The house looked so different and a little bare after the folks moved. We had lots of dust as the road in front of the house (96th Street) wasn't black topped until 1940. I used to carry wash water out and sprinkle the road to lay the dust so I could hang the clothes out when the wind was in the direction to bring the dust toward the house.

We had only been married about 6 months when a team of horses ran away with Russell down on 86th Street close to where Alice and Chester lived. He ended up with a broken leg and was in bed with a weight on it for a month or more, on crutches for a good while and not able to do much all that winter. He did carry mail after he could get around better. The first time we went to Russell's folks after he broke his leg his crutch slipped on the wet board walk down there and we were so worried that we took off the bandage and splits to satisfy ourselves it wasn't broken over again. While Russell was recuperating from his accident we lost nearly all of our hogs with cholera. It was a good start all in all.

About the time we were married or just before Lisco Leonard and Jessie Beaver, Martha Kuhn and Harold Landis, Inez Riggles and Cecil Hartman, Tom Beechler and Clara Powell and a lot of others were married. Edith [Edna's twin] was going with Glen McKenzie. Girstle [Edna's brother] and Jesse [Russell's brother] started palling around after Russell joined the married ranks and went as far as Greenfield on dates. That was much father then than it seems today. It wasn't long until Jesse started dating Mabel. Girstle had first one steady then another - Ruby West - Alice Steinmeier - Delpha Harcourt [her father John was president of the Broad Ripple State Bank and died in 1923] who died while he was going with her, and finally found Helen Dawson who was last and best.

Our first tractor was a Moline that Dad sold the boys. It was all right part of the time. They used horses most of the time and we didn't farm a thousand acres when corn was husked first by hand, later by a one row picker, wheat and oats were cut by a binder, shocked, then hauled in to a separator run by a steam engine and threshed. We saw big straw piles behind nearly every barn. We had straw ticks [mattresses] that were washed and filled with new clean fresh straw. At first they made the bed so high you could hardly climb in. Carpets and a straw matting used in place of carpet was taken up, the old straw and dust taken out and the floors scrubbed - a fresh layer of straw and then the carpets or matting replaced. House cleaning then was quite a task as the stoves were moved out, etc., and since we had no vacuum cleaners the task of cleaning was a spring and fall procedure.

          end of part twenty-five

A list of all of Edna's columns