I grew up in an old white American Foursquare farmhouse four miles of gravel south of Dexter, Iowa. Though none of the rural roads were labeled then, and there no longer was a creamery, when we said we lived on Old Creamery Road, everybody knew which one it was.

I loved this house, but my mother did not.

One of my favorite parts of the house was the front porch, toward the road. My sister and I played cowgirls there, played with whatever pet we had at the time, even Rusty the squirrel, and watched rainstorms from there.

All four of us bundled up in blankets on the porch the fall of 1957 to watch for Sputnik to go sailing over the farm.

 

Downstairs

The front door led to the kitchen with a round pedestal table and white Youngstown cupboards that Dad had installed. Mom decorated the room in pink and green. She even had pink and green square Melmac dishes which were large enough so that Uncle Bill didn’t have to pile food on top of food when he worked with Dad and ate with us. The crank telephone was on the wall near the table. (Our number was 5211, our ring was four shorts.)

North of the kitchen was the living room, with a smaller room off of it to the west, where Mom’s treadle sewing machine was. An oil stove heated the larger room. I remember pulling a tooth, sitting with my back against that cozy stove. The upright piano was in that room, our very first television (black and white), and a maroon plushy sofa where Dad sat with an ashtray on a stand nearby.

When the stove was taken down each spring, that room seemed so much larger.

Upstairs

Upstairs wasn’t heated. Gloria and I shared the north bedroom, which had two smaller rooms, one empty and one used for storage—Mom’s trunk with high school souvenirs and Dad’s from the Air Corps.

The south bedroom upstairs was Mom and Dad’s. It had no closets. Dad installed some rods and Mom shirred blue sheets on poles to conceal their clothes. (She’d done the same thing when they were living in a church in Texas during the war.)

The Mud Room

Behind the kitchen downstairs was what we called the “mud room” until Mom changed our terminology to the “utility room.” Men washed up for noon dinner at that sink because it was right inside the back door, the one we usually used from the garage.

That old cob-burning stove in there was handy when the electricity went out. Once Mom sewed up a baby pig after its mother had stepped on it, and kept it warm behind that old stove. I decided then and there that I’d never marry a farmer.

When Dad removed that old stove, Mom let us roller skate in that room. All the floors in the house were covered with linoleum, and the floor in the mud room even slanted.

How I loved this old house!

Cubbyholes

The other special places were behind the pedestal table and under the stairway. We called them cubbyholes. Dad’s was the smaller one above, where he kept his watch and billfold and mysterious papers.

The one underneath was large enough that two young girls could sit on the floor and keep our treasures in there, birds’ nests, pretty rocks, and whatever else we’d found as we explored the farm.

What I remember most about those cubbyholes, though, was the strong smell of mice. Mom had to set mousetraps in most of the rooms, especially the kitchen, hating to find mouse pellets among her utensils.

The mice, the leaning floors, lack of closets, trying to heat the place. My mother longed for a new house.

She’d even drawn up plans for it.

Then one day when Grandpa and Grandma were leaving after a visit, Grandma’s foot broke through a board on the front porch. That triggered some earnest planning and they eventually tore down my childhood mansion.

But my mother got her small green mouse-proof house.

 

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Here’s an 8-minute version first produced and aired by Our American Stories on February 16, 2021.