WINTER CHORES

With snow on the ground and daytime temperatures hanging below freezing, Pa declared that winter had officially arrived, even though the calendar indicated it was more than a month away. The routine around the farm was now fully in winter mode.

Now that the cows stayed in the barn every day and night, the barn chores increased by many times over summer chores. Straw had to be toted in from the straw stack, silage tossed down from the silo that stood at the east end of the barn, and hay forked from the haymows above the cows in the barn and then tossed down hay chutes to the cattle mangers below. Pa scattered a ground corn-and-oats mixture in front of the cows each morning and night, the amount based on the amount of milk each cow gave. Dry cows (those that were not milking, awaiting the birth of their next calf) received less ground feed. Every morning the manure gutters behind the cows had to be cleaned, a messy, smelly, but necessary daily task. Pa shoveled the manure into a wheelbarrow; when it was full he pushed it out the barn door and along a wooden plank that he kept clear of snow to the manure pile that grew ever larger in the barnyard in front of the barn.

About once a week Pa filled gunny bags (burlap bags) with cob corn from the corn crib and cotton grain bags with oats from the granary and packed them in the back of the Plymouth after removing the backseat. New tires were nearly impossible to buy during World War II, so when a tire failed, it was replaced with a used one—Pa had several used tires on hand, as did most everyone else who owned cars during the war years. The old car squatted in back and sputtered a bit with its heavy load, but even with the old tires halfway flat, the Plymouth never failed.

The grist mill was a three-story building located just beyond the dam that corralled the Pine River and formed the Wild Rose Mill Pond. Pa backed up to the unloading platform and dragged the bags of oats and corn out of the Plymouth and onto the wooden platform. The miller, Rodney Murty, a longtime friend of Pa’s, greeted him and began pulling the sacks of corn and oats to one of several square holes in the mill’s floor. The water in the mill pond powered the mill. Under the mill the water, backed up by the dam, provided sufficient force to spin the blades of a Leffel turbine.

Built of massive twelve-inch by twelve-inch timbers, the grist mill was a building of mystery and wonder. I never got to see the basement, where the actual grinding took place, but when the mill was working, the entire sturdy building shook and shuddered. The line shaft—a metal shaft with various-sized pulleys and belts connected to it—hung from the ceiling on the first floor. As it controlled the line shaft’s pulleys and belts, the water-powered turbine drove every aspect of the mill’s complicated machinery, from the corn shellers to the elevators that moved the grain from one part of the building to another.

In addition to grinding cow feed for the local farmers, the mill provided electricity for the village of Wild Rose. Besides driving the mill’s grindstones, the turbine powered an electrical generator located in a little brick building just beyond the main mill. Thanks to the mill, the village had electrical power by the early 1900s, many years before the electrical lines were strung to rural communities. Because both grinding of feed and generating electricity depended on water power, the electricity for the village was turned on only in the evening, after dark, and was turned off again promptly at eleven o’clock each night. This allowed a sufficient head of water to build up at the dam to ensure that grinding could go on all day without any loss of waterpower.

After the sacks of cob corn and oats were dumped into the square holes in the mill floor, the empty sacks were stacked by the chute, where they would be filled with the warm, fluffy mixture that appeared a few minutes after the grinding. The earthy smell of the freshly ground grain competed for attention with the loud grinding noises coming from the mill basement and with the shaking and shuddering resulting from the machinery’s work. Everything in the mill, including the clothes of the miller, was covered with a fine, white dust, a byproduct of the milling process.

Sometimes we had to wait a half hour or longer as other farmers had their grain ground ahead of ours. On the far side of the mill, a little office had been portioned off from the rest of the structure. It contained a small desk, several chairs, and a wood-burning stove that made the mill office a cozy place to wait. On busy grinding days, several farmers gathered in the mill office to swap stories about their cows, about the weather, and always about the war, as several farmers had sons fighting overseas.

If the wait at the mill was unusually long, we walked across Highway 22 to the Wild Rose cheese factory to visit with cheesemaker Marvin Jones. The cheese factory was always warm on a cold winter day. The smells and sounds were so different from those of the mill, just a few yards away: the smell of cheese being made, of fresh milk and cheese curds; the quiet sound of the paddles moving across the cheese vat, stirring the milk, and the occasional rattle of metal against metal as the cheese curds were removed from the vats and placed in presses where the cheddar cheese would be formed. The cheesemaker always welcomed us and offered us fresh cheese curds, the kind that squeak when you bite into them.

With the sacks of freshly ground corn and oats once more stashed in the back of the Plymouth, we drove home. There we unloaded the sacks in the granary, swept out the back of the Plymouth, and replaced the backseat so my brothers and I would have a place to ride if and when we decided to go someplace—although between the weather and wartime rationing of gas and tires, we traveled infrequently in winter.

That was fine, as our winter chores kept us plenty busy. Every time it snowed, my brothers and I shoveled paths from the house to the pump house, from the pump house to the barn, from the house to the outhouse, from the house to the barn, from the barn to the straw stack, from the barn to the granary, from the granary to the chicken house, from the chicken house to the house, and the biggest shoveling job of all, from the pump house to the road—a path wide enough that the milk truck could drive into our yard to pick up our cans of fresh milk each morning.

Lesser but still important daily chores included collecting the eggs from the chicken house, feeding the chickens, and removing the ashes from the stoves in the house, the potato cellar, and the pump house.

One wintertime chore that seemed both tedious and never ending was splitting wood. The big blocks of wood we cut in the fall had to be split into manageable sizes so they would fit inside the kitchen cookstove. When I was four or five, one of my chores was carrying wood from the woodpile to the kitchen woodshed. As I watched Pa split the wood, he made it look easy. Lift the block of wood onto a large splitting block. Study the block to determine the direction of the grain. If you were good at reading the wood’s grain, you could strike the block with the splitting ax in just the right place and it would pop open with little effort. If you misread the grain, the ax blade would stick, and you’d spend the next several minutes trying to extract it from the block—embarrassing if Pa was watching, disgusting if you were working by yourself. (I didn’t know then that there was art to this, and that Pa had mastered it only after many years of splitting wood.)

By the time I was ten or eleven, I was splitting wood by myself and trying to remember how Pa did it. Along with learning to read the grain, the key was eye-hand coordination. If your mind told you to strike the block in a particular place and you hit it in a different place—well, lots more practice was necessary. The worst mistake of all was to strike over the block and break the ax handle. I did this several times in my early attempts at wood splitting. Pa didn’t say much, just grumbled while he fitted the ax head with a new handle.

Winter added many chores to our daily routine on the farm. Of course, the season also provided a break from the sunup-to-sundown work of spring, summer, and fall: the planting, weeding, and harvesting. Yet one chore was a constant backdrop to all of our days, twice a day, in every season: milking our small herd of cows and toting the milk to the pump house, where we immersed the cans in the cooling tank (in winter the water in the tank kept the milk from freezing).

As we moved into late November, deer season became the topic of conversation around the supper table, as Pa recalled the many hunts he had experienced. On those wintery November days, whenever neighbor men saw each other the talk generally turned to deer hunting, for nearly everyone in our neighborhood hunted deer. It was a true rite of passage for a kid reaching age twelve. I could hardly wait to become a deer hunter.