Sending You a Halloween Postcard

All Hallow's Eve Memories

I look out the window and see the leaves falling

The spiders are weaving the webs around the front door. 

I think the season calls for leaving the webs through the end of the month.

Why you ask? Its soon to be All Hallows Eve!

My mind wanders back to Halloween on the farm.

We always carved the pumpkins and roasted the seeds. 

The Old Farmer would get the pumpkins started by cutting out
a round lid with a notch to fit it in place. And carefully

held the knife on an angle inwards so the lid was beveled
to fit and would not fall in!

The pumpkins went out at sunset with a candle inside.

Then there was the year
The Old Farmer made a pumpkin man
to sit in a chair out by the road.
He stuffed an old pair of overalls with straw
and put him in an old pair of boots.
And he had a spooky pumpkin head. 

Something dark and scary happened overnight
and in the morning his parts were scattered to all corners. 

Halloween did not disappoint.

Fall Leaves and Walnuts

Does it feel like fall yet? 

Are the leaves blowing in the wind?
Is there a chill in the air?

On the Old Farm there was a front woods

and a back woods. 
There were beech trees and ash trees and oaks and maples.
There was a chestnut tree. And english walnuts.

The Old Farmer's children as children all over the world
would collect the prettiest fall leaves they could find.
Beech leaves were yellow. 

Maples were red and golden. 

We would bring our samples home and the Old Farmer's Wife
would iron them between sheets of wax paper to preserve them. 

Then off to school for show and tell. 

And oh the bounty of walnuts. 

We would collect a basket full and spend

an evening in front of tv cracking shells and separating

the nuts into a bowl. 

These would make wonderful coffee cakes in the coming months.

 A RECIPE
This recipe is an easy quick coffee cake we learned in 4-H.
1 1/2 cups sifted flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup shortning
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup milk
Grease bottom of 8" x 8" x 2" baking pan.
Sift and measure flour. sift together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.
And shortening and cut in with pastry blender or fork.
Add beaten egg and milk. Spread in greased pan.
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp flour
2 tsp cinnamon
4 tbsp butter
1/2 cup chopped nuts
Mix topping ingredients and sprinkle over cake mixture.
You want it on chunky so it sinks and and forms pockets of deliciousness.
If spread evenly and thin it will not work.
Bake at 350' for 30-35 minutes, serve hot!

Getting the Old Farmhouse in Shape for the Winter

The Old Farmhouse needed a bit of work from time to time.
Painting those fancy corbels was tricky! 

( The ornate decorative brackets under the eaves. )

One Old Farmer's Daughter remembers

 being on the roof where they overlapped
with the Old Farmer 

  reaching to paint them.

Of course in places you could put a ladder

on a porch roof, which made it much easier. 

A blessing was the Old Farmhouse 

having permanently colored shingles.
They were cement asbestos, 

very rigid and stonelike.

Every fall the screens were taken off 

the old windows and storm windows 

put in their place. 

And vice versa in the spring. 

No triple tracks back then.
And think about all the storage space

this took in the off season too! 

 The Old Farmer's children's job was to wash them prior to installing for the season.

This one picture shows the corbels and the siding

and some of the many windows needing to be changed spring and fall.

Shift Work and Children's Games

The Old Farmer had another job. 

He was a printer by trade. 

But his heart was in farming. 

The printing trade was learned through a series of steps.
You started as an apprentice, running and toting for

the master printer. When you had learned all the ins and outs

of the materials and how they were used you moved up to
Journeyman. Then maybe you assisted in loading the ink
and paper rolls. learning to run the presses.
 

  

There was a lot more to this than you might think.
You had to get the ink flowing evenly.
To do it right you ran a test page checked it and adjusted as necessary.
If you just ran it and waited for it to get flowing as it went
you may have wasted a lot of ink and paper in the process. 

And learning to use colors!
The Old Farmer was a Master Printer.

Well the point of this story from the Old Farmer's Daughter's
point of view was how he always made time to play a game

with me before heading off to shift work in the afternoon,
or when getting home after a night shift before going to bed
for the day.

It was often chinese checkers. Or cards.
We played war where when two cards you each put down matched...

the first person to shout war could confiscate all the cards down on the table.
The first person to run out of cards lost. 

And our personal family game, Jud.
Named with a shortened family members name.
This was an abbreviated game of rummy with just
4 cards instead of 7 and you made your sets of 3 or runs. 

I hope all children can have these fun memories of their fathers.
They seem like little things but are big to the children.