Reflections Upon a Blessed and Exciting Life – No.10: Elementary School Days: Helping Grandpa

In my elementary school age it was always a very special treat to go visit Grandma and Grandpa Kieschnick. They lived in a farm outside Lincoln, Texas, about 60 miles from my home. The trip to and from was itself an adventure. We loaded our 1929 Model A Ford with kids and excitement. The roads, of course, were unpaved and the 60-mile trip took in excess of 2 hours, especially since it was not at all unusual to have to stop and fix a flat.

Once at Grandma’s place we were sent to the garden to hoe weeds, prop up plants and often harvest some vegetables and/or fruit. If I (or my sister Leona and I) stayed over for a week or more our jobs got more interesting. I remember picking beans, then placing them on a tarp to get good and dry. After a few days we beat the beans to separate the kernels from their pods. After another day or so of dry heat we would find a windy spot. Then we threw the beans into the air and let the wind separate the kernels from the chaff. The chaff was fed to the animals; the kernels we consumed.

A special treat while at Grandpa’s was to make hay. The hay was in a field some distance from the farmhouse. That was good because we got there by riding on the back of my Dad’s faithful horse Dan. I remember my job when the dried hay was made into bales. I sat on one side of the baling machine and reinserted baling wire so it could go from one side of the bale to the other.

We had an hour off for lunch to eat and rest. One time I think my sister and I sat on some kind of a tick nest. That evening our bodies were covered with blisters and we both believed that some of those ticks had embedded themselves permanently into our flesh. We struggled to extract them from our own and our sib’s body.

At the end of the day there was a special treat. Grandpa would say in German, “Melvin, go take the horses down to the tank to water them.” This meant unhitching them from their wagons and then leading them to a tank (pond) where they drank the water. I loved being in charge of those horses, then unbridling them, feeding them and getting them into their own stalls for the night.

A job that I did poorly and hated was “cutting maize”. Milo maize grew to be several feet tall and the stalks held heads containing seeds. The job was to use a knife, cut off the head put it into a bag and then load it onto a wagon. That was tough work. Worse yet was that something about that milo maize created a terrible itch over my whole body – and of course the rule was “bathe only once a week, on Saturday.” One of God’s great gifts to kids like me was the invention of the combine, which eliminated the job of “cutting maize”

Many years later when as a school principal I was confronted with an upset parent or an angry teacher I always comforted myself by saying, “This surely beats cutting maize!”