Girls, watch your pecans!
Girls, watch those pecans you have stored away for your Christmas baking. I read where some people had a bucket of pecans in their garage, covered with another bucket, and it exploded, setting the garage on fire.
We had something like that happen on the farm. A huge haystack just exploded in the night. What a bright light and red hot sparks flying everywhere. I think you call it internal combustion.
Do you get tired of weather reports on TV? It seems like they are on more than the program you want to watch. The way we watched the weather when I was a kid was that if we saw a big black cloud or if old Shep wanted in and hid under the dining room table, we knew it was time to go in.
It seems like it snowed a lot then. Of course we walked to school. Once the snow was so deep I could hardly move my short legs through it. Surely my parents didn't realize how bad it was.
One room country school, one bucket of drinking water, one dipper, one towel — and two privies out back, that's the picture. One time the teacher's boyfriend (I guess you would call it "beau" in those days) stopped to visit her for a few minutes. I made some smart remark about it and ended up standing in front of the black board holding my nose in a chalked circle. I guess that was her idea of "time out."
There were all grades. Different classes would go forward when their time came and the teacher would teach them. What an acrobat the teacher would have to be. She would have to shift gears from first graders, then to eighth graders.
First, she would have to get there early and build a fire in the big old pot-bellied stove in the center of the room. Hats off to those courageous people!
— NORMA HANNAFORD
