By Violet R. Eye
I was born to parents who farmed for a living. Most farmers will tell you that farming is a hard, dirty, and most times, a thankless job. Having come through the “Great Depression,” daddy and mom both knew what hard work was like. There was little money for buying things and when World War II started, a lot of things were rationed.
The laundry was done once a week, usually on a Monday, and the clothes were hung outside on the clothesline to dry. There were no automatic washers or dryers. My mom washed our clothes for the first six years of my life using a washboard. She didn’t have a washing machine until they moved to the farm in Doe Hill, Virginia. Imagine hanging sheets and other clothes outside in the wintertime! Everyone should try this just once.
I remember as small girls, my sister and I began doing simple chores. We started washing the dishes as soon as we could get our hands in the dishpan while standing on a bench. We would carry water from the spring to use in the house—no running water or electricity in our first home.
I have yet to figure out why so many of the farm animals were so mean and even some of the birds. The horses were mean. The turkey gobbler was mean. The buck sheep and boar hog were mean. Daddy’s hound dog, Bauser, was mean and the rooster was mean. The rooster would wait until you started walking away and hit you from behind. These could be considered putting your life on the line if not accompanied by an adult. Despite all of these critters, we grew up. It wasn’t all work as we did have time to play. I spent a lot of my time playing in the stream that ran through the meadows, building rock houses and playing in the mud. We had no toys. My favorite place was the orchard, and yes, I climbed the apple trees. I recall one time my sister and I ate some green apples. That didn’t turn out very well. There was/is an old cemetery beside the orchard, and I would go there just to look at the stones and pick some Blue Myrtle that had been planted there many years before I started my visits.
As I got older the jobs I was expected to do increased in number and size. I could milk a cow by the time I was six years old and continued to help milk until I got married and left home. I could find the chicken hens nests that they thought were hidden in the barn, and outside in the tall grass in the barn lot. I learned a lot about farm life in my first six years of life. I started to school at age six and a half, and mom and daddy moved to a different farm and their workload increased greatly. Daddy was put in charge of helping the Hiner ladies handle the operation of five farms. Our family had grown as I now had a brother four years younger than me. The chores that my sister and I were assigned had increased as well. I would help milk, after bringing the cows from the meadow, eat my breakfast and be on the school bus by 7:00 a.m. After a long day at school, I would get home around 4:45 p.m. Mom would have started fixing supper by the time we got home. We would gather the eggs, bring in wood for the stoves, and then it was off to the barn to milk again.
A large garden and potato patch were necessary, and I spent a lot of time pulling weeds, hoeing and picking potato bugs. I remember one summer they planted a patch of soybeans. Something about the vines made your skin itch, and we had to pick and shell our bushels of these beans. I did not like soybeans. As we got older, we would help with the hay making and in the corn field until it was too big to work. My sister and I would help load the bales and put them into the barn. There was a hay elevator, and daddy would put the bales onto the elevator and send them up. We would carry them to the back of the barn where an adult was waiting to stack them. The stacking had to be done just right, or the bales wouldn’t stay in place. As soon as spring arrived, the cattle and sheep would be taken out of the meadows, and it was time to pick any loose rocks. I didn’t like to pick rocks.
We didn’t only help with the outside chores but also in the house. We would help clean the house on Saturdays. We would sweep the floors, then mop them and dust. The living room and kitchen floors were mopped every Saturday. Imagine mopping the bedroom floors in the winter—thank goodness that wasn’t a weekly thing. We didn’t have mops with a handle—it was down on your hands and knees! That’s how I mopped my floors until just the last few years as my knees just couldn’t take it and getting up off the floor, these days, is almost impossible.
As a farm girl, I not only learned how to work but to know when it was time for gardens and crops to be planted. Spring was house cleaning time, and you washed down all the walls, washed the curtains and windows, and took the heavy quilts off the beds and hung them outside to air. Mom would always polish the heating stove after the fire was let go out for the summer.
I grew a love for nature and that continues to this day. I knew where to find the Turk’s cap lilies, the pink lady’s slippers, trailing arbutus, and pink honeysuckle azalea. I was always fascinated by the big tadpoles that would hatch in the water that ran from the drain in the kitchen sink—the cold water in the kitchen ran nonstop day and night. It saddens me today to see that so much that was a part of my life is pretty much gone. The deer population has all but wiped out the flowering shrubbery and other wildflowers. There are no wild strawberries. The raspberries and blackberries seem to dry up before they reach the picking stage. Modern day hay making doesn’t allow for the abundant number of flowers that grew in the meadows to come up and mature, allowing them to seed off. This has greatly affected the bee population.
I always enjoyed fall as I knew where the apple trees with the best apples were, when the small cling peaches were ripe, and where to find the wild plums. There was an abundance of cherry trees when I was growing up and I helped to pick many gallons—these like the old apple trees are all but nonexistent. One must wonder why so much is gone.
I am so thankful that I was raised to appreciate the hard work that goes into farming, and no, I didn’t always like what I needed to do. We should stop from time to time and say a simple thank you to a farmer for all the hard work he or she is doing on our behalf.
Hands-on, real-life experiences that are lived out on a farm mean so much more than reading a book about farming. Many people have no idea what farm life is like or how it affects their life.
The lessons I learned on the farm weren’t easy, but oh, so worth the time spent.
Violet R. Eye
