March brings a much-needed end to winter. Daylight saving time begins March 14 and the first day of spring is the twentieth. It’s a time when dandelions, robins and green grass are a welcome sight.
To me, it’s a new beginning. While I was growing up, my parents rented a farm instead of buying one. Landlords changed tenants March 1 before spring field work began. About every three years, we moved to a different neighborhood. I still remember the five different farm owners we dealt with.
Moving day on a family dairy farm was a big production completed between morning milking and evening milking. Friends, relatives and neighbors were recruited with their pick-up trucks and hayracks. A livestock trucker was hired to move the cows, pigs and horses. Chickens were caught and confined in wooden crates to be transported in the back of pick-ups to their new home. The machinery and household goods were loaded onto hay racks. The women carried precious items with them inside cars.
The three of us only used the main floor of the large, tw0-story homes that rarely had a furnace. Stoves were extinguished and rekindled at the new place. In the kitchen, a cookstove burned kindling or coal briquets. A noon meal was prepared to feed the hungry moving crew. An oil burner heated the living room and two bedrooms.
The following day, I was the new kid among ten or twelve students at the nearby country school.
In 1947, we settled on the Anderson farm northwest of Durand, my home until I married in 1959. My parents stayed there through 1970 when the landlord sold the farm. My folks, who were in their sixties, quit farming and had a home built in Durand. Dad took a job as a school janitor and, for the first time in her life, my mother was ‘just a housewife’.
What does the month of March signify to you?
This is one of your few weekly blogs that I really can’t identify with. In 1940 when dad got sick of working at the Freeman Shoe Company in Beloit, and moved his family out to the country from South Beloit, he bought the farm at R.4, Beloit, and they lived there for some years after Janice and I went off to college. So………. I have no memory of constant moving as a child though I certainly moved often when I was married to my first husband, Karl Killingstad. I am sorry that you had to go through the trauma of changing schools so often. I went the one room school (Inman) for eight years.
I didn’t think of changing schools as a trauma. I hated to leave my best friend but I soon found a new one. Moving day was a fun day for me. I think the adults enjoyed getting together even though it included hard work, which was nothing new far farmers.