My Parents

My mom and dad met when they were teenagers, dad was eighteen and mom sixteen. They lived several miles from each other. Dad's older brother married mom's older sister, making the families more tied together.
Dad and mom wanted to get married when they were nineteen and seventeen but dad's mother refused to let dad marry until he was twenty one. You see he was earning a living for my grandmother and her six daughters who were still at home. I never understood why the oldest brother wasn't responsible to help the family. My dad was named for his father so maybe he felt like it was his duty and he completed his duty. He was twenty one on the twenty second of May and married my mom on the twenty ninth of May. My mom turned nineteen on the twenty fifth of May.

In those days everyone celebrated the life of the loved ones who had passed on by going to the cemetery on Decoration Day, the last Sunday in May. They placed  flowers on the graves. They took a dinner and had lunch after a church service in the cemetery. My mom and dad went to such a celebration and got one of the ministers there to marry them. After dating three years, they were finally married.

They made their home in a two and half room house, where there first three children were born. This house was up the hill a half mile or so from the farm house where the other six were born. My dad, with help from others built the farm house and barns.

Our parents didn't have the opportunity to get a formal education. They went to elementary school in  a one room school house. My dad was left handed and suffered so much from his teachers making him use his right hand to write. Unfortunately his hand writing suffered. He still wrote left handed in spite of his teachers trying to retrain his brain. My mother could have gone to Standard or Norm School and taught school, but she was busy helping her mother, who was always sick. She helped take care of the five younger siblings. She learned to cook, sew, and clean. My mother was never sick. She called herself a "work horse". I believed she learned a lot from her sickly mother who out lived her. (Mom died of a blood clot to the heart after a broken hip. I was twenty five when she died.)

My parents were very talented in singing. My dad had a great bass voice and mom was a soprano. They sang a lot as they went about doing their work. They did a lot of singing in church. Mom played the organ.

They started the day cooking breakfast together. My dad fried the bacon or sausage and made a big skillet of milk gravy. Mom made biscuits, fried eggs, cooked oats, and made a big pot of hot cocoa. When breakfast was ready they prayed aloud together. Usually their prayers awakened us children or maybe we were just waiting to hear them pray. Sounds like a big breakfast, remember they were farmers or hard workers so they got a good start by being filled up with food. The day began with chores and then designated work.