Maxine Lee, today’s guest author, is also the grandmother of our good friend carterzest. Please make her welcome! Over recent days it’s been my pleasure to visit via email with carterzest and Maxine and get acquainted with two very special people who are part of a large and loving family – a family with full hearts who certainly do have a story to tell.

Maxine was born in 1929 on the South Dakota plains and published Some Assembly Required in 2005. The gathering of her stories in the book was a result of her dream “to leave a printed account to my family, of my beginning, my birth place and childhood, and a few of the lessons life has taught to me.”

Her faith is part of her story and she says “Since it was my privilege to put together some slices of life with spiritual applications, for my church and since I had lots of stories of the past to tell, I included a section of those essays. There is much of my history in those stories.” One of these essays is included in today’s post as well.

Today’s post is Maxine’s opening narrative from her book –  Part One – In the Beginning and also includes an additional word picture, We’re Moving Again, as the extended family narrative begins to unfold.

Part One: In the Beginning

It all began somewhere in Sweden from where my great grandmother and family came to this country. I never knew them. Their family name was Matson. One daughter was named Ida who had a brother, Olaf and a sister, Sadie. I remember them only vaguely. There were others whose names I do not recall.

These newcomers to America built simple homes in an area between South Dakota and Minnesota, where many Swedish and German families had settled. When my grandmother Ida was about sixteen, she fell in love with a Jewish boy whose last name was Stanhope. She was soon expecting a child. However, it was against the young man’s religion to marry outside his faith, which left my young grandmother in a sad predicament.

To have a child out of wedlock in those days was an utter disgrace. So my Catholic, Swedish grandmother agreed to marry a German man, by the name of Chris Lenz, a widower with five children who needed a mother. This marriage of convenience produced a dozen more children.

My father, Joe, was not a part of either group of children. His place in the middle proved to be uncomfortable. His older stepbrothers and sisters never let him forget that he did not belong and at the age of fourteen, he left home. He rode the rails to Wyoming where he found work in the coal mines.

Even though my father was a small man, about five foot-eight inches tall and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds in his prime, he did some amateur boxing.

Having a low self esteem because of his birth circumstances, my father agreed to marry a women who was expecting. He didn’t want anyone else to suffer his fate. He married Goldie with the agreement she would set him free if he met someone he wanted to be his wife.

He met my mother, Ruth Turkelson in Utah where she was working as a waitress in Bingham Canyon. She was Irish, blue-eyed with black wavy hair, and very beautiful. My dad used to tease her about being a Mormon. However, she was a Methodist because her family attended that church. Her mother had been widowed and remarried. My mother had two half siblings, a brother and a sister. Since we lived in South Dakota and Minnesota most of my young life, we saw our aunt and uncle only once.

True to her word, Goldie granted my father a divorce, and he married my mother in Wyoming. They then moved to South Dakota where my brother, Ralph was born in 1926, and I arrived in 1929. We moved into a two-room cabin on the edge of a peatmoss swamp in Minnesota, near the towns of New London and Spicer. I remember Spicer being our mailing address. And this is where my memories began.

The winters were bitter cold. My mother used to do the laundry in a tub of melted snow and hung it outside on the line to freeze-dry. She would bring the clothes in at night and stand them up in a corner to unbend, and then draped them over our sparse furnishings to finish drying.

While my father hunted wild animals in the woods around us, my mother cared for her growing family without running water, a washing machine or electricity. Our house was covered outside with the pelts of raccoons, skunks, fox, beaver and other furbearing animals.

Our two-room cabin was at the bottom of a long hill, about five miles from the nearest small towns. I don’t recall the size of those little villages. I don’t think I ever saw anything but the spot where my dad parked the car.

On the rare occasions when all of us went to town, we were told to stay by the car which was usually parked in the shade of a few trees, where we would play until Mom and Dad finished their errands. Our parents usually brought us a bag of candy to pass around. Once, we shared an ice cream cone!

When my dad was headed to town one beautiful day in June, I pleaded to go with him. Apparently, my brothers and sister were out playing farther away from the house. I still see my father relenting and I got to go to New London. We went into an Emporium of sorts, and my dad gave me some money to buy my brother a birthday present. His birthday was June 26. He was two years older than myself. I finally settled on a big flat box filled with paints and brushes. I held it on my lap all the way home.

I remember I hated milking time. I was five, my brother seven, and my only sister was four. My brother and I had the chore of bringing in the cows. I am sure it was free range and sometimes those beasts went to the farthest corner of the state. Early evening, before it even started to darken, (because of wolves and bulls!) we went after the cows if they didn’t respond to my dad’s first calls. Walking on peatmoss was like walking on a sponge, and it seemed you didn’t make any progress. Especially if you were only two-and-a-half feet tall. And when you climbed up the old deserted beaver dams that had once been covered with water, it was hot and sticky and hard work for a five-year-old.

Then there was the battle with the burning weed whose nettles raised huge welts on my tender skin. Did you know those weeds are actually good for you when dried and brewed into tea? I didn’t know it then. I might have appreciated them more.

On a cold evening or morning, there were benefits after you found the cows. You could ride one if you could get on. The cows were warm. Or you could walk behind and wait and pretty soon one of them would drop a nice, hot, green pile to warm your bare feet. Oh, it felt good on a crisp autumn morning!

We couldn’t afford shoes for frivolities. Shoes were for school only, and were bought only when early snow was expected. On one occasion, there must have been a good sale and I got my shoes in time to break them in. We kids played hide and seek in the tall grass. I didn’t want to ruin my new shoes, so I placed them on the side of the hill. They are still there, I guess. My mom was very upset that I lost my new school shoes. She had paid two dollars and ninety eight cents for them, and they were to last me ’til next spring. I do not remember if I got another pair.

We wore shoes to school when it got cold. Toward spring, holes had developed in the soles. No big problem. Papa measured our foot on a piece of cardboard and cut an inner sole. No hole now.

Our meals included pheasant, fish from the many lakes near by. In winter, Dad would fish through a hole in the ice. We ate venison, rabbit and Mom made wonderful squirrel pies with a golden biscuit crust. In the summer, we kept a large vegetable garden. During the hot summer days we never had fresh meat, because we had no refrigerator. But we raised chickens for the table, and there was always fish, and sometimes rabbit to eat. I remember one winter someone got a young raccoon and Mama made it into a pie, using lots of garlic. I don’t know how it tasted. We never could get past the garlic.

The frogs in Minnesota are large. One year, hordes of huge frogs came down the hill behind the barn and headed for the swamp below our cabin. We gathered them in five-gallon buckets, slautered and cleaned them, and took them to Mom. She fried those huge legs in bacon drippings, but she would not eat them because as they cooked, the legs would contract and move in the pan. She couldn’t handle that.

Mom, born in the west, was a fancier of wild mushrooms. It was a standing joke how she would gather them and cook them with a dime in the water. If the dime darkened, the mushrooms were not safe to eat. Time after time, the dime would come out as shiny or shinier than when she put it in, but she was not convinced the mushrooms were safe and threw them out. She saved the dime.

The winters were so cold in Minnesota that frost covered the nail heads in the walls of the cabin on the inside. In the fall, my father would shovel sawdust and dirt around the house after covering the lower three feet with heavy tar paper. That was called “banking” and it helped keep heat in and the cold out.

At night, we could hear the timber wolves howl. It was a long, lonely sound echoing from the peat swamp.

When the moon was full and bright, the sight of the pristine snow banks was something I remember. The fragrance of the snow remains a fond memory–biting cold and sparkling like a million diamonds in the moonlight.

When my younger brother was born, we children spent a couple of nights at a neighbor’s house since the baby would be delivered at home. My father came to get us late with two horses hitched to an open sleigh. He wrapped us in our fur coats and put hot rocks at our feet for the five mile ride home. The night was very cold, but we would peek out of our mounds of fur and see the moonlight raise sparkles on the snow. Truly an unforgettable sight.

We’re Moving Again

The two room cabin on the edge of the peatmoss swamp is as vivid in my mind as yesterday. I can see every inch of it. We had scoured each foot of ground around our home for firewood, until I am sure the woods were as clean as a park. Mom needed lots of firewood to bake bread in our wood stove oven.

I was about six when we moved from there to the Orson place. After the two-room cabin, our new house was huge. It had a master bedroom off the big kitchen where Mom and Dad slept. The formal dining room came with a shiny bay window where Mom kept a Christmas cactus. The dining room had built-in China cupboards at one end of the room. (We had no China.) There was an old pump organ in the large living room that had been left behind by previous tenants. The pedal straps were broken, and we could only make it play if one person got down on the floor and worked the pedals, while another pressed the keys. The organ came with music rolls and you had to pedal to make them go around. That old organ was the only piece of furniture in those two huge rooms.

The stairs were long, each step shiny and slippery. I know, because I slipped and slid down and hurt my back. The house had an attic, half a world away. Up there were mysterious radio parts and we imagined they had been been used to send secrets to the Germans in the first World War. There was also a sundeck where we laid out beans and hazelnuts to dry in the sun.

I was in the bedroom minding my own business one afternoon, when I heard something hitting the wall in the hallway outside the room. I was petrified! Maybe it was the guy with two heads. Finally, I worked up enough courage to go out on the sundeck and looked inside, down the hall. I couldn’t see anyone. It was a while before I got brave enough to race through that hall.

That’s when I slipped down the stairs in my frantic bid for safety.

Our next move was to the Flynn farm where Dad planned to have a dairy operation. We had twenty-seven milk cows, several pigs and some chickens, and fields to harvest. Our school was a two-or-three-mile walk over the hills. Just before Christmas we moved into our new home. It was so cold the day we moved, that Mom went into her gift box and brought out two red sweaters that were intended to be the Christmas presents for my sister, Chon, and me. I told my brothers that I saw a Bingo game among the gifts in the box. The boys went and told Mom. I denied that I had peeked. But I had seen that game and Mom knew I had peeked. I felt so guilty.

We worked hard on that farm, yet we failed to make it. My dad  had to declare bankruptcy and sell off almost everything to pay the debts.

Next we moved into a small three-room cottage on George Lake. Our bedroom was the screened porch which we closed in for winter. Again we heated our cottage with an Airtight stove.

In summer we fished all day, swam and explored the other smaller lakes in the area. We climbed the trees around the front of the lake to see if we could go all the way without touching the ground, swinging from tree to tree. Maybe we are indeed descendants from monkeys?

There were several guest cottages on the lake. I remember going to one a couple of hills away and playing with all the dishes that were furnished for summer vacationers, until I was discovered and the owners asked my father to instruct us to stay out of his cabins.

During this time, we raised chickens to sell as fryers to those rich folks who spent summers on the lake. That’s where I learned to dress a chicken at age twelve – a couple of dozen a day. I got tired of it, but I learned.

We all learned to play card games. Whisk was a popular game and taught us lots of numbers. I also read many books. In summer, I had several different hide-outs, which I equipped with dishes, and dolls and things.

Note from Sharon:  As explained in the intro above, Maxine  presents the narrative of family life in Part One  and then, in Part Two, shares spiritual lessons by using stories to illustrate Biblical truths. In this excerpt from Part Two, shoes (or the absence of) are part of the story again.

Excerpt from Part Two: Stories with Christian Applications

Shifting the Blame

Isaiah 53:6 “Like sheep we have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” I Peter 3:18a “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins; the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.”

Staying overnight at a friend’s house when you are young is a great honor. It did not happen often when I was a child, because I was needed at home for chores, and no one needed an extra mouth to feed. I was invited to stay overnight by our neighbors, the Elliots.

It was a hot Minnesota summer, and we went barefoot most of the time to save shoe leather for fall, for cooler weather and for school. We were going to church with the people I was visiting, I don’t remember if I had my shoes with me, but I was told to wash my feet for church. I carried the basin of water into the living room where I would be alone and washed my feet. I dumped the water outside and put the basin back.

The mother noticed the spot the water had left on the wooden floor. She was upset and started yelling at her son. He said he was innocent, but she didn’t believe him. I was too petrified with fear to confess to this fierce woman that I had made that mark on her floor. The boy got a spanking, and I went unpunished. I didn’t know not to wash my feet in her living room. We didn’t have a living room.

That boy was not ready to take my punishment. He did not do it willingly. But Jesus did.

In essence, we drove the nails in His hands and feet. We hanged Him on that cross. We denied Him a drink of water to satisfy His thirst. We pulled the beard from His face. Then we denied knowing Him, until He lovingly wooed us back to Himself. And after all that, He forgave us while he died.

Such love. (Romans 5:8) But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.