What Takes You Back?

The other day Katrina asked me to put some lotion on her arms, as she has had carpal tunnel surgery and her right hand was in a splint and she couldn't do it by herself. I told her that I liked the scent of the lotion. She said the smell of it took her back to her mission days because it was a brand that was used a lot there.

That comment reminded me of my morning walks this summer that have brought me in contact with reminders of my childhood. I think the senses that Heavenly Father has blessed us with are an amazing form of time travel. These are some of the sights, smells and sounds of small town/country life that have transported me back to our Montana farm this summer.


As I walked by the river bank leading to the Wellsville dam, I saw this abandoned car down in the old river bed a ways from the dam. On our farm, we had a few pieces of old equipment that sat in the fields rusting away. We liked to play on them. Some of them later became collectors items that Dad was able to sell. Unfortunately people really did follow up on the urge to push a useless vehicle over a cliff such as you see here. Someone at some point before we moved there in 1951 abandoned an old truck in the Musselshell River just beyond our barnyard. It just happened to be about the deepest part of the River for some distance, so it became our swimming hole. I was always kind of afraid to go near the truck when I was young, but as I got older and braver, I discovered I could touch it with my tiptoes and still have my head above water, then push away and do kind of a surface dive away from it. I never tried to explore it's depths but imagine it would look something like this old car that I guess was exposed after the dam was built on this river.






The fields with alfalfa






and sweet clover evince several memories...

the bustle of hay harvest time, scorching summer heat, dried alfalfa leaves stuck on glistening moist skin, field mice taking refuge under the bales of hay, trapdoor spiders hiding among the stubble, hershey bars tucked away in the glovebox to provide a welcome treat, the sweating canvas water bag that was our lifeline as we worked and the welcome midday meal followed by a short siesta until the sun began it's downward descent and we once more made our way to the fields.





We didn't have a flower garden when I was young, besides lilac bushes. But I enjoyed the wildflowers--that I later discovered are mostly weeds--like the dandelion--

and the morning glory. What I found interesting about both of them is that they respond to the light, their blossoms opening up in sunlight and closing up at night. We used the dandelion to predict whether someone liked butter. (If you hold a dandelion under your chin, your chin will reflect yellow in response to your love of butter, or so we were told.) I don't know how many handfuls of dandelions my mom accepted from us and graciously placed in a cup of water to beautify our kitchen:)
Another weed that I saw recently was what we erroneously called Indian tobacco. I asked Katrina if she knew the proper name and she said she thought it was Curly Dock. According to Mr. Google, it is Curly Dock.












As we played along the ditchbanks and the banks of the Musselshell River, we discovered a more elegant flower, the wild rose, whose scent no perfumer, in my opinion, has been able to successfully reproduce. I love that smell!

According to God's plan, there are also some irksome plants to afflict and torment man. Among those that I despised as a child were the Russian thistle (which turns into a tumbleweed when it is dry),

the foxtail,










purple thistle,









the burdock and cocklebur













and other sock-grabbing plants.











Then there were the trees, my favorite--but most annoying in the springtime when the cotton was flying--was the big cottonwood tree that we used to climb. We loved making whistles with the leaves.















Other plants of my childhood that fell someplace between shrubs and trees were the berry producing bushes that we enjoyed. This one was a tree, the crabapple. We used to help Mom pick crabapples from a neighbor's tree and she would make apple jelly with them. The fruit was small and it took a ton or so to make a batch of jelly. It's tartness challenged our tastebuds, and they were kind of hard to eat because they were small, the majority of the fruit being the core.


We also went on excursions with Mom to find currant bushes. I don't remember any on our property but I remember stopping along the roadside to pick a basket of currants, which my mom also turned into a beautiful, dark translucent jelly. I thought it was a form of magic the way she transformed those rather unpalatable baskets of fruit into succulent jellies.


Even though the previously mentioned fruits tasted sour to me, I felt we had made a joyful discovery the first time I tried another berry that grew along the river. This one was the Buffalo berry. It took a whole handful to make a bite. If one were to try just one berry, it would yield far less than a single pomegranate seed. The center of the berry was similar to the pulp of the pomegranate. Because the berries were so small, we didn't attempt to stand there and fill a bucket with the tiny berries. Instead, we would each break off a branch or two (we had no idea that was diminishing next year's harvest) and we would go back to the house and pick and eat the berries at our leisure. It is a very tart berry but we enjoyed eating them to see if we could eat a handful without pulling a "sour face." The most miraculous thing happened once the first frost hit those berries. Their scarlet-red color deepened in hue as they turned more translucent and they became sweet and wonderful to eat.


Lastly, as I walked past the cornfields, I was reminded of the cultivated crops in the summers of my youth--which included, in addition to our garden vegetables, the potato patches and fields of field corn. We used what is called a grain drill to plant grain as a starter crop for new alfalfa and I think to plant the corn too.

This picture that I found reminds me a lot of the grain drill that my dad had, according to my very young memory, since these were not crops that he repeated every year like the hay.






I remember sitting in the garage cutting the many gunnysacks full of seed potatoes into small pieces, making sure to have an eye or two in each chunk. Then Dad dumped the potatoes into the tractor-guided planter which distributed them in neat rows in the field. This picture reminds me of the field where Dad set us to work plucking off the potato bugs from the plants to save his crop. It was probably only about an acre of potatoes, so not his greatest farming venture, but it sure looked big to me as we set out in the morning to cover all of the rows and find the annoying potato bugs.

Another of the aged pieces of equipment that we used to play on was an old potato sorter, similar to this one. Ours was simpler and very crude, a wooden frame with a conveyor belt that sent the potatoes down to two areas.
There was a chute that could be moved back and forth between two bags to separate the small and large potatoes. I don't think we ever used it for what it was intended but we had fun on it.

Well, this ends my trip back in time, traipsing through my memories. I am actually rather exhausted but it has been quite fun!!