My first horse was a gentle giant who was born during my fourth year, in a blizzard on my Granddad’s farm. Granddad said we formed a special bond on the night he was born, and it lasted all his life, and beyond. I still feel it now.
He shared the next 32 years of my life and carried my own son before he could walk. This patient animal was a fixture, an icon in my life.
So many, many memories from my childhood and on into adulthood, continuing with my child’s childhood revolved around him. I would like to share a few of those moments with you as my tribute to the memory of this noble animal.
One night in late December of 1958, my family was spending the weekend on my grandparents farm in Eastern Washington not far from the US-Canadian border.
My grandparents had homesteaded that land, about thirty miles from the closest real town.
They scratched a living for themselves and their sixteen children from rocky soil that lay on mostly steep hillsides and a few level benches that lay at the baseline of the mountain snowpack. My Granddad farmed with horses, not tractors, all his life.
Thirteen of those children survived to adulthood, and my mother was their youngest child. I was the 64th grandchild.
On weekends, the old farm house was often crowded with three or four families of Aunts and Uncles and Cousins “getting away from it all.”
For the most part, we were city kids and going to “the farm” was a great treat, but there were a few drawbacks. We were used to certain ammenities like electricity in all the rooms, flush toilets and both hot and cold running water and modern conveniences like motor driven wringer washing machines. We didn’t get the Maytag until several years later.
But we’d gotten a black and white TV that year, the only one on our block. My mother said we were “progressive” and my other Grandmother was wrong–it wasn’t really a tool of the Devil.
I used to wonder what the NBC peacock would look like in color. In my imagination it was so beautiful. I was so disappointed with it when we finally got color ten years later.
Until the late sixties, the farm had none of those things. It was like stepping back in time.
When we got ready to go upstairs, we were each given a candle which we would then use to light an oil lantern in our bedrooms.
There was no central heating. The only heat sources were the kitchen cookstove and a pot bellied stove in the parlor. Each bed in the nine upstairs bedrooms had four thick handmade quilts on it, each of them in a different pattern.
My Grandmother still cooked on a wood stove and churned her own butter. There was cold water you got by working a hand pump at the kitchen sink, but no water faucets or hot water. The pump was the kind you sometimes see now at the more primitive State Parks or used for a yard decoration.
Grandmother would heat water on that wood stove and give us baths in the kitchen in a round washtub about two feet across and a foot deep while she baked fresh bread for the next day in its oven. She washed our clothes on a washboard and hung them to dry on bushes in the summer or on wooden pegs mounted in the wall by the cook stove in winter.
The outhouse was out behind the barn, about a quarter mile hike from the house.
There was no yard light, so it was usually quite dark and spooky on the walk out there unless the moon was full, but you could see a million stars.
Granddad would point out the different constellations when he accompanied me and tell me legends of how each one got there.
While it might be pitch black outside on a moonless night, once you went in the outhouse and latched the door, it was dark as sin. The one advantage was you couldn’t see all the spider webs in the corners at night, but it was still sort of creepy hearing the mice scurrying across the floor in the dark around your feet.
Some of the sissy cousins would bring a coffee can with them on those visits to use at night, but Granddad didn’t much like sissies. I prided myself on being a big girl so I would take the trek out back when nature called.
When I was small, Granddad would often walk out there with me, pretending he had to check up on his livestock.
In reality, once I got out there I would often balk at actually going in and closing the door. Granddad would bribe me with a promise to let me pet the horses after I was done if I would hurry up. Even then, I was crazy about horses. They always smelled so good.
The Sears & Roebuck catalog was provided for toilet paper. It wasn’t too scratchy if you crumpled it up a bunch of times before you used it. And you had something to read if you were going to be in there awhile. During the day, plenty of light came in through the cracks.
Sometimes they had the Speigal catalog for a little variety or the J. C. Whitney catalog, but it wasn’t very interesting.
On this particular night, the moon was nearly full, but it was mostly covered by the storm clouds. The wind was strong and it was snowing heavily.
Our tracks were rapidly filling in behind us, and the snow was up to my little knees but I was too proud to take the piggyback ride Granddad offerred me. After all, I was a big girl. I’d be five come April. I didn’t need any help getting through the snow.
As usual, when we got to the outhouse, I didn’t want to go in. While Granddad was trying to convince me to hurry up, a strong gust of wind tore off a shutter on the barn loft. When it fell, it made a sharp clatter which spooked the horses. One knocked off the top railing on the corral and jumped the fence and the others quickly followed and soon disappeared in the snow.
Granddad swore like a drunken sailor and hurried me back to the house to round up some help to find the horses. I wasn’t sure why drunken sailors swore so much, but that’s what my Grandmother always said. She’d say, “Evan, watch your mouth in front of the children, you sound like a drunken sailor.”
The old dappled gray mare named Guerney was very pregnant and it was way beyond freezing. Guerney was really old, “five times older than me,” my Grandad said. He was surprised she was “in the family way,” because she was so old.
Just that morning at breakfast, Granddad said she was “off her feed” and it was worrying him just a bit. I figured he must be very upset now to be using all those bad words. I guessed he was really worrying about that old Guerney. So I worried along with him. It was very cold.
My Dad volunteered to help with the chore and left me behind (he thought), pouting in the corner because I couldn’t go.
It didn’t take me long to get back in my coat and follow them. And promptly get lost in the snowstorm. Only I didn’t know I was lost, I was on a mission.
After a while, I could hear a lot of yelling in the distance, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, so I ignored them. I knew exactly where old Guerney would be going and I headed down that way.
I knew I was going the right way because I saw the Heart Tree. We called it that because there was a heart carved on it with some writing inside. Mom told me it said “Richard Loves Velma” and that my dad carved it there a long time ago when they were courting.
By the time I was born, the original homestead cabin was gone, but the old root cellar was still there. If you went down the road and then cut back up the hill, it was about a half mile from the house my grandparents lived in when I used to visit them, but it was shorter if you cut across the hay field.
The root cellar was one of my favorite places on the farm. I used to play “house” there and pretend I was a pioneer.
It was built into the side of the hill and part of it was a cave hollowed out of the inside of the hill. Granddad said the original cave had been enlarged and shored up with logs, and the front part built on to it.
The front part was made of thick logs that extended out from the hillside about eight feet square, and it had a live grass thatched roof. <1> <2> Next–>–>