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 6th 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.
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 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.
