Next Monday, February 7, would be my parents’ anniversary. On a Thursday afternoon in 1935, they stood with two attendants for a private ceremony in the church parsonage. The following Saturday night, they hired a hall for a dance attended by friends and relatives from surrounding communities.
For years, I thought the professional photo taken of the three of us when I was six weeks old was their wedding picture. I couldn’t imagine them without me and Mom said they were wearing the same clothes.
When I was planning my wedding, I asked Mom, “Why were you and Dad married in February when the weather was so iffy?”
She replied, “A lot of us were married in February to be ready to move onto a farm when landlords changed tenants the first of March.” Those young people had guts to marry, start farming and have babies in the midst of The Great Depression.
Before Alex and Edith became Dad and Mom, each of them had grown up on a family farm with child-sized tasks for boys and girls. He attended a country school for eight years and learned to farm from his dad. She was raised by her father after her mother died when she was seven. She went to a country school for eight years and then rode a horse to town every day to graduate from high school.
They rented a family-sized farm on shares. The young couple furnished the labor, team and horse-drawn equipment. Edith donned pants and worked alongside Alex instead of wearing a dress and remaining in the house. The milk cows and hogs were owned jointly by the landlord and the tenant. Expenses and income were split 50/50.
My folks worked together for thirty-six years. At the beginning of 1971, they retired and moved to their new house in the village. He became a janitor at the school and she was a housewife.
Have you ever taken an objective look at your parents’ early years?