Ripley Roots Stories /Twigs

	Ripley Roots

The Farm

by theresa m ripley, tenant

The Ripley Homestead, house, wash house, and Dad's Tool Shed and Garage

The farm. The words evoke a myriad of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Our 200 acres did not differ much from other farms except our buildings were older and the equipment more antiquated. The farm is where I spent my youth, and the images of it are indelibly printed on my mind.

The nucleus of any farm is the acreage, but for me the heart was the farmhouse and surrounding buildings. They were my childhood domain. The farmhouse was supposedly over 100 years old. My parents told me that a similar farmhouse was built at the same time with the same plan about a mile away near the Ocoya Pond. That house had not been lived in for years; the decay was very evident; and it was finally razed. But our house stayed on, and in the 1950s it got white aluminum siding to spruce it up and hopefully to keep out some of the winter's cold, which it did not.

The house had a front porch which faced Route 66 and a screened back porch. The back porch was somewhat cooler than inside the house during the summer time, and it became the place where Mom canned vegetables. The screening was intended to keep out the flies. But the back door never did fit properly, and there were usually just as many flies inside the back porch as outside. Mom made quarts and quarts of tomato juice, stewed tomatoes, and other canned produce on the back porch. The last step in canning is to put on the rubber seal and tin lid and ring. One knew the seal had taken when it "pinged" as Mom called it. We would have a cacophony of pinging as the jars did their final part in the process. Mom would often go out and check her jars, like she did her new chicks, to see if they had sealed. Those that failed the test were canned again.

The back porch became a storage area for out-of-use items such as: the wooden ice box that Mom had painted green, an old stove, and boxes of items from my grandparents left when they had moved to town. The back porch was also the place where we temporarily kept the store- bought cans that had been used. Because we did not have anything like a garbage man, it was Dad or Ray that took the cans to the dump behind the limestone quarry about a mile away. This was not something they liked to do too frequently, so we had our own version of a compactor. The brand name on the compactor was "Theresa." Every time we used something out of a can it was my job to wash out the can, use the can opener to cut open the bottom end of the can, and then squash it as small as I could by stomping on it with full force. We usually had five huge buckets of squashed cans before Dad would "take them to the dump." It is amusing to read about today's landfill problems and suggestions of what the average homeowner can do to help. One, of course, is squashing cans. I imagine that this plan would be more successful if the average homeowner had to take his unsquashed cans to the landfill just once.

Our back porch had a set of stairs which led down to the basement. The basement ceiling height was about 4'6", which for most of my childhood was fine. The basement was small, no larger than 6' X 10', and had a concrete floor and combination concrete/large rock walls. There was a concrete shelf 2 feet deep which ran all the way to the floor all around the perimeter of the room. The shelf was cool to the touch and was filled with Mom's canned produce. This included different kinds of vegetables and fruits. One time Mom even tried to can beef. This was not a success story so it was not tried again, but the jars remained on the shelf. (Mom was never one to throw "good stuff" away.) The remaining shelf space held a mixture of dishes and kitchenware from my grandparents (which we never used), and the kerosene lamps used several times a year when the electricity went out.

The main activities of the basement were egg cleaning, sorting, and storing. Wooden egg crates which held 30 dozen eggs, three dozen to a layer, had to be hauled up and down the very steep steps of the basement. But it was cool in the summer, and it provided an out of the way place for Mom to do her eggs. I think she enjoyed being there.

Coming in the back-porch side of the house, which almost everyone did, you usually stepped over 15-20 resident cats that lived underneath the steps. The back porch door led directly into the kitchen. The kitchen was small and had the following items: the old hand pump and sink, the cookstove which operated on cobs, and one or two freestanding cabinets. It was a very narrow area, and it was difficult for more than one person to be in it at a time. Before running water was in the house, the water came from the well and was collected in the cistern just outside the kitchen. When I started in 4-H, we traded the cookstove for a gas/propane stove and got a little more room in the process since the cookstove was such a monstrous thing.

The most vivid memories I have of the kitchen when small was helping Mom with the dishes while she taught me phonetics. Mom, who by all reports was an excellent teacher, probably assessed that I was not progressing in reading very well. After supper Mom would heat a couple of gallons of water on the stove, transfer it to the bowl in which she washed the dishes, and began asking me to sound out all words that began with SH. I would recite back shut, shoot, she, share, shine, and so on. After the dishes were done and I had gone through several vowel and consonant combinations, Mom would take the soapy water outside and throw it out on the lawn. (This is the reason the grass in this portion of the yard did so poorly. It always had a yellow, stunted appearance.)

Next to the kitchen was the dining room with the standard dining room fare. We used formica- topped tables and plastic chairs even after we had inherited the oak table from my Ripley grandparents. The oak table was much too massive for the small space that we had. At one time in the evolution of our home this might have been an elegant room. It had the potential. Wainscotting around the ceiling, which I did not appreciate until two decades later, was in this room and the living room. It was covered with layers of paint and both of these rooms were wallpapered.

When we remodeled (that's a loose term for getting plumbing in our case) in the late 1950s and actually got running water, the old kitchen was cut in half, and one half was made into a bathroom. The other half became a mud room. The mud room became the place where Dad and Ray would change out of their coveralls and boots after coming in from the field. In Mom's opinion this helped to keep some of the dirt out of the rest of the house. In the mud room a water heater and electric belt-driven water pump were added, but the old hand pump remained. Dad continued to use the pump and old enamel dishpan instead of the new bathroom sink for the rest of his days on the farm.

The new kitchen sink was moved into the old dining room along with the stove and refrigerator. All these appliances and two freestanding cabinets plus an oak buffet circled the perimeter of the room with the table and chairs in the middle. There was not a lot of spare room. The room was made to appear much smaller than it was because Mom tended to cover every square inch of the walls and refrigerator door with something. There was no space left on the outside of the refrigerator, and it was adorned with huge and fairly unattractive handmade items. The worse I recall was two large 10-inch high peacocks with feathers and glitter and a magnet that attached it to the refrigerator. Mom also went through an African violet (dozens of them) and parakeet (including bird cage) phase that all ended up in this room (actually a series of parakeets as they kept dying off). One wall contained our oak wall phone that was larger than anyone else's because it had been previously owned by the Ocoya Grain Elevator and evidently was a long- distance phone. The phone was right in front of the newly-created small bathroom door. Telephone users and bathroom users were in competition for the right-of-way. Our phone number was short-long-short on line 2, and the most common number we called was three longs on line 22 which was Grandpa and Grandma Phillips.

The new bathroom had our first set of built-in cabinets. Even though they were not spacious, it was the first time Mom had anywhere to put towels, sheets, and pillowcases. Space being at a premium, we still ironed towels so any fluffiness they had from drying would be flattened out of them so they would take up less space. The bathroom had a sink, medicine cabinet, tub (no shower), and the clothes dryer. The dryer stuck out enough from the room that it was protruding into the sink area. The tub never got much use, unfortunately. In the winter it was just too cold to take a bath, and in the summer it was just as easy to use the habits acquired over the winter.

The double-entry doorway from the dining room (now dining and kitchen) led into the living room. That sounds grand but it was not because of the small size of the living room that was completely dominated by the oil furnace in the middle. It didn't seem so bad in the winter because of its obvious utility, but in the summer it was a drag to have it there. But it was gargantuan, and one would not think of moving it out for the season. The contents of the living room were three chairs, a small wire basket to hold magazines and papers, a sofa, a small table that held the telephone (after wall phone days were over), a TV (after 1954), and a glass-front dish cabinet. It was very crowded. It was made even worse in the winter with the wooden clothes rack sprawled out to dry clothes. What furniture we had was covered with those silly coveralls. I am positive we did not have nice furniture, but who could ever tell with those drapes on everything. There were family pictures on everything that could hold a picture, and one picture of Jesus that had last year's Palm Sunday palm braided behind it. My three best girlfriends in school all took piano lessons and had pianos at home. Mom often commented that she would like me to take piano lessons, but that was always followed by the comment, "but where would we put the piano, hang it from the ceiling in the living room?" As I said it was crowded, everywhere.

Next to the living room was the open double door area that led into my parent's bedroom. Mom saved her egg money for a long time to get a new two-piece bedroom set: a double bed with a headboard and dresser. The room also had an older wardrobe and the absolutely gigantic and heavy Pike Township safe, which we had because Mom was township clerk. (This position afforded her $200 a year, if I recall correctly.) Along one side of the bedroom, with barely enough space to pull out the tucked-away stool, was Mom's sewing machine. The sewing machine story is something of which I have always been ashamed. Mom saved to get a new electric sewing machine, and it coincided with my learning the alphabet and the initials of my name. I carved my initials several times into the only new piece of furniture in the house, the sewing machine.

That was the downstairs of our house. You entered the second story of the house via the combination dining/kitchen room. The steep, narrow stairs (on which there were always piles and piles of things stored, the most notable being Mom's bookwork for the farm) led up to Ray's room. Ray's room was a pretty typical boy's room with an old dresser, an older cabinet that he used for all his comic books, and lots of pennants on the wall. He had a very small closet with a door.

You walked through Ray's room to get to my room. Because my room was very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter, I was not a kid who spend much time in her room. But cold as it was, my room was still warmer than Ray's in the winter. My room was directly above the oil furnace in the living room, and there was a vent in my floor right over the furnace. The ritual for going to bed was kneeling beside my bed for evening prayers and then lingering for a moment with my hands on the vent before bolting under a mountain of covers with my stocking cap and gloves on. I glorified the day that electric blankets became available, but I was well into my late teen years before that occurred and Ray had already left our house for his own which was warmer than ours.

As far as furniture in my room, Mom early on had purchased (or perhaps purchased at a farm sale) a cedar hope chest for me and put things in it periodically. I never expressed much interest in the hope chest and considering I was 42 when I married, Mom's hope chest was mostly that, just hope. I also had a small display cabinet that had story book dolls from around the world. I owned other dolls but did not play with them much, but did enjoy paper dolls. I also had a small well-made child's chair that an Ocoya neighbor crafted for me. My small closet lead into the attic, a wonderful and forbidding place. I went into it less than a half dozen times in my whole life. It had the real treasures from my folk's combined family history, including great grandparent portraits and many other things. When I was in my 20s and living in Oregon, I became interested in antiques and conjured up visions of all the glorious things that must be in the attic if only I could get to them and bring them back to Oregon.

That was the farmhouse. When anyone would ask me where I lived as a kid I would say, "The large white house across from the Ocoya Elevator." I said this well into my teens until one time I said this when my sister-in-law was in the room. She said, "Theresa, it's really not a big house." It was the first time that I began to revise my vision of the place. It was tiny, and crowded, and not nearly as white as I would like to believe.

But it was a place that almost exclusively has pleasant memories for me except in 1977 when the living room had been completed dismantled so that a hospital bed could accommodate my father there.

Even though the house was not a mansion, the buildings and artifacts around the farmhouse held a great appeal for a kid. Right out from the back porch of the house was the approximately 4-foot high pump resting on a step-up square concrete well platform. While running down the sidewalk at age six I tripped and fell on the corner of the well platform and still have the scar above my left eye, another half inch and I probably would not have an eye. Outside of this bad encounter, the well platform was a wonderful play device. Going out and pumping on the pump was always fun.

On the other side of the well platform (within 20 feet of the house) was the combination wash house and cob house. As you looked out from the back porch, the wash house was on your left and the cob house was on your right. After the cookstove was gone, which had been fueled with cobs, the cob house had outlived its usefulness. But we never seemed to get rid of the cobs. I often played in the cob house and would walk through mounds and mounds of cobs stored there as well as a lot of other "stuff." The "stuff" in the cob house, which was definitely not weather proof, was the antique oak furniture of my Grandma and Grandpa Ripley. After my parents died, I had the furniture hauled to Oregon. Over half of the legs had rotten away by being stored legs down in the cob house for decades. Luckily, the lovely library table had been stored legs up and they were in tact.

The Dinner Bell and Barn

The wash house got a good workout every Monday of my childhood. Mom and I use to heat the water in the copper double boiler (which I still have), wash the clothes, wring them out, and pin them to the line which ran between two trees on the side lawn. The wash house also stored more artifacts from my grandparents: two cane chairs (caning missing), an old camelback trunk (painted green by my mother; she must have had lots of green paint at one time), and my father's baby rocker. The baby rocker had its most recent refurbishing 5 years ago by Ray just before his granddaughter was born. Just to the left of the wash house was the old dinner bell. It was about 2 1/2 feet high and the large handle could be used to make it ring. In former times it brought the men in from the fields to eat. Someone, I imagine Dad, had painted it silver; and it was one of the favorite play items of any kid that visited us.

Dad's Tools

Walking on past the wash/cob house, you came upon a sight that was wondrous. It was Dad's shop. I have never seen a more disorganized shop in my life that was so clearly cataloged in one person's mind; Dad's. The shop was actually an old one-room school house that had been moved to our farm ever so long ago. Dad's main shop was what had originally been the outer cloak room. To begin to describe this area is more than my fingers at the word processor can do. But I do have pictures. When I got into 35 mm photography in the mid 70s, I took my camera home on several occasions. The shop with its misarrangement of tools (old and new) and hundreds of small compartments filled with items was a black & white photographer's dream.

The second part of the shop was the actual schoolroom. Pieces of the blackboard and chalk tray were still on the wall along with the script and print squares of the alphabet at ceiling height. Before we got the machine shed, we use to store our car in the back part of the shop. The first car I remember there was the yellow-tan '48 Dodge. The back part of the shop was used for working on projects and storing smaller equipment that probably went back to before my grandfather's time. It was marvelous to see Dad responding to Ray who needed a widget size 342 go right to the place in the shop and come up with widget size 342 in less than 20 seconds. That's true, I counted once. Among the thousands of items in the shop was the Ripley's Eggs, Believe it or Not sign after it was retired from Route 66 roadside. I will always be sorry that it got away from me.

Behind the shop was the hen house. A very dilapidated hen house. It housed about 400 chickens. It was not a place that I enjoyed frequenting much. The best assignment to pull was feeding and watering. I can't think of one nice thing to say about having 400 chickens in one house. The hen house had two rooms. The smaller room to the right was filled with nests, and the larger room was set up for feeding and roosting.

The Outhouse

To the right of the hen house was the outhouse. Actually, I can't think of many nice things to say about the outhouse either. We, honest to god, did use the Sears catalog in the outhouse. In the summer it was hot and smelly, and in the winter it was cold and smelly but it remained my Dad's choice over the indoor plumbing. After my parents died, I believe the outhouse had its last life as a lawn decoration one Halloween in front of the high school principal's house. This was a yearly ritual for our community, and it seemed a fitting end for the structure.

To the right of the outhouse was the smoke house which was about the size of the outhouse. By my childhood we no longer smoked anything so I acquired a small playhouse. Because I had so many other places to play on the farm, it was not utilized to its full potential. I am sure any number of city kids would kill for such a play area, and I just breezed it off. It was much more fun to watch Dad in the shop, as any farm kid would agree.

Behind the hen house, outhouse, and smoke house was the brooder house. Now that was a fun place. It was circular, I don't why, unless it meant there were no corners to let little chicks get smothered in. The new chicks arrived in the spring, and to be anywhere near the brooder house was to hear a capella choir of cheepers. Behind the brooder house was an older, more run-down building which had no function by the time I was a helper. I think it had been a hen house. The newer hen house, if that was the case, was little improvement; but at least it did not have big gaping holes in the wall.

In back of this area was our orchard which was planted when I was preadolescent. It was one of the ideas of the landlords. Ideas were often forthcoming from them. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to have fruit trees," they said. After they initiated the idea, all that was left was for the Ripleys was to plant, water, and nurture the trees. We did not have adequate outside water pressure so there are many memories of assisting to water all 40 of those new apple trees by hand. Years later about all they produced were wormy little apples. But these did make delicious applesauce. They were not good enough to eat in hand. Mom offered the produce to everyone, including egg customers; and we would often go out and get a bag of apples for relatives, neighbors, or customers. I do not ever remember the landlords asking for or getting any apples.

The three remaining buildings on the Ripley farm were the machine shed, crib, and barn. The machine shed was built sometime in the 50s. It was the only new thing I ever saw constructed during my parent's tenure on the farm. It was a half circle shape, made out of aluminum and two double doors on each side. It was very large and kept almost all of our farm equipment out of the weather. Dad was very proud of the machine shed.

The crib's purpose was to store grain, primarily corn. It also had a breezeway through the middle that housed other equipment. The long conveyor grain chute was on one side of the crib and on the very top was the weather vane. After my parents died, my brother wanted the weather vane and his son walked up the conveyor chute to the very top of the crib and took off the weather vane. It was very high and a fairly foolish thing to do, but it was absconded and taken to "young Ray's" farm.

The barn probably held the most fascination for any kid because such a range of activities went on in there. For years the upstairs haymow had one area cleared off and was the neighborhood basketball court. I only watched Ray and his friends, but I imagined myself as the one true cheerleader of the group. The haymow was a wonderful place and my play group (The Ocoya Four) had many wonderful hours there.

The milking took place downstairs in the barn. I spent the most time with my brother while he was milking and I was hanging around watching him. He used a T-stool instead of the traditional three-legged stool when milking. He wore his felt close-brim hat and nuzzled his head into the cow's belly and milked away and talked with me. Every once in a while he would squirt a stream of milk toward the dozen or so cats that encircled us both.

When the cows were not in the barn, they were in the back pasture right outside the barn. In order to keep the cows watered and have enough salt, the water tank was there with a salt block close by. The water tank was elliptical in shape and about three feet tall. We kept catfish in the bottom of the tank to eat the algae which always seemed to be plentiful.
The water was always murky, but you could see the catfish that resided there. We never ate any of these catfish, thank goodness, but I uncertain what did happen to them. The resident cats might be suspect here, in addition to their mouse duties.

The only other structure on the main farm circle was the fairly large gas tank which we used to "gas up" all equipment and the cars. A nice thing about having the gas tank was having Mr. Jones, from Farm Services, come to fill it. He was a pleasant, amiable man that had a wife who was ill. His daughter, who was much younger than I, often accompanied him on his gas route and Mom either made or had something special for her for every visit.

The area around the house had huge lawns, and lovely old trees until the box elder bugs got most of them (even the one where I had a tree house in which I spent many hours). There was a main gravel road leading off Route 66 that brought most visitors to stop right in front of Dad's shop. Then they could either circle around the pump by the water tank and leave the same way as they came or go out the dirt back lane. At the end of the dirt lane was our mailbox.

All of the buildings were wood frame, except for the machine shed, and most of them were gray in color and peeling. These buildings were never painted while I was there or afterwards. There were a few of the buildings that appeared never to have seen a paint brush, and they were all fairly dismal in appearance.

In 1977 the house burned. When I went back for Mom's funeral, Ray did not want me to go over to see the charred remains of the house which was just fine with me. But Ray and his best friend, Jerry Campbell, spent hours trying to go through the charred remains to find what, I'm not quite sure. They did get some of our grandparent's dishes that had been stored in the basement, but they broke when you touched them. Ray found most of the 50 pennies that I had used to frame Mom's high school diploma. I had secretly retrieved her diploma just before her 50th reunion and found a penny dated for each year and affixed them around the diploma. Ray also found my diploma from Indiana University out in the barnyard where it had landed after the explosion of the house, but most of the diploma was charred away. Many other treasures had been in the house. I had been the negligent child who had not yet retrieved the prize possessions of my youth: high school yearbooks, diplomas, and memory scrapbooks. All of the family pictures of previous generations, which Mom and Dad had so carefully labeled, were gone along with Mom's trip books of each of our adventures to the West.

When my brother died in 1986, I went back to the old farm grounds. Jack was with me and all that was left was the crib, machine shed, and barn. All the rest, rightly so, was no longer there. Even the back lane had been plowed over and planted. We went into the barn and climbed up into the haymow. My grandfather's old horse harnesses were still on nails hanging on the wall. It was difficult in a way to be there, but I wanted Jack to have a sense of what the Ripley farm use to be. Which, of course, it wasn't any longer. But the land remains, and the memories are as vivid as ever.