 4-H goal. White bread was the staple but during that year, I launched into the world of bread forms that never made it to our table at any other time.

  Dinner rolls. German black bread. Sweet breads like Martha Washington’s Fan that used maraschino cherries to dot the blades. Crusty French bread. Breads in all shapes, flavors and colors lined our cupboards that year. I never tired
of kneading flour into dough, smelling fresh-baked bread throughout the house, slicing into a loaf to see a perfect texture.

  That year, Jane and I prepared a team demonstration on bread baking for the county fair. By that time, I was ever so conscious of makeup and jewelry, wearing two or three rings at a time, on each hand. We prepared for our presentation so carefully: our uniforms spotless; our hair carefully combed and held away from our faces with barrettes; our utensils and ingredients in place. Our demonstration was going well.

  Standing behind the table on the elevated demonstration platform in the fairgrounds 4-H building with rows of spectators seated on folding chairs in front of us, and the judges dead center in the front row, Jane mixed all the ingredients while I explained quantities and steps. When it was time to knead the dough, we executed a flawless exchange of responsibility. Jane took over talking as I sprinkled flour on the board, turned out the dough, dusted flour on my hands and began to knead. Only then, with my hands deep in the stickiest moment of bread making, did I realize I had not taken off my rings. Dough globbed around and under each ring.

  I glanced at Jane. She saw my error. I hesitated for half a breath but continued to knead, hoping no one in the audience, particularly the judges, would see. They were, after all, several feet away. It was possible. But just then, I heard a girl say—in a stage whisper just loud enough for everyone to hear—“Oh, she should have taken off her rings.” I was mortified. When I was finished kneading, I wiped my hands as well as I could, pretending all the while the rings did not exist, even as I picked up the talking part of the presentation as Jane formed the loaves into pans.

  We finished the presentation as we began—flawlessly. There was only that one little thing with the rings. I was kicking myself when we read the judge’s note, ‘Should have removed rings before demonstration!!!’