My mother, young animal trapper

As told to me by my 91-year-old mother:

I ran traps every day except during bad weather.  I caught animals for their furs. I caught mostly muskrats, but I also caught one raccoon and one skunk. One day,  a raccoon got caught in a trap by just one of  its toes.  I sic’ed  Pup on the raccoon but its toe broke loose and it bristled to fight.  The fight lasted a long time and Pup got tired.  It was dangerous to let Pup stop so I said, “sic ‘em” again.  After about half an hour the dog finally beat and killed the raccoon.  Our cousin, Curt Crick, who was an annual raccoon hunter said, “It takes a mighty good dog to whip a coon.”  

Once I had a skunk in the trap. Fortunately it was in the dead of winter and the skunk had frozen to death. Skunks don’t put up much of a fight once they are captured. But I was still concerned that I would pick up too much of the skunk’s scent by carrying it home.  I found a heavy forked limb I thought would be strong enough to hold the skunk. I hoisted the heavy limb over my shoulder with the skunk hanging behind me.  Before I made it back to the house I wearied of the heavy load and put the limb down. I then put both gloves on the same hand and held the skunk away from me as I carried it the rest of the way home. I managed to escape picking up the scent, except on my clothing. Why go to such trouble?  Skunks brought in a good price for their furs.

One time I caught a live muskrat in the trap. Preferring not to shoot it, I clubbed it over the head to kill it. Then I carried it home and put it in the brooder house where Mom raised baby chicks. It was wintertime so the brooder house was empty. My brother Richard offered to take the muskrat to Colfax to the man who purchased and skinned the animals, so I went out to get it for him. When I opened the brooder house door the muskrat was sitting up looking at me so I had to kill him all over again.

Excerpt from Twins! Paul & Pauline, their first 90 years © 2008 by Janice Green

Clubhouses

What does it take to make a clubhouse? Some kids and a little imagination. Sometimes parents help too.

The first clubhouses I remember were the hoghouses. My grandparents had raised hogs many years ago, but now they were just small wooden structures with roofs on them. They had dirt floors and I vaguely remember something boxy enough to sit on. There really wasn’t much to a hoghouse, but it was ours.

My older brother Keith and the neighbor boy Ronnie claimed the biggest one as theirs. Not to be outdone, I got my younger brothers and sister to join me in claiming the smaller one. This was the scene for my famous Backwards Party that I wrote about in an earlier post. We cleaned out all the spider webs and bugs and climbed in through the door in the roof that opened and closed.

My memory of the hoghouses seems fleeting. I believe my father may have removed them shortly after we moved onto the farm. Whatever the reason, we were soon looking at other clubhouse options.

There was an old apple orchard my grandfather had planted beside our house. The apple trees were very large compared to the ones seen in apple orchards today, and we didn’t go to the expense of spraying them to get a harvest. We simply ate and canned what we wanted from them. Keith and Ronnie built (or perhaps my older cousins built it years earlier before we moved onto the farm) a treehouse high up in one of the apple trees. I was afraid to try to climb up the tree trunk even with those boards nailed on like a ladder, so it wasn’t hard for them to keep us out. But we fussed that we wanted a tree house too. So Dad built a platform on a low branch on a smaller apple tree for the rest of us. It had a ladder that you could climb up to one corner. Our treehouse made a pretty good clubhouse until “big boy” (son of one of the farm hands) fell off the ladder and broke his arm.

I think the most unique clubhouses were the ones in the wheat fields. Again, Keith and Ronnie set the pace with the first one. They discovered a large patch of weeds growing in a low spot in the wheat field and made it into a clubhouse by tramping down the weeds in the center of the patch while leaving the outside weeds standing for the walls. When they turned me away from their clubhouse, I looked for my own patch of weeds and recruited my younger sibblings to help make a clubhouse of our own.

I’m not sure what the point of having a clubhouse was. Maybe there is a sense of power that comes from having a spot to call your own. That’s one of the nice things about living on a farm. You can find your get-away spots if you call them clubhouses or not, like climbing up in the haymow all by myself and playing with the kittens, or sitting on my favorite tree limb in the tree at the far edge of the orchard and just thinking about things and spying on the world of birds and stick-worm caterpillars and wheat blowing in the breeze across the field.

Copyright © 2009 by Janice D. Green

A Backwards Party in a Hoghouse

Among my earliest memories of writing my own thoughts and ideas I find myself playing with secret codes when I was in about the second grade.  My older brother, Keith, had been using secret codes to share messages with Ronnie who lived up the road, and I thought it looked like fun.

The easiest code they were writing called for two sheets of paper and a piece of carbon paper.  The trick was getting the papers in the right position before starting to write–an original copy on top, a second sheet under that which would carry the encoded message, and beneath it all was a sheet of carbon paper with the carbon side up.  Then when you wrote the message correctly on the top sheet of paper, it would appear backwards on the backside of the second sheet of paper.  It was a great trick!

I discovered two problems with my newfound trick.  The first was figuring out whom to write a message to since my older brother preferred writing to the neighbor boy, and my younger brothers and sister couldn’t read yet.  Then the second problem was figuring out what to say in my secret message if I did figure out whom to send it to.  This was probably my first encounter with writer’s block.

That’s when the idea of writing an invitation to a party came to me.  Since the writing was all backwards, it seemed perfect for an invitation to a backwards party.  There had been a backwards Sunday School party at church recently where everyone dressed with their clothes on backwards or wrong side out, and with their shoes on the wrong feet.  My family had recently moved to the farm in Rochester, Indiana, that had been in my father’s family for generations.  There was also a new family who had moved into the farmhouse across the road and they had four young children.  We could invite them to join us for a backwards party in our clubhouse.  With Mama’s permission, I wrote the invitation, in code of course, and took it to Mrs. Deloris Ogle across the road.  She didn’t understand it, so I showed her how to hold it up to a mirror to read it.  And what joy!  She said they would come to my party!

When the day arrived for the party, the girls, Carol and Doris, came in dresses, though I don’t recall what her son, Donnie, wore.  They didn’t wear anything wrong side out or backwards.  I panicked!  I guess in all the excitement I had forgotten to explain to her about the clubhouse. Our clubhouse was nothing more than the old 5 X 7 foot abandoned hog-house behind the barn.  To fix it up for the party we had brushed out the spider webs and used some crepe paper to attempt to make it more festive.  I had also planned an activity or two to play in it.  But I would NEVER wear one of my dresses to play in the clubhouse!  We even had to climb in through the door in the roof!

If it bothered Mrs. Ogle, she never let on.  She let the children take their clothes off and put them back on wrong side out and backwards.  And the party began!  I was quite proud to have pulled off the party, but I also learned something about the importance of including all the important details in an invitation that day.

© 2002, 2009 by Janice Green