Memories of the little things about my Father and Mother

Dad, Mom and others in my life.

I was sitting in a Sacrament Meeting the other day and a thought came to my mind that in all of the stories that I have written that I haven’t written little things that I remember about my parents, grandparent, aunts and uncles. The little things that always come to mind when you think about them. So here goes.

Kermit Poulson

It is interesting to note before I begin that my father was named Kermit Poulson long and I mean LONG before Kermit the frog was created even though whenever anyone asks me what my father’s name is that is their first comment “Like Kermit the Frog.” I quickly remind them that my father was born May 27, 1909 and Kermit wasn’t created (a big difference from being born) until the year 1955. I was the 6^th child “born” to my father 2 years prior to the frog being created. I was born August 13, 1953. Only my youngest sister is younger than Kermit and that by only one year. So my father was 46 years old when the frog was created.

Some of the small things that I remember about dad in my early years was him sitting down in the large chair and immediately falling to sleep, a trait that I have not only inherited but probably even improved upon.

I have in my mind a day that we had been hauling hay and it was a very hot day. We had been bucking hay onto the wagon and I was probably the one that was actually driving the tractor since I was too young and small at that time to even lift the bales, never the less the leaves would still blow toward me and stick to my sweaty skin just like everyone else. So after the last load was in the stack yard and moved onto the hay stack Dad suggested that we go up behind the old slaughter house and take a swim in the canal. That part of the canal was slow moving and thus was pretty sandy. So we went to the canal, stripped down to our birthday suits and jumped into the water. It felt so good. As I look back it is the only time I can recall swimming in the canal with no swimming suit and of course probably the only time none of my sisters were swimming with us.

Dad and I ended up doing the chores alone the last four years of my high school years since Lynn was then off to college and mission. I did then many times alone before dad would get home from work at night, but he always did them with me in the morning. He would get up and go get the cows into the barn yard and then come back to the house and come down and open the door to my bedroom and tell me to get up and then he would clinker the furnace. He would again stick his head into my room and tell me to get up. I wasn’t very good at getting out of bed back then and it probably took great patience for him to go back three or four times till I finally got up. We would then go to the barn and he would have the milk cows in the barn by then and we would milk the caws all by hand except one that he said was to mean to milk by hand and we would put the milking machine on her.  (I later decided to milk her by hand as well since I hated washing the bowl and cups of the machine, I had no problem milking her by hand.)

I remember several times when we would bring the cows up from the pasture to the barn that they would want to go a different direction when they got up to the barn. There was a trail that would go behind the old shed to the barn and at the top of that climb to the barn there was a road that came from the driveway to the side of the barn and the cows always wanted to the driveway not to the barn. One of would always have to run up from the other direction to head them back toward the barnyard. What sticks out in my mind though was the keys always rattling as they hung down on the keychain from dad’s belt. He would always grab them with his left hand to keep them from making too much noise or to keep them from coming off his belt I guess. Anyway it is a little thing that I often think of at work now when I run up or down the stairs at the Marriott Center while working. 

The path to the barn is on the left side of this image.

You can't really see it but you can see on the right the 

barn yard where we were taking them.

One afternoon as I was coming out from the barn after doing the chores dad drove into the yard. He had been in Salt Lake City that day for the school district picking up supplies and as he got out of the pickup truck he pulled with him a trumpet. I had wanted to learn the trumpet even though I played the Alto Saxaphone in the school band which was the instrument that dad had played for years in a local band for dances all over the Uintah Basin. I only played it a couple of years before returning to the Sax. However I still own both of them.

The last thing is remembering fast Sundays when dad on several occasions would get major migraine headaches because he was trying to fast. Physically that didn’t work for him but he tried and would often get majorly sick because of it. I love my father and appreciate all of the little things he did for me.

Getrude Ilean Hansen Poulson went by Ilean all of her life even though she had been named after a dear friend on her parents she didn’t particularly like the name I guess. Most people I know named Gertrude go by Trudy so she probably wasn’t alone in her feelings for the name.

Mom was a wonderful mother and the little things that I remember about her were the ways she taught us to love work (or hate it, I sometimes wonder still). Saturdays were the especially hard days. We would always have to get up and strip the bedding off of our mattresses and then gather our dirty clothes and take them up to the back porch where we would then help her wash the clothes. We had the old ringer washer for most of my younger childhood years and we would help put them into the tub and later run the clothes through the ringer, put them into the clothes basket and take them out to hang them onto the clothes line. (We hung them outside when the weather was good and then on a wooden rack in the front room when it wasn’t warm enough to hang them out.) I was a regular Saturday ritual.

Along with that ritual was the “Never work on Sunday” rule that would always seem to get broken about 12:00 AM (or 12 midnight) that night when we were still cleaning the house and the kitchen floor still had to be mopped and our sheets put back onto our beds. I hated making my bed when I was so tired, but I must admit I always loved the smell of the sheets as I finally got to crawl in between them.

My very earliest memories include mom and dad making the soap to use in the clothes washer. I don’t remember all of the details, but I do remember using the fat that we had taken from the beef that we had killed for meat and putting it into a large pot over a fire in the yard and then mom adding the lye to it and stirring it until it was all melted down and cooked I guess. We then poured it out onto trays and later cut it into bars. We stopped using it later when commercial soaps became readily available, but I still have vivid memories of some of those bars that were around the house for years (and may even be there still).

This is the old ringer washing machine covered 

with snow where it now sits in my yard.

I have removed the ringer parts so no one can get hurt.

Another view of it.

Mom was a social worker and then later a school teacher. I only remember her years working at the school. She taught some elementary classes but was the school librarian for most of my school years. I was blessed to be able to take classes in high school from her in the library which consisted mainly of putting books back ono the shelves, organizing the magazines onto shelves for reference materials for the debate and English classes and checking out books to the students. My senior year I was the editor of the High School Yearbook and mom was the advisor for the staff. It was a lot of fun doing the yearbook with her even though she wasn’t particularly pleased the day I was kicked out of English because I asked Mrs. Evans if I could go do some redo pictures for the yearbook.

Mom would always stay up late after we were sent off to bed to write in her journal She faithfully kept journals from 1963 until her death in 2001. I have electronic copies of all of them and Marsha has the originals. I first started photographing them and later completed the rest of them by scanning them. She had kept journals all through college but later burned them and then regretted that decision for many years. We have enjoyed reading excerpts from her journals and especially the ones around the significant events of our lives.

Mom also recorded the weather, temperature and time taken for many years There was a notebook near her thermometer where she recorded all of those particulars every night before she wrote in her journal.

Mom was a great cook and often shared the responsibility with us as well Clair and I made the family bread each week for years. He did it first then when he went on his mission I took over. We loved to also make cakes and cookies, even some green ones that Clair made for St Patrick’s day one year. They were applesauce cookies and even though they were really good I must admit it took a little effort to get those green things past our lips and into our mouths.

Mom and dad were also very loving people proved by unselfishly taken Pauline into our home for four years during her Freshman to Senior years. She is still very much a sister to us in our family.

Mom loved rocks and flowers and we had gardens made of both. I must have gained my love of rocks from her as we would often have to stop and pick up pretty rocks for her to take home and put into her gardens. She also had a very vast collection of irises of different color and fragrances.  I didn’t realize for years that each color if iris had a significant fragrance separate from all others. She also lived trees and even had to give u planting the majestic giant oaks because dad mowed them down before he could see where they were planted. I am sure he didn’t do it on purpose, but it still happened.

Mom was a stickler for having children behave and the most prominent memory we have of that is when Marsha screamed out at the top of her lungs as mother was taking her out of sacrament meeting, something to the effect of PLEASE DON’T SPANK ME. I knew exactly how she felt though because I had been a recipient of her spanking and also having to go to bed without supper (at least until she had given me enough time to think about it and her then returning to talk about it before taking me back down to eat cold leftovers).

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I thought that this would be pretty short and that I could include the others into one document, but I see now that it isn’t, and I will do the rest in another document. It is amazing how things flood your mind as you try to write them down.