Christmas on the Ranch

Snow drifting lazily from the sky, the spicy scent of the pine tree twinkling with lights, platters and tins of cookies galore, and board games.

Christmas eve was always the “real Christmas” when I was growing up. An evening to look forward to for weeks of shining anticipation and wonder and awe.

It all started in 1948, when my mother emigrated from Germany. She arrived in November, just in time to experience the American Thanksgiving holiday, lots of snow, an outhouse, no electricity, and life on a ranch with real cowboys.

In December she received a letter, which had been lost and rerouted several times, informing her that, although she had spent two years filling out reams of forms in duplicate and triplicate, she was still lacking documentation to stay in America, and would have to return to Germany after the New Year.

Unless she was married.

Yes, she had come to America to marry my dad, but it became imperative this ceremony happen before the end of the year. After a search, they found a minister in a town 75 miles away willing to marry them on short notice. But because he was to leave on vacation right after Christmas, the only day available was December 24. And, because that evening was the church’s Christmas eve service and children’s program, the slot open was 4 p.m.

Since my dad’s family lived in “the middle of nowhere” in eastern Montana, and being practical, frugal ranchers, they couldn’t simply go to town for a wedding. No. Grandpa and Dad hitched up a trailer to the car, and they would pick up a load of feed—“as long as we’re in town anyway.”

So, at 4 o’clock on December 24, 1948, my parents were married on the pine-bough decorated stage in the Lutheran Church in Forsyth, Montana. A celebratory dinner at the Corner Café and a movie “The Fuller Brush Man” completed this landmark day. Oh yes, with the load of feed, hauled home on slippery roads, and a slight delay to fix a flat tire.

Every Christmas Eve thereafter, at 4 p.m., my mother would get dressed up, my dad came in from doing chores, and we sat around the Christmas tree, having coffee or hot chocolate and eating cookies.

After supper, for several hours, we slowly and meticulously opened gifts, one at a time, carefully cutting the tape and saving the paper for next year. We savored each one—sometimes it was a picture from the Sears catalog of whatever item Mom had ordered but hadn’t arrived yet. And last, but certainly not least, Dad pulled the package from Germany from behind the tree, and we delighted in German chocolate, Lebkuchen cookies, lovely handmade lace items, or fine china coffee cups. Mom marveled over each gift, with a misty, far-away look in her eyes. I know she missed her family and would not see them again for ten years.

About the time we began folding up the Christmas wrapping, Dad or Mom would suddenly say, “Did you hear that?”

Our ears perked up as we listened. “What? What did you hear?”

“I thought I heard bells.” Or “Was that footsteps on the roof?”

We rushed out to the front porch, where a pile of gifts had been left for us by Santa. We never did catch our dad putting them out there—sneaky guy, but it was the culmination of a warm, loving, happy family evening.

I will always cherish those memories.

Happy Mother’s Day

As we commemorate motherhood this weekend, I celebrate my mother, Rosel Engel Gasser.

Mom as a young woman

She grew up in war-torn Germany, experiencing the hardship, lack of food, bombing, seeing family members wounded and taken prisoner. She worked hard, persevered, and had her eyes set on “something better.”

As a nurse, she took care of the wounded, including an American GI, a friend of my dad’s. Don Gasser was in the Army, part of the American occupation after WWII ended and stationed in Mom’s small town of Bad Orb.

He went to the hospital to visit his friend, met the nurse, and they hit it off. He befriended her family, took them food, and gave them encouragement as they dug themselves from the wasteland of war.

Wedding 1948

After a few weeks or months, the Army shipped Dad home with no notice. By the time he arrived, he decided he really liked this vivacious German girl. He wrote her a letter and asked if she would consider coming to America to marry him. She wrote back “Yes!” looking forward to the “land of milk and honey,” the opportunity for a fresh new start.

However, it took two years of endless paperwork before she was able to make the trip.

I have always thought how courageous she was to leave her family, her home, and her friends to move to a new country, with a new language, different culture (from urban to a ranch in the middle of nowhere), not knowing anyone except this man she hadn’t even seen for two years! And in 1948, people still looked at Germans as “the enemy.”

Life in eastern Montana was not “milk and honey.” It was eking out an existence in the heat and droughts of summer, brutally cold winters, and the uncertainty of making a living ranching and farming.

She threw herself into the partnership with my dad, working alongside him while keeping an immaculate house. During the first years, she had no hot and cold running water, so she washed clothes by hand. A gas-powered washing machine made life a little easier, but the water had to be carried by the bucketful to fill the washer and then to empty it. A coal-burning stove in the kitchen heated two rooms in the winter, and she prepared nutritious meals on it as well as heating the iron for pressing clothes.

Before my brother was born in 1955, my dad remodeled a storage room for a kitchen, complete with electric appliances and a washer and dryer. My mom was ecstatic.

Mom worked hard all her life, set a godly & moral example, and taught me to be a strong, independent woman who could accomplish whatever I set out to do.

I look back and thank her today for the woman she helped to shape in me.

To memorialize and understand her better, I’ve written two novels: Seeking the American Dream and Finding True Home, based on her life.

One-Room Country Schools

Recently I wrote a short “memory” piece about my one-room country school at Sand Springs, MT, for an author friend who is putting together a book on the subject. It was a fun trip down memory lane.

When I was almost six years old, there were no kids of school age in the area and no school closer than twenty or thirty miles away. I was so eager to learn to read and write that my parents consulted the county superintendent of schools who recommended teaching me to read from the “Mac and Muff” pre-primer series. I was in seventh heaven! Now I could read and write my own books!

 

By that next summer of 1956 the Joe Dutton family moved to Sand Springs and bought the general store. They had four children, three of school age, so the neighbors got together, formed a school board, and hired a teacher, Susie Huston from the Brusett, MT area. There had been a school at Sand Springs in the past, and the parents pitched in to clean and fix up the schoolhouse, which was in the middle of a field about a quarter mile from the store. A coatroom was converted into a “teacherage”—living quarters for the teacher with a bed, dresser, and a stove. Later the schoolhouse was moved across the highway when a new store building was built, and a small two-room building was constructed next to the school for the teacher to live in.

I started school with one boy with me in the first grade, one in the third, and a girl in the fourth. For several years, we four were the only students. The largest school population was during my brother’s time in the early ‘60s, with twelve students.

I have fond memories of “Huston,” as she preferred to be called, teaching us in innovative ways—board games for math, “Go-Fish” type card games for vocabulary words, and pictures she cut out from magazines as writing prompts. Listening to the upper grade students also piqued my interest and spurred my quest for learning. When I reached upper grades, I helped the younger kids with their studies. Huston taught there for three years.

Photo courtesy The Missoulian

Apparently the school population has come full circle, according to Sandy Gibson, Postmistress and owner of the Sand Springs Store, once again with four students, who have a male teacher and attend four days a week. Innovation teaching is still the “norm” with “lots of hands-on” projects, such as planting and caring for trees and a bow-and-arrow class.

North-Central Arizona, where I live now, also has a still-operating one-room school at Crown King—celebrating 100 years of teaching K-8 this year. Only one other such school in Arizona is located at Apache near Douglas. Crown King has 11 students, with one teacher, and was featured in the August/September issue of Prescott Woman Magazine. http://prescottwomanmagazine.com/aug-sept2017/

 

Childhood Memories, Adult Discoveries

I remember the house–a big two-story white clapboard, with a large wrap-around porch, and the stairway inside that my parents had to block so I wouldn’t try to climb up with my stubby two-year-old legs and fall back down. I remember the scent of tea, the warmth of the coal-burning stove in the corner of the living room, the hardwood floor covered with a bright rug and horse blanket throws on the sofa.

This is the ranch–known then as “the McCollum Place”–my grandparents moved to in the early 1940s after years of moving around, following the grass for their horses. This was the place they lived the longest, “retiring” in the early 1960s. This was my first home that my parents shared with Grandma and Grandpa for about three years after my mother emigrated from Germany, striking out on a journey of unknowns to the promise of a new and better life.

I hadn’t been back since I was a teenager, but when I visited Montana recently I drove to Ingomar, the “town” nearby. Ingomar is one of those places that you have to WANT to go to–you’re not going to happen upon it while traveling the regular Montana routes. Once the sheep shearing and shipping capitol of Montana in the early 1900s, it then boasted 46 businesses including three banks, railroad station, two elevators, two general stores, two hotels, two lumber yards, plus rooming houses, saloons, cafes, a drugstore, blacksmith shop, claims office, doctor, dentist and maternity home. Now the population is 14 and the main business is the Jersey Lilly Saloon and Cafe.

I had a vague recollection of the direction of the ranch from Ingomar, but I asked for directions, and I’m glad I did. Boots, the proprietor of the Jersey Lilly, glanced out the window at my car. “Good, you have all-wheel drive,” he said. I gulped. He explained they’d had some rain recently and the low-lying spots might still be muddy. Since my car was new to me, I dug out the owner’s manual to make sure I knew how to put it in four-wheel mode, just in case.

We (my sister-in-law, Marylou, & I ) followed Boots’ hand-drawn map: turn right after the cattle guard, keep going past the stock tank and you’ll have to open and close the gate… for eight miles over the rough one-track road. Fortunately, no mud remained, and I didn’t have to test out my vehicle and my memory of Montana mud-driving.

We found the house, which is still inhabited by Lance & Connie Moreland, very nice, hospitable people who are leasing the ranch. I had to smile at my memory of this “big” house. It’s two-story, all right, but it’s not large. How cramped the quarters must have seemed to my mother! The porch was not wrap-around as I had recalled, but still was a good-sized one on the front. I remember a photo of mini me at the rail with a chicken egg next to several large hailstones.  The staircase is still there, and the hardwood floors. The Morelands told me that unfortunately the owner doesn’t want to spend any money to fix up the house, so it is a bit on the dilapidated side.

But I’m glad it’s still lived-in and not falling down.

Celebrating a Cowboy’s Birthday

Dad, Grandma & Grandpa

My dad, Don Neil Gasser, was born November 9, 1924. He would’ve been 89 today.

He grew up in the Cut Bank/Sunburst area in Montana (often known nationally as the coldest spot in the nation in the winter). His mother, my grandmother, was the rodeo-riding cowgirl I’ve written about in my novels Cowgirl Dreams, Follow the Dream, and the newest, Dare to Dream, scheduled to be released May 6, 2014.

Dad was an only child and the little family moved many times over the years, following the grass for their Percheron crossbred herd. He was six years old when they trailed 100 head of horses from Cut Bank to Salmon Idaho in the early 1930s to find grass, after drought and grasshoppers left Montana tabletop bare. He remembered that adventure vividly and that became one of the pivotal events in Follow the Dream.

I remember my 6’4″ dad as a quiet, soft-spoken man, an avid reader and student, although he

Dad & I in his rebuilt Model T

never attended college. He taught himself to read at least three languages, memorized passages of the Bible while driving tractor, and passed on the love of books and music to me and my brother Mark. Dad was, out of necessity, an inventor, a mechanic, a veterinarian for his own and neighbors’ cows. Anything that needed done, my dad could do. And he was a real cowboy–when he was astride his horse, he rode so smoothly you could hardly tell where the man ended and the horse began.

Dad passed away in 2003,  much-loved and well-respected by all who knew him. Happy Birthday, Dad!

Think it’ll rain?

It struck me the other day as I heard this conversational question several times from different people…I haven’t heard that since I lived in eastern Montana!

The past 17 years, while I lived in Mount Vernon, WA, the question was more likely to be “Think we’ll have a summer this year?” Rain and clouds were plenty—300 days of them—with averages of 30-40 inches annually. Sunshine, not so much.

I grew up in the semi-arid high plains in Montana where drought was common. Rainfall might average 10-13 inches a year, depending on the area. I remember watching the clouds with my dad and wondering if it was going to rain…or hail…or just dry lightning.

Now I am again living in the semi-arid high plains desert of north-central Arizona, where ranchers look at the gathering clouds and ask, “Think it’ll rain?”

Following is an excerpt from my book Follow the Dream, when Jake and Nettie are watching the sky, hoping and praying for life-giving rain.

Sunday, July 14, 1929

Spring rains never came this year. The little bit of grass that came up is nearly gone. Used up rest of the hay already. Jake’s not himself. I’m really worried.

When they watched the skies now, it was with a tingling sense of hope and dread. The clouds built up over the rims, dark and angry, then dispersed as the hot winds blew them to nothing.

In June, Jake had only shrugged when the thunderheads passed over and splattered just a few hard raindrops like bullets into the dust. There was always a chance that the next storm would dump its load and the grass would come back, resurrected from its hardpan grave.

Each time the sky grew dark, Nettie ran to gather clothes from the line, shut the windows in the house and bring four-year-old Neil in from riding his stick horse. While their son played cowboy on a saddle in the kitchen, she and Jake prepared themselves, anticipating the long, drowsy afternoons of gentle rain when they could rest without guilt, and just be together as the earth replenished itself. But disappointment always followed one brief, hopeful interlude after another.

As summer wore on, the clouds produced nothing more than a frightening display of heat lightning, the air so charged with electricity that the hair on Nettie’s arms stood up. She thirsted for a view of something green, the smell of new grass. A silent vigilance overtook their lives.

She watched the tension pull at Jake, his hopeful expectation as the sky darkened, the half-smile when he heard the first clap of thunder, and then the slump of his shoulders when the storm again passed them by. Her heart ached for him, and fear built inside like the thunderheads on the hills.

http://www.heidimthomas.com

Memories in a Coffee Pot

This small, forlorn coffee pot holds a barrel of memories for me.

My parents had a coffee ritual. Most days, unless my dad was out working in a far-off field, he would come in around 4 p.m. for coffee and a snack. It might be fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, or warm whole wheat bread with butter and chokecherry jelly, “wonderberry” (wild berries similar to blueberries) pie, or vanilla ice cream smothered in fresh sliced peaches.

Mom placed a generous scoop of coffee grounds in the pot and poured boiling water on top, letting it “steep”, like tea. After a few minutes, she or Dad would blow into the spout to settle the grounds, and pour the strong, aromatic brew into their cups. Strangely enough, they never seemed to have to deal with grounds floating on top.

Even when we were working outside together in the heat of the summer, stacking bales, a thermos of coffee marked afternoon break-time in the shade of a growing hay stack.

An extra special occasion, Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve, began with that coffee. As the lavender shadows of dusk gathered, Mom would dress in her holiday outfit, bring out the Christmas goodies, and brew the coffee.

Although I didn’t like coffee and didn’t start drinking it until I was in my 30s, this “coffee time” was a hugely important part of my life, growing up on a ranch in eastern Montana. It wasn’t just a time to stave off hunger pangs until supper, it was a time of togetherness, an important family ritual.

Even after my mother died, my dad continued the afternoon coffee observance.

I am downsizing in anticipation of a move in the near future, and I had to make a painful decision to discard this coffee pot. But the memories will live on.

Bursting into Spring

Spring literally blossoms with metaphors about rebirth, new life, and new beginnings. It is my favorite season and is especially meaningful to me.

One reason is because I grew up on a ranch in eastern Montana and celebrated the release of snowbound winters with warm sunshine, hills rolling with green grass and quilted with wildflowers, and I witnessed the birth of new calves.

Another reason is one I discovered when I moved to Missoula in the western part of the state. Missoula is located in the bottom of a mountain valley and in the winter, it experiences the same type of weather inversions as the LA basin. Because of this, although winters there are more temperate than eastern Montana, it is often cloudy for weeks on end. That is when I discovered that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.)

Now I live in the Pacific Northwest, where it is more often cloudy and rainy all winter than not. In spring, I feel like the tulip that flourishes here, reawakening after a long winter’s hibernation.

Like a Tulip

Like a tulip, I awaken

Reaching up toward the warmth

Straightening my curled-in body

Pushing away the heaviness of the winter soil

Like a tulip, I awaken

Stretching my arms to the sun

My eyes open as the petals

Squinting at first, then opening wide

Like a tulip, I awaken

Hearing the buzzing of the bees

Sensing the grass grow

Feeling the earthworms move

I am the tulip, as I awaken

Reveling in the sunshine

Embracing its glow, its warmth

I am the tulip, as I blossom in the spring

Merry Catmas

My Jellicle Cat under the Christmas tree.

Celebrating the birth of Jesus. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish Friends and Happy Holidays to all!

How to Say It Like It Is

I was saddened recently to learn that one of my favorite University of Montana journalism professors, Robert C. McGiffert, had died last December at age 88. He wrote the textbook, The Art of Editing the News, received UM’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982, and received the Montana Free Press Award from the UM schools of journalism and law. He was a stickler for factual reporting, and I remember my classes with him fondly.

As one former student, Ginny Merriam, put it so well in a tribute: “We are the Journalistic Children of Bob McGiffert….From the beginning, we knew he’d be tough. At the end, we loved him….”

And from my fellow classmate, Carol VanValkenburg: “…I, like so many others I have talked to over the years, decided to become a journalist because of him….”

The following is a poem by McGiffert, published in Editor & Publisher and the Montana Journalism Review. It is so titled because E&P paid him $2 for it.

$2 Poem

As any reader knows, a source can

charge, declare, affirm, relate,

recall, aver, reiterate,

allege, conclude, explain, point out,

answer, note, retort or shout,

rejoin, demand, repeat, reply,

ask, expostulate or sigh,

blurt. suggest, report or mumble,

add, shoot back, burst out or grumble,

whisper, call, assert or state,

vouchsafe, cry, asseverate,

snort, recount, harrumph, opine,

whimper, simper, wheedle, whine,

mutter, murmur, bellow, bray,

whinny or … let’s see now

… SAY!

Thanks, Bob! You taught me well. I don’t need to add another thing.