(includes illustrations by the writer.)

Back to the land.

Richard and I were married in 1980, and even though the back to the land movement was slowing down in Missouri, we still wanted to give it a try. Those native to Missouri…the hillbillies, some might call them, already had it down pat.

We met in the middle of the country after both of us had suffered through painful divorces. We were heavily damaged with a full load of baggage.  Meeting in church, somehow God saw fit to put us together. We fell into each other’s arms and let God love us through each other. We certainly didn’t have any of our own love left to give.  After seeing each other for two months, we were married. We still are.

At this point I had only lived in Missouri for a few months and he had lived here for close to a year. We were both experiencing culture shock…we thought there wasn’t any in Missouri, but we were wrong. It was just much different than what we were used to. We lived in the little town of Mountain Grove, which at the time had a population of less than 4,000 people and the town was 60 miles from a city of any size.

Richard was working for a milk loading plant and the only job I could get was sewing at a shoe factory. Just about everyone in the community was either in farming, a related field or working at a shoe factory in the area.

We purchased a plot of land an acre wide and ten acres deep for $8,000. Sounds good, but it was a hill with rocks for soil and black-jack brush covering the biggest part of it. Our payments were $100 a month, so to be able to afford it we rented a little cabin in the area for $35 a month. The locals would sell and resell their land over and over again…rarely did any outsiders ever get it paid for. We yanks were there to help THEM pay off their places.

The Cabin.

We were glad to get into the cabin.  We had been living with a friend for the last month while we looked for our own place. The three of us had been sleeping in one room and we were so glad to be by ourselves as a family again. The cabin was a small house with a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms. No bathroom, just an outhouse. There was electricity, but no running water and we heated with a pot-bellied wood stove. I’m sure our seven year old son thought we were poor beyond belief…I didn’t realize it then, that he couldn’t know that it was a lifestyle we had chosen in order to attain the dream of owning land.

Living in the cabin was an experience all its own. It was on a black-top road, had no insulation, a tin roof, an 80 foot well on the front porch and an outhouse 50 feet from the house. We rented it January 1st, so we immediately learned for the first time in our lives how to burn wood. Luckily we had made friends with some of the locals, so we could call on them for help when we needed it. We needed it.

Jo and Earl were locals who had bought the better part of the 40 acres we bought a section of. Their part actually had a house, with a barn and a field behind it.

When the first real cold spell hit, we put a mound of crumpled paper in the stove, kindling, and a few sticks of wood. We opened the flue and damper wide and lit the paper. It took off like a house afire, and it almost did. We got that little stove cooking so hot it danced on the floor. We called Earl and asked him what to do. He said, “Don’t put anymore wood on it!”  Then he explained we needed to close the draft down. The stove pipe started turning pink and the stove was turning white…we were afraid it was going to blow up, and take the house with it, but it didn’t. Slowly, it began to cool down. Whew! What a relief to see the stove quit dancing and feel the room cool off.

Earl came over one day soon afterward and showed Richard how to split wood. He had an orange monster mall. One solid whack on dry wood and it split instantly. But the wood was green….not so easy to split. He had to give it a whack with a slight twist at just the right moment to get the green wood to split. Richard was young then and he stayed at it till he had split the entire of wood.

Just getting water was a chore. Richard pulled up bucket after bucket of water form the well on the front porch and poured it into a 30 gallon plastic can with a lid on it. We used it for drinking, washing dishes and sponge baths. We went to my Grandmother’s a couple times of week to take a shower when we wanted to get really clean.

It was work, but living there was also peaceful. In the mornings we’d go outside and brush our teeth. It was awesome because turkeys would roost in the branches outside and large red-headed woodpeckers would come and drill the trees just a few feet away. When towering thunderstorms rolled in, we sat on the front porch and watched the lightning crack through the sky and listened to the rain pound down on the tin roof. That was the up side.

 Rats

The down side was the outhouse and the chamber pots.  Not only was it creepy dark and stinky, but it had wolf spiders and varmints that would pop their head in for a look while you were doing your duty. I managed to get pregnant the first month we lived there so there were lots of trips to the outhouse at all hours of the night. One night, what looked like a copperhead crossed the path on my way to the outhouse. After that incident, we got the chamber pots. Not a lot of fun either.

Pregnancy affected me in a weird way. Every evening at six o’clock I started itching all over and I HAD to take off all of my clothes and get into bed. One night as we lay sleeping in the buff with my burgeoning belly, we started hearing rustling noises in the kitchen. We had only one free-standing cupboard with our food in it. I immediately thought of the varmints that visited us in the outhouse.

Richard got up armed with an axe-handle to see what was causing the ruckus. It was a rat. He saw it, but he couldn’t corner it on his own so he got me up to play goalie with a broom at the entrance to the living-room. He would head after the rat, trying to bonk it and it would get away and head toward me. I didn’t have my glasses on and couldn’t see much, but I played goalie pretty well just the same. So while I naked, pregnant, big belly and all, swatted the rat slapping it back into the kitchen, Richard ran around equally naked trying to conk it with the club. It took a while, but we finally got it. Sadly we found it was blind in one eye though poor vision didn’t seem to keep it from living high on the hog off of our food.

Later on that summer we decided to move back into town. We gave up the land and the cabin in order to have a safe warm place with running water when the baby was born. I missed the turkeys, the woodpeckers and the thunderstorms, but not the outhouse. I knew I would always be thankful for running water and indoor toilets.