Mary's Memories of Her Parents

(10/08/12) I remember Mom teaching me these little sayings: Railroad Crossing watch for the cars! Can you spell that without any 'R's'. I thought it was very hard to try and figure it out but Mom finally told me the secret. 'There aren't any 'R's' in the word 'That'. I remember her enjoying this very much. She also taught me this as she gently pulled on my toes in turn: 'This little Piggy went to town, this little Piggy stayed home, this little Piggy had roast beef, this little Piggy had none, and this little Piggy cried 'wee, wee, wee', all the way home!'. I loved it and kept asking her to do it again.
And I remember Mom buying a whole set of educational books from a salesman thinking it would be really good for us kids to look through them. She was hoping we would be able to use them to help with homework. They only thing I used them for was some kind of stories that they contained. And I did look up some poems (or songs) in them. I learned 'On Top of Old Smokey' from them. I remember singing that song but I don't think Mom really approved of it because it mentioned losing a lover from courting to slow. I think she was hoping for me to learn something a little more educational. Another song I remember learning was 'The Bear went Over the Mountain'. Later when we were older I remember Mom mentioning how she wished we would have used the books more. She probably had to talk dad into getting them and we didn't even take advantage of the knowledge right there at our finger tips. Does anyone else remember them? Maybe you used them more than I did? I think Mike might have also spent time looking through them.
I remember when I was little and I was really mad and frustrated about something. (probably something John or Mike had done). I was complaining to Mom by yelling and stamping my foot. Mom couldn't hold it in and she started laughing at the scene I was creating. I was shocked that she was laughing at me instead of catering to my problem. She tried to get it together quickly and tried to explain that I reminded her of Rumpelstiltskin. It hurt my feelings that she laughed at me but this memory makes me realize that I always felt I could tell her anything (that is until I turned into a teen-ager.) She must have gotten very weary of all our tattle-tailing because I remember her reminding us 'not to be a 'tattle-tailor'.
Mom had to be the one to discipline us with swats on the rear. I ask her once why Dad didn't get after us and she replied that he was worried that he would hurt our feelings. And once she did tell Dad she was getting tired of being the one to always correct us and it was time he did the bottom swat to me. So reluctantly he did attempt to do the discipline, I could tell it was something he really did not want to do. But you really couldn't call it a swat; I think it was more like a pat! But indeed it did hurt my feelings that HE would actually spank me! I think Mom felt bad because she never did ask him to perform that job again. I use to keep score of when I got mad at one of my family members. When they made me mad I would run in my bedroom and put a mark by their name. Mom and John got an amazing amount of marks which seemed to be acceptable to me. Dad only had one mark and that was the one and only time he ’spanked’ me.
I remember Dad trying to get us to be some kind of help on the farm. We had to help get some of the rocks off of a section of land and load them on the pick-up. Then we had to help un-load the rocks by tossing them off on another section that wasn't going to be farmed. Another task was riding with Dad to load the baled hay on the truck. Some lucky person, I think Mike or John, got to drive the pick-up which really meant idling it and stopping it so Dad could put the bale of hay on the pick-up. I don't know why I remember this because I don't remember getting to drive the pick-up and I know I wanted to.

One task I do remember Dad letting me do and that was riding the back of the potato planter. He drove the tractor and I sat on a seat at the back of the potato planter. There were 2 bins of seeded potatoes that would fall down and a round of picks would constantly go around and pick up a seeded potato and drop it into the plowed earth that the potato planter was also was creating. My job was to watch the picks and if they got stuck and stopped working I needed to alert Dad so he could stop the tractor and fix the problem. Well, Dad was hard of hearing so when the picks stopped turning I yelled at him but he couldn't hear me. I didn't know what to do so when he got to the end of the row he ask me how it was doing. He was a little disappointed that I hadn't stopped him when the problem occurred. He told me to throw a potato up in front of him somewhere that he could see and he would stop the tractor. So the next time there was a problem with the picks not turning, I threw a potato up there but it hit him in the head! It really startled him and he told me I didn't need to throw it at him, just up where he could see it.