FAMILY TOGETHERNESS

Published in Intermountain Farm and Ranch June 10, 2011

About a year ago, the women’s auxiliary organization in our church challenged all women to have their family sit down together for five meals a week. We received that directive on a Sunday. Well, by noon on Tuesday I had fulfilled that goal for the first week. I wondered if now I could quit cooking for the rest of the week.

This did make me stop and appreciate the advantages of living  on the farm/ranch. Yes there’s a lot of cooking, but the family does sit down together for meals, and not just five meals a week. There are also other advantages of this life.

We lived at the ranch during the summer when the kids were all at home. As soon as school was out in the spring we would move up. We would come down to the valley on weekends and attend church, buy groceries, and then head back up Monday mornings.

Many mornings, after chores were done, I would pack them a lunch and the kids would take off exploring. The old Cutler house was a fun place to go, or up to the foundation of the old school house, maybe to one of the groves of trees near by. They would usually arrive back to the ranch house in time for dinner, our noon meal. They liked to take their bikes and ride over to Hell Creek. Once a summer on a Saturday morning, I would pack a lunch and the older ones would ride their bikes from the ranch to our valley home. This was approximately twenty miles which took them most of the day on a bike.  

Every afternoon about 3 or 4 o’clock, I would get the kids in the car and we would go out to the field to take their dad a treat. Then we would head to Hell Creek where the rest of the afternoon was spent swimming. The water wasn’t deep nor the current swift, but it was water and a chance to play in it. Home again and they would play their games, sometimes Anti-Eye-Over ( or Anti Over), or play on the old equipment. We had an old combine that they especially liked to play “Love Boat” on. There always seemed to be something to do!

We didn’t have a TV as there was no electricity. We did have a battery powered radio which was turned on every morning to get the news, and Boyd listened to ball games in the evening on it.

For quite a few summers we had “Red” the hired man. He was an older man that Dad Schwieder would hire in the early spring to help get the ground ready and he usually stayed through the fall harvest. We only have two bedrooms in the house and “Red” had to sleep in the back bedroom with the kids. He didn’t like that and would get grouchy with the kids if they were too noisy. I don’t think “Red” liked me up there. He wanted to do his own cooking. I never spiced things enough for him. When I would serve a meal he would put so much pepper on his food that you couldn’t tell that he was eating anything but pepper. But he and I tolerated each other as best we could. In fact, we integrated him into our “family” as best we could. I think he was always glad to see us depart for the valley on Saturday afternoons.

The first day of school would see us settled again in our valley home. Now as the kids are grown and some of them have moved away and have their own families, they often talk about the memories they had of those days at the ranch.

Even though the kids have moved away, the cooking is still being done for those family members that help on the farm. And more than five times a week we sit down as a family and eat together.