Everybody had chores as a child. One of mine, rain or shine, winter or summer, was to get the first bucket of water from the well into the house. To do this you had to take the metal bucket that sat on the kitchen counter out to the well and pump water into it. There was a metal cup that had a long handle that you had to take out of the bucket. Everyone drank out of that cup. We didn't used “glasses” unless someone came to the house. To get a normal routine drink of water our family used the metal cup and dipped water from the bucket.
When you went to the well to pump water, it was important NOT to throw out the old water from that bucket, until you were sure that the pump had prime. The danger of throwing the old water away first is that if the pump didn’t have prime you would then have no water in the bucket to prime the pump.
As I understood it at the time, there was a leather piece down in the well somewhere that would dry out. If it was dry then it wouldn’t create suction and pull the water up. The water you poured into the top of the pump wet the leather and made it "swell up" (enlarge) and then it would pull the water our of the well.
It always seemed ironic that you had to have water, pour it into the well, to get water out of the well. There is probably some deep and meaningful allegory there but I fail to be able to figure it out.
After getting the water into the house, assuming it was summertime, the rest of the day was mine. I could do whatever I pleased pretty much.
We didn’t wear shoes in the summer unless we went to town. This seems to have been pretty common for farm kids in the 1950’s - 1960’s. Our feet were like leather pretty quickly into spring and early summer.
Rocks under your feet were no trouble. The only real threat to feet were the thistles in the pasture nearest the house. Even thhe cows and horses avoided them. They really hurt if you stepped on them.
The thistles were on the path to my favorite pond and then on down to the creek. There were lots of things to do at the pond and at the creek. One could pass the entire day there, or at least until you got so hungry that you had to go home.
Food and hunger may have caused you to head for home but drinking water was no problem. I never drank out of the pond. Creek water was my preference. And I simply scooped up water in my hand and drank it. Then one day I walked up the creek from where I’d just had a delicious drink to find a dead coon in the water. After that, I decided to always walk down creek to get a drink. I thought at the time that maybe that might help. Somehow.
In the creek there were always little minnows. Tiny little fish. I didn’t see bigger fish, just these little ones. I wondered how they got there.
I saw bee swarms in the hollow of old trees in the summer.
There were two big hills that had a deep valley between them. In the spring you could lay on one side of one of those hills and watch coyote pups play in the sun on the other hill. You had to be quiet, but it was possible and fun.
I liked the frogs in the pond. We had gigantic frogs. By the end of the summer they were huge. And just to think how they started as these jellied mass of eggs in spring. Floating. Icky. And then they started to move and later little polliwogs took shape. Then they were little frog like things with tails. Then frogs.
Then big frogs.
I did my best to dam the creek. Rocks, mud, sticks. How big could I make it? How much water could I dam? Nobody cared. Nobody knew.
Maybe you read about our “Four Hole Outhouse”. If not you can go look at that. It was a part of the house and buildings at the top of the hill. (To post yet in January, 2024.)
The house had no central heat and no running water. As far as I knew then that was all fine. And as far as I know now, that was all fine.
My brother and I slept in a bunkbed. The floor in our room sloped. You stepped through the door into the bedroom and the floor sloped away from the main part of the house to the outside wall. So we slept with our heads on the upside of the bed.
It was our bedroom and that’s all I ever thought about it. Then later in life someone said it had been a corn crib. Okay, well maybe it was. Corn cribs usually have slats that let the air into the corn. So maybe someone covered up the corn crib with wood and that was our bedroom.
Then, even later in life, my mom said it was a chicken coop. But as my mom got older things she said had to be discounted about 50%. She started to “misremember” things.
So I tend to think that it was probably just a room added on at one time or another. No one would have a corn crib or chicken coop attached to their house. (Would they?)
It was really cold in there in the winter in that room. Some of you surely think I’ve had brain damage and if that is really the case this is where it happened Because in the winter you put your head under the blankets to keep as warm as you could. So I breathed in my own carbon dioxide for years.
When it was winter and when we woke up we could see our breath in the air. We ran for the wood stove in the “front room” and that is where we could get dressed. The side of you facing the stove was of course the warmest, so everyone kind of turned in circles as they put their clothes on to "even out" the temperature of things.
There was another “oil stove” in another room. It was always going. It burned coal oil. Whatever that is. The “coal oil” was in a big tank on the outside of the house. It was tilted up so that the opening where the oil flowed out was lowest. The coal oil stove never got too hot and never got very cold. It was just a slow, steady, low burn.
We had this strange phone that hung on the wall. It would suddenly ring. I always thought we should “answer the phone” because when it rang someone was calling us. But that was wrong. The phone rang, stopped, rang, rang, stopped, rang, rang, rang, stopped. Those starts and stops were signals to those listening to tell them who the call was for.
The phone rang longer and shorter in intervals. The “shorts and longs” were to tell those on the “party line” for whom the call was intended. Aa child I could never make out the longs and shorts. It all sounded like ringing to me. All the shorts and longs were the same.
I knew when the phone was for us because my mom would pick up the phone and talk. I knew it wasn’t for us when she picked up the phone and put her hand over the place where you talked into and she just listened.
On the farm I saw cows being birthed. And birds return in the Spring. I began to wonder who orchestrated all this. Who put this all together and made this happen.
I was outside all day. I went home to eat something when I was hungry. Sometimes it was a piece of bread with butter and sugar. And that was fine.
Then I was back outside.
Late in the afternoon the walk up the hill back to the house was so very long. I wondered why it was so long going back and it took no time at all to run down the creek.
I never figured out how the leaves knew to come out on the trees. How the blossoms on the trees or bushes because apples or berries. But it was obvious that someone was coordinating all this.
Then one summer I went to “Vacation Bible School” at the Southern Baptist Church in our little town. And it became clear.
I’d been to church before. My mom had taken me and my siblings and it was fine. We would go to Sunday School and then church. Sunday School was okay and church was okay if you could sit still.
Suddenly my mom stopped going to church. A lady over the hill and around of couple of bends in the road would stop and pick me and my siblings up if we were standing alongside the road and take us to church on Sunday. I always went.
I think the lady’s name was Mrs. Downey. There was likely a Mr. Downey in the years before, but I never knew him.
She was very kind to us and me. And the people at the little church were all kind to me even after mom stopped going. Probably the only reason I went to church was because of the kindness of the people there.
So I’d heard about God and some of it had “sunk in”. But for some reason at Vacation Bible School, I figured out that it was God who made all that is made. That he created the frog eggs and the fish eggs. He made the bees swarm and the bees made honey. We ate honey and it was good.
He made chickens and the chickens laid eggs. We went to the post office some years and brought home a box of little chicks that make lots of noise and ate cracked corn and pooped in their water and made a general mess. Eggs became chickens and chickens laid eggs. And things just went in these wonderful cycles.
Frogs made those jellied mass of eggs, they became polliwogs, and polliwogs became those little frogs with tails, and those became big frogs. Then in he spring it started all over.
The gooseberries were tart and made your mouth pucker. He did that. You could make a pie from gooseberry if you used lots of sugar. Sugar cane from a plant made of cane. He made that.
Every year the coyote pups were on the hillside. Different pups, same mom. Every year.
The creek ran with clear water. It was Him who did that.
The wind was hot on your face in the summer and bit your cheeks in the winter when you had to go chop ice so the cows could drink.
And I heard about Jesus. He was God’s son. And if you wanted to go to heaven then you needed to believe in him.
I didn’t know about all that. I did know I wanted the God who made all this. Who coordinated all this. The one who made the horse tail clouds, that then became denser, and then the rain came. I could tell the weather there in Missouri by looking at the sky. God would tell us the weather.
And a strange thing happened to me during all this. I don’t know maybe this is really odd. And maybe it is not. But I had this feeling inside of me like someone had taken a hot coal out of that wood stove and put it in my chest. It burned warm. It glowed. When there was talk about God and / or Jesus then this happened all the more.
So I had to do something. I asked my mom and she said something like, well you know when we are at church… there at the end, when the preacher gives the invitation to go forward; that is when you should go tell him that you want to be a Christian.
The very next Sunday I waited. I don’t know what the sermon was about. I didn’t care. All I did was wait for the end. Waited to go down and find out what to do next.
Our preachers were students from the seminary which was about an hour’s drive from our little, country church. They got a chance to preach and practice being preachers and we got pastors for a few years, normally until they graduated.
On the day I was waiting, as the first note of the invitation hymn was played I was at the front of the church. I don’t remember running, but by the surprised look on the pastor’s face, maybe I did.
Or maybe he was surprised because there was this little, dirty, country, kid, who only wore shoes to go to church, who slept in a corn crib and had nothing but rocks and sticks and mud. Had nothing but a glow in his chest and a belief that there was something big out there - a God. A God he had to have or who he wanted to have him.
That little kid who had nothing, was a ragamuffin, hasn’t changed. He’s still dirty, still unkept. And he’s not worth much.
He’d like to have the coal put back in his chest.
©David L Arment
revised March 19, 2024