Jaime’s Reviews > Nothing to Tell: Extraordinary Stories of Montana Ranch Women > Status Update

In the early years, lots of times we’d come home-you never locked the doors—and find the beds are full. Somebody’d come ridin’ in, fixed themselves somethin’ to eat, and went to bed. I’ve come home and found a whole row of boots sittin’ outside the door. It was nothin’ uncommon to come home and find your house full of somebody.

I was thinkin’ the other day, all these years I’ve never lived in a house where they’ve had a bathroom.

We moved into a little place of our own, built out of doors from railroad cars. You could get these doors at the railroad shops in Brainerd. Other folks was doin’ the same. We lined up these railroad-car doors, got a roof on, and made a house.

A lot of people have preference to the white egg. And then we have the people who want the brown egg. Some figure if it’s a brown egg, it’s no good. Don’t know where they got their theory from.

The cheapest I remember eggs sold for was twenty-five cents a dozen. Just guessing, I s’pose in 1947.

The following year Dad said, “You can’t start school now because Mama needs you.”
I helped Mama all I could, and I did most of the baking. I sewed; I made dresses for my younger sisters. That year, when I was supposed to be in eighth grade, I never got to go to school at all.

It was the poor people’s kids that went to this schoolhouse, three of us and four others. The rich people sent their kids to school in town.

Dad would go down the river a ways and throw in a stick of dynamite. Mother would sit in the boat; he’d come down, and they’d get a boatful of whitefish with a net.

He put a lantern down by this feet—cars didn’t have heaters then—and he had a blanket that covered himself with.

Simple things were fun.