Dusty days
by Mitch Jayne
An old friend of mine in his seventies has tackled the job of writing down some remembered parts of his farm family’s history, having waited, as he put it, “’til the last dog was whupped.” He sent me his first chapter for comment.
He isn’t the only person to put this sort of recordkeeping off until he has seen that no one else in the family wants the honor, having passed on the chance or passed on period. He has found out that unless someone in the bunch of ancestors did something well-known or heroic, writing a Missouri farm family’s history is apt to be dusty going—especially in the 1920s and 1930s, when most roads consisted of dirt, gravel and eventually dust.
His first chapter started with dust. He remembered (as I do) that all rural and small town people lived with road dust, shook it from clotheslines and curtains, felt it on summer sheets, tasted it in sandwiches—and poured it, settled, from bath water and wash basins.
Lacking any well-known relatives to begin with, he got so carried away with the dust of his childhood that I sneezed reading it. The man was the Hemingway of dirt.
His family lived near a junction of a farm-to-market road and a gravel highway, and in summer every passing truck and car pulled a tan-colored dust curtain behind it, which rose, spread and settled gently on absolutely everything—flowers, floors, damp wash, the privy, the baby and even the pond.
The chapter did have some mention of relatives: grandparents, great uncles and an occasional cousin would wander in occasionally out of the dust cloud, but you could tell the author had found his theme.
He said the coming of REA was of great importance to his grandma, not because of lighting, but because of electric fans that enabled her to get some air moving in the house while keeping windows shut. And there was the vacuum cleaner that kept dust off of the floors and the well pump that enabled her to wash dust off the porch, screens, and small children with a “hose pipe.” This directed my historian’s mind toward what happens when it rains on dust.
His mud writing was what turned this to history. His grandma—having mastered the hose as a clean-up tool—used it on every creature who tried to enter her house with dusty or muddy feet. She even hosed down the feet of a young man coming by to tell grandpa he was running for office and needed his support. He left his card.
Now that’s what you need to dig up a family’s high points! I’d like to think this was the only time Harry Truman ever experienced cold feet, but I had to read nine pages of dust before the writer got around to telling me anything historical.
If you are planning to write one of these family stories, folks, start with your grandma. She probably made history happen.
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