Sunday, March 22, 2009

80--CONTINUED--18

I decided to tell some of the things that happened to us through the years.
When Arlo was in the hospital with his back, I went to work at hot lunch in the Manassa grade school. I worked with Maggie Weston. The hot lunch was a great blessing to the children. Our meals were well planned and I learned a lot about planning meals for a big group and how to prepare well. We made our own bread. Maggie mixed most of the dough, but I did it once in a while. We even made the buns for the hamburgers. Once Bruce Jarvies came back 9 times for another hamburger. I often wondered how he held so much. They were sloppy Joe hamburgers and were very tasty. We served as much food as the children wanted as long as it lasted. We cooked beans once a week and we did many good things. The government furnished many good foods for us. We got real butter, turkeys, and many other foods. Our meals were really good. Many times we had leftovers and we took them home. That was a real blessing to us, as Arlo was not working and my pay was small. I worked there for several years. I learned to clean up after doing a job and putting things away when I was through with my job. That is a simple thing, but it has made my life more simple.

When Arlo was able to go to work after his surgery, we bought the home across the road from Maggie. That was our first home that we owned. Things in life happen in small steps. Line upon line. We lived across from Maggie when we bought our first television.

I remember when we lived there Arlo bought a red pickup. I could not drive it in the snow. It took me a long time to be able to drive it on snowy roads. Arlo could get in it and drive very well.

We lived in a house with running water in the house and a bathroom, when we lived in Romeo, That is the first indoor bathroom we had, but when we moved to Manassa, we had a hand pump in the kitchen, but an outhouse. When we moved the our home across from Elma, Arlo installed a bathroom and we then had running water in the house. We did live simple, but I loved my life, eventho you would feel that it was surely awful.

We spent a lot of time in the mountains. Arlo was a fisherman and enjoyed hunting. He took us to the mountains often. I enjoyed that.

2 comments:

Larry said...

Maggie Weston was a bit of a prankster. On April Fools Day she would make chocolate covered cookies, or sandwiches. The cookies had a core of a wooden nickel. The sandwiches were bread and mustard, nothing else. We liked her.

Kent said...

I loved our home in Manassa. It was so comforting to have that home to come home to to unite our families.

I remember Maggie Weston's garden. She truly had a green thumb. I remember once she was mowing her lawn and needed to move the mower over the elevated sidewalk. She reached under the mower to grab ahold, and it cut all of her fingers.


Bingham family, about 1936