Tomboys that we were, Renée and I drove yellow Tonka trucks through the dirt, right along with our brothers. We graded roads and set up farmsteads. Used sticks for fences and stones for corner posts. Also in the dirt, we raced alone or with one another, dragging along a stick that left snake trails behind.

​For clean play I dressed kittens in doll clothes and pulled them in our little red Radio Flyer wagon, or pushed them in a vintage stroller. That cedar windbreak smelled good and the trees weren’t as giant as those in the shelterbelts, so we set up play kitchens.

We owned no actual dress-up clothes, so I metamorphosed into a bride with a white towel or pillowcase veil, gliding down the aisle between the mulberries and cedar trees.

Most of the time, imagination was the game we played, be it cowboys and Indians, making mud pies dotted with oozing purple mulberries or clumps of leaves.

Hide-and-seek and tag consumed endless hours. When I was “it” I held my eyes so tight that I saw white stars, which made me a bit slower on the start-up with my call of “Ready or not, here I come.”

We hid in the corn and got lost a time or two. Cornfields were different back then. It seemed like a foot of ground to grow weeds spanned the space between stalks.

Confidence overrode the fear, knowing that if we followed the rows, we’d either end up in the shelterbelt way north of the house, or back near the old cedar windbreak.

The four of us stuffed ourselves with mulberries until we couldn’t handle another bite. A tall old tree grew next to the corner of the chicken coop and we climbed on the roof to feast. Gorged ourselves on giant white and purple mulberries, and smaller tasty black ones.

At mealtime the creamy milk turned deep violet. Twigs, leaf bits, and bugs floated to the surface. Without the milk to show them off in a bowl, I imagine we ate quite a few winged and legged creatures along with the succulent berries.

One time we visited a neighboring family late into the night. I was having so much fun that when it was time to go, I ran and hid. Mom and Dad called and called. Did I actually think they’d leave me?

It was just so much better, running with someone other than my siblings, I didn’t want to go home.

Do you have carefree summertime memories of childhood?

Summers were synonymous with freedom back on the farm in the fifties. We ran free and fanciful in between helping Mom with the garden, and doing livestock chores or working in the hayfield. “We” means the four oldest of us seven, and as the oldest, I was the play leader of the Mosel pack.

​We greeted every day as an adventure. I’m sure someone in the family called the four older of us hooligans, the way we ran wild. My sister Renée and I played shirtless in the heat. I’ve seen pictures of other girls from that era who did the same.

We lived outside to “get the stink blowed off.” The outdoors was a much more pleasant place to be than in a stifling house.

In the summer of 1955, Mom took a break one day and photographed the four older of us out front of the house. For some reason, she used the green card table as a backdrop.

The black and white photos reveal healthy round faces, bright eyes, smiles, and love. My hair is curled around my face from the humidity, with the characteristic crooked bangs. (Like cutting a cake, Mom always seemed to cut my bangs crooked.)

In the background is the tractor-tire sandbox. Dad’s red GMC pickup, circa early fifties, is just beyond the fence. A big fat hen pecks the ground nearby. The cattle chute and peak of the barn roof are visible in the distance.

I lived barefoot and only wore shoes away from home, to church or on the occasional trip to the Starlite Drive-in on Buck Nite. Dirt either puffed up around my bare toes in dry soil, or squished between my toes after a good soaking rain.

Sandburs went unnoticed. We stayed away from cockleburs. My bare feet found countless rusty nails.

Mom soaked my foot in a white porcelain pan with Lysol and hot water. I’m sure we received tetanus shots, I knew about lock jaw, but I have no recollection of getting any inoculations except polio. Preventative medicine was never mentioned.

We spent our days in rough, often unsanitary conditions, in the corral and around other out buildings, and with the animals. We tried to ride hogs in the hog pen. Their short bristly hair scratched the inside of my thighs.

In the barn we climbed up the wooden fence and hopped onto baby black calves. We sure caked on the dirt, dust, and critter smells.

I hope you have carefree memories of childhood summers.

​How can anyone grow up in Nebraska without a snow story?
 
One memorable winter was in February 1962, my eighth-grade year. Twenty-two inches of snow fell in four days, with white-out blizzard conditions and howling winds.
 
Dad strung a thick rope from the fencepost near the house to the well house. We followed the fence from the tank to the barn. Another rope spanned the corral from the northeast corner of the barn to the hog shed. The wind blew and shaped drifts higher than our porch roof.
 
We took turns helping Dad scoop around the porch steps until we created an impressive frozen wave of snow that curved around the stoop. White castles of snow drifts hid the fences, so the animals walked on the encrusted drifts wherever they pleased.
 
No indentations revealed where the ditches framed the road. The milk truck from the cheese factory couldn’t make it through so Dad dumped the milk on the ground after we had fed some to the hogs. He tried to save as much as he could by emptying the chest freezer.
 
Dad put the meat in a snowdrift. The milk ruined the deep freeze when it seeped through the seals and into the motor. He cried over the waste.
 
The cold of that winter blasted colder than my young mind could remember. Temps dived below freezing and the added north wind contributed to dangerous wind chills. The actual temperature dropped to 32 degrees below zero shortly after the heavy snow in February.
 
We hand carried grain and hay to the animals, chopped ice with an ax in the hog waterers and for the cattle tank. A fountain of frozen water draped over the rim of the tank from the spout.
 
We finished chores long after dark and stayed out way too long. Ice crystals formed where teardrops and runny noses met hats and scarves. I can still see tears running down Mom’s cheeks as she rubbed our frostbitten hands until they warmed.
 
My fingertips and the balls of my feet are still affected by time spent outdoors in the cold and the chores of that year. As with every winter season, spring brings the thaw.
 
The vast amount of snow created icicles, wonders to behold, and the biggest I’ve seen in my life. My brothers broke some of the long narrow ones off the roof, turned them into swords, and danced about.
 
As tough country kids, germs weren’t in our vocabulary. We stood beneath the eaves with our tongues out and caught the drips as the sun’s golden rays melted the icicles into rain.

​December is a time of reflection. Mind pictures from childhood emerge. A scent often triggers a memory of family Christmases gone by.
 
I have wonderful childhood memories of the farm, the one-room country school, and my home church. We were snowed in a lot and loved it. I seem to remember a Christmas program or two at the school postponed because of snow.
 
I wish I had a physical photograph of the scrawny Christmas trees we decorated. Years have erased the day or week of December when Dad drug in a volunteer cedar tree from the pasture. The lights were always colored bulbs. Mom had treasured glass ornaments that grew fewer each year, but we filled up the spaces with paper chains and strings of popcorn and cranberries.
 
Icicles finished it off. Though I tried to be meticulous by evenly hanging the silver filaments over the ends of branches, the younger ones threw the silver strands so icicles landed willy-nilly. Many decorated ears of my siblings and clung to hair.
 
Christmas programs were quite an event in the one-room country school I attended. Blake Lake School, Dist. #56, was my playground and expanded my world by exposure to treasured antique books.
 
But I digress…Our teacher enlisted the tallest students to help her hang “Curtains” made of wool army blankets over a wire to create our stage. I sang a solo most every year, played in skits, and memorized classics such as “’Twas the night before Christmas.”
 
Once the program ended, we frolicked in the small space with our friends and showed off artwork to our parents.
 
At some point Santa burst through the door, laden with goodies in a gunny sack thrown over his shoulder. Those brown paper sacks were the best gifts ever. Peanuts in the shell, a few other nuts, haystacks—chocolate-covered mints, filled hard candy, an apple, and an orange.
 
Better yet, and by far my favored event, was the Christmas Eve program at church. The Grace Lutheran building of my childhood was a Christmas card picture of a little white frame church with the steeple. (That building gave way to an A-frame where I sang a solo on dedication day.)
 
On Christmas Eve I participated in the Sunday school program. We all lined up in the basement. The kindergarteners ascended first, progressing to the eighth-graders who brought up the rear. We entered through the back doors singing “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” and proceeded past the pews to assigned seating near the stage.

A story came to life for me as a preteen when I wandered in the northeast corner of our pasture into the ash grove. Neighbor men had told my dad quite a tale that involved one finger of a canyon which crossed the fence line.

The notorious Doc Middleton and his gang reportedly used Horse Thief Canyon to hide their stolen stock. They claimed the rustlers boarded up both ends of the canyon, north and south, so the ponies taken from Spotted Tail and Chief Red Cloud were kept out of sight until buyers rode in from neighboring states.

Some who romanticized Doc gave him a renowned Robin Hood-like reputation. Often, ranchers and poor settlers alike protected him and his gang from authorities.

I considered Doc a romantic figure as well. My thoughts soared backward with the wind. I fancied myself as a young girl of the long-ago prairie, and enter Horse Thief Canyon…
 
Dressed in a long dress of calico and high-top shoes, my bonnet bounced askew with my braids, I crossed into the world of Doc Middleton and his band of rustlers.
Thundering hooves echoed through the cliffs of sand. I grabbed roots, slipped, and knock gritty granules down the side wall in my hurry to escape for cover up the bank. I took shelter behind a wide cottonwood trunk, shaking in my high-tops.
I gathered my skirts and I tucked the fabric between my knees, just as the first horse rounded the curve beneath me. Sunlight glistened on the open-mouthed grin of the leader.
Gold Tooth Jack!
I drew an easy breath.
He would do me no harm. According to folklore, if he saw me, he’d offer me candy.
Too cowardly to step out, I bided my time until the gang passed by. My heart pounded a rhythm with the rumbling echo of hooves long after they had driven the stolen ponies out of sight.
With the excitement over, I retraced my steps and left the canyon.
 
I returned to my early 1960s bare feet and shorts, and wondered if meadowlarks ever called Doc Middleton and his gang to adventure.

Our Antelope County pasture first called me to sing with the meadowlarks in the mid-1950s.

​At the tender age of six or seven I ventured off alone to herd the milk cows. I climbed over the high wooden corral fence, heart pounding with my newfound courage. Then I sauntered up the lane, and headed east toward the highest pasture hill to locate the cows.

Through years of lazy summer afternoons, I hurried off much earlier than necessary, often into a fantasy world. Some days it took an awful long time to bring in the cows.

I derived such pleasure from communing with nature, especially the lilting call of a meadowlark, in those wide open spaces. Skipping through the lane on the way to the pasture, I exulted with those meadowlarks. Their melodious “see-you-see-yer” sang through the hills from March to October.

The quiet, the wind, and the wildlife on or surrounding our pasture hills gladdened my heart. There was always birdsong. Erect jack rabbits and a prairie dog town dotted the landscape. I giggled over the gangly long-eared hoppers, or the funny little prairie dogs sitting next to their lairs.

My imagination joined with nature to interfere with my duties. I pictured buffalo exploding across the flat prairie below or grazing on distant hills to the west. I imagined painted Indian ponies and puffs of smoke signals in the distance. That blue-gray horizon far beyond Willow marshlands to the north proved a mysterious land.

The colors of the sunset sky often distracted me when I was supposed to herd the cows for evening milking. The purples, pinks, blues, and gold that tinted the world around me caused me to envision the return of Jesus when He comes again in the clouds.

If I spotted the Holsteins straight east, appearing like black and white polka dots in the grove of ash trees, I felt apprehensive. Compared to the wind whistling its soothing music sound of rain through the cottonwoods close to our house, the old ash trees in the woods, with gooseberry bushes and other prickly undergrowth around the scarred trunks, made me feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Even the birds flitting among those trees made startling, scary sounds.

​Somewhere, I found enough courage to enter the grove.

We seven kids grew strong and healthy from livestock that went from pasture, pen, or coop to supper table. Milk products combined with vegetables and fruits gave us energy to play and work in the fresh air.

Some years crops were nonproductive, and we survived because of livestock. Over the years Dad concluded those acres weren’t meant for cropland. He wised up and seeded all the land that wasn’t already pasture. Cattle grazed on varied grasses from early spring to first winter snow.

During a wet spring the brome hit full-grown cattle to their bellies. On a dry August day cracks appeared in the native grass pasture between tufts of yucca, sage, and tumbleweeds, where the prairie flowers were only a memory.

We pastured stock cattle as well, white-faced with black or red bodies. The males (steers) were castrated and usually sent to market as yearlings. Some females (called “heifers”) were put in with the Black Angus bull for calving in the spring. A heifer became a “cow” the second time she gave birth.

Calves were dehorned, vaccinated, and castrated; fed and sold at the discretion of the farmer. If cows and their calves didn’t take to one another, or something happened to the cow, calves had to be nursed along. We kids fed the calf by first letting it suck on a finger, then tricked it into going for the false teat on a calf bucket, which held another cow’s milk.
​
All cattle are not cows. To me a cow is a Holstein (that’s black and white), with a ponderous bag stretched pink with bulging veins and ready to pop its milk. My brother can relate how many cows were milked when and his age at those times.
I have saved an old triangular milk stool, a calf bucket, and a pair of “kickers” that hobbled nasty cows so we wouldn’t get hurt.