“I’m getting up...”
“Now, Keith! We have to get those cows milked.” She is standing in the bedroom door tying a kerchief over her hair to help prevent the barn smell from seeping into its follicles.
Dad works as a substitute mail-carrier for rural route two. Our mailman has worked at the post office long enough to accumulate six weeks of vacation annually and that’s when Dad gets called in to cover for him.
This morning Dad is in Rice Lake sorting mail, rather than at his usual post in the barn milking the cows. Mom needs to be in Barron, at her desk in the Bank of Barron by eight. Little brother and I meet the school bus at seven-forty. Therefore, while Dad is sorting letters addressed to route two by box number, we are home ready to cover for him. I really don’t want to get up. I’m crabby and angry, but I know better than to act-out. So, I pull my barn clothes on.
This isn’t the first time Dad has had a part-time job in town. When I was born, he had what was called a milk-route. He drove the truck for the man who owned the one-rig operation. This consisted of going around from farm to farm, picking up full cans of milk and dropping off empties that he’d picked up the morning before. Many years later he told me that in order to stay on schedule, he’d learned to be the one doing the talking as he drove the truck out of the yard.
“Some days I was the only visitor those farmers had. So they wanted to talk...and talk. But I had a schedule to keep.”
He had one day off each month - the fourth Sunday, when Prescott, the guy who owned the route, drove it himself. That didn’t mean sleeping-in that morning though. It meant getting up before five and milking cows as usual, but instead of racing off to a morning of fetching cans full of milk until noon, he went to church with us.
“At that time, I was an afternoon farmer, all of my chores, except for the morning milking of course, had to wait ‘till I got home.” He explained.
They rented a farm and we lived in the old house that was in pretty rough shape. At one point they had fourteen pots and bowls spread out on the floor upstairs to catch the rain that dripped in. That raining-in was the only running water - the pump and outhouse attested to that. “Your mother hated that house.” Dad recently reminded me.
Mom was a teller at First National Bank then, but she was still Dad’s right hand on the farm, too.
“When you were born, your daddy didn’t get to meet you until after he finished his milk route.” Mom wrote in my baby book.
Although I weighed five pounds and one ounce, like most babies, my weight dropped after birth. Mom was discharged a couple of weeks before I could go home after proving that I could maintain a weight of five pounds or more. They brought me home on April Fool’s Day - into to that shack with the leaky roof. I was the second son that Mom gave birth to, however, James Craig who was born on January 15, 1953 passed away at two days old. Another brother, Dale Arden, was born two years after me on April 6, 1956, but he too didn’t live.
On August 13, 1959, my brother, Kent Steven was born and he is now fifty-two. The fifth and final son, arrived on March 28, 1961. Kent and I were staying at Aunt Lois’ house while Mom was in the maternity ward.
Aunt Lois hung up the telephone, turned to me and said, “Jesus wants your baby brother to come live with Him, so He’s taken him to heaven.”
I crawled behind her davenport and cried. I wanted Dean Lee to live on earth and play with Kent and me. I didn’t like the fact that Jesus took him away, but since I’d just turned seven, I was old enough to know that I couldn’t say it out loud. I was also aware that Dad was my age when his mother died and I didn’t even like to think about that.
Many years later, I learned that we took baby Dean’s body to Minneapolis for an autopsy because Dad and Mom couldn’t afford the transport fees and decided to make the four-hour round trip drive southwest to the Twin Cities themselves. I knew that we went to the University of Minnesota hospital, but I didn’t know why until just a few years ago. I remember a grave-side service in the Norwegian cemetery, west of Barron - out in the country on County Road T. A small white box was lowered to the foot of Grandma Bjugstad’s coffin, where they share a grave. We refer to her as Grandma Josie, because after her death, Grandpa remarried. The grave next to her was then vacant and for Grandpa. The grave on the other side of his was where Grandma Clara, his second wife, lies. One more empty plot was where Grandma Norma (his third wife), the only Grandma Bjugstad that I ever knew, was to be buried. But many years later, my Aunt Lorraine was buried in it, next to her mother, first stepmother and father. Grandma Norma was buried with her own family after being widowed for more years than she was married to Grandpa. One of the striking memories I have of that cemetery is that Mom cried as we were getting back into the car the day of Dean’s funeral. It was the first time I’d seen her cry and it stung.
Every Memorial Day we’d visit that graveyard that was filled with many Bjugstad relatives and I’d always be reminded that that was where Mom broke-down. A few years ago I was there and noted how so many are babies, children and young adults - many of my ancestors didn’t lived to experience old age. One grave marker tells the story of how a mother and five of her children died in 1918 when the flu epidemic swept through Wisconsin, leaving her widower and another five, suddenly motherless-orphans behind. Nearly one hundred years later, half a family’s legacy serves as a reminder of how fragile life really is.
Our two other brothers were buried in the same unmarked grave in a cemetery in Rice Lake. One day a letter arrived informing my folks they had been moved. A map was enclosed, but they were never quite certain exactly where they are now.
“There souls are in heaven, where their bodies are, isn’t important.” Mom once said. She’d always mention them on their birthday, though. If Mom was still able to talk today, next January she’d say, “James Craig would have been sixty years old today.” Just think of that.
I was about to turn thirteen years old, that 1967 January morning that Mom was rousting me out of bed to help her milk the cows and do the morning chores before the school bus came.
Using my flashlight I see on the thermometer that hangs on the north side of the pump house, that it is nearly fifty degrees below zero.
“Turn the radio on,” I say as we enter the barn. Sometimes when it is just a little colder, school is closed.
“The Rice Lake schools are open. I repeat, Rice Lake schools are open.” The radio announcer says, after reading a short list that’ll be closed in the county. “I’ll give you the school closure report again at the top of the six o’clock hour,” he promises.
I roll my eyes in disappointment as I squat down to slip the milking machine onto the four teats hanging in front of me. “It figures,” I mumble to myself and Bessie who just stands there, like the dumb animal that she is not giving a hoot if I have to go to school or not.
Mom limps by us, lugging a full milking machine that is too heavy for her. As she pours it’s contents into the milk-pail she begins singing, “Joyful, joyful we adore Thee...”
It is just another Monday morning at Summit Acres.
"This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." Psalm 118:24
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