It’s a warm Saturday morning in the spring of 1958 on the Hoelscher- Fehmer farm a couple of miles outside of Ellinger in southeast Fayette County. The cows in the pasture are lazily grazing on the lush grass still glistening with early-morning dew. The old sagging cedar plank gate provides an opening in a rusty barbed wire fence that separates the pasture from the aging house and decrepit outbuildings on a farm that appears to be in a time warp from the previous century.
As my mother and I, along with my two younger sisters, round the corner in our 1953 Chevy sedan, kicking up gravel on the winding dirt road, we see my great-uncle busy hitching his two aged mules, Dolly and Molly, to his cotton wagon. Their blinders are already in place, along with their harnesses and chains attached to the double tree connecting them to the wagon tongue.
Today is “potato pickin’ day”! At age 14, my day will actually involve work. My two sisters, seven and eleven years younger, are basically “along for the ride”. Their day will be a day of play. Lucky girls! My mom grabs an old jug filled with wa ter from the edge of the porch, and my great Aunt Molly follows with a molasses can filled with butter and jelly sandwiches. We all walk down the hill carrying our buckets for gathering potatoes, followed by the creaking old wagon driven by my Great Uncle Alex, who is navigating along the ruts of a rudimentary trail, bouncing across the dry creek bed and onto the sandy patch of soil on the other side that’s an ideal place for growing an abundance of Irish potatoes.
I know that this will be a hot day filled with dirty work. I had no say-so as to whether I would come along or not. We are told what to do, to obey, and not to complain. Work ethic is an inflexible discipline in my German and Czech families – it’s “follow” by example!
My uncle parks his wagon, unloads his plow, re-hitches his mules one by one and proceeds down the first row.. We follow behind him.
Our jobs are to pick up the potatoes, throw them into our buckets and then dump them onto the wagon at the end of the first row.
It doesn’t take long before my mother yells, “Watch out for the burning nettles!” “What’s a burning nettle?" "You'll find out if you touch one”, yells Mom. I soon see what she’s warning me about – a broadleaf plant with bristly stinging hairs on the leaves and stems and small greenish white flowers. Burning nettles obviously like to grow in the same sandy soil as potatoes, because this field has an abundance of them.
It doesn’t take long before I brush my arm on a nettle lurking behind me, waiting for an assault as I swing my bucket around. Yelling about my pain is getting no sympathy! Instead, it’s a reprimand, “I told you to watch out!” I quickly learn that a red patch develops, accompanied by intense itching and burning that persists for a long time.
We bend, pick, fill and dump, hour after hour. There is no laughter, no conviviality, no talk of the weather, no sharing of local gossip – just silence, other than the sounds of plow- ing, and repetition bend, pick, fill and dump. By mid-morning, we take a break to enjoy our simple fare, but quickly resume our task. At the end of the third hour, a few synapses in my sun-addled brain snap to attention and reveal an epiphany – “When I grow up, I will never have a job that involves doing the same thing over and over – I hate it!” A voice startles me out of my momentary reverie – “Stop daydreaming and get to work!” My mom is a task master!
After a morning of back-breaking work, we trudge back up hill for a dinner of fried chicken and the typical sides prepared by my great-uncle’s spinster sister. During a short rest-period, I try to listen in on a conversation spoken in German, hoping to understand a few words here and there, but soon the time comes to resume the field work. By mid-after - noon, the field is replete of potatoes, but my job isn’t over. I didn’t quite understand the German conversation at dinnertime about how I would be the one to crawl under the house to remove the old rotten potatoes and replace them with the new!
“You want me to do what? Seriously? You want me to crawl under the house with colonies of daddy long leg spiders vibrating over my head, snake skins under my hands and chicken poop on my knees? Is this some kind of cruel punishment for a past indiscretion that I’ve forgotten about?” Of course, this was a conversation in my head with myself! I open my mouth to stammer out a simple three-letter word – “But…” However, when I get the “look” from my mother, I know that I better close my mouth and get to work. No words need to be spoken.
So, with a garden hoe in hand, I reluctantly crawl under the house to remove the smelly remains from last year's crop, trying to figure out if it’s better to push or pull the hoe. Bucket after bucket of newly picked potatoes are being handed to me – the culmination of hours of potato picking. By the time I finish, I exit from under the house stooped over with white cobweb-covered hair. No acclamations of appreciation are forthcoming – helping is expected; working is taken for granted. I’m learning the lessons of life, and I also have another resolution, “I will never ever become a farmer’s wife!
