Farmhouses and Sweet Potatoes

A narrative

I have lived in my farmhouse on the Missouri/Iowa border for almost eight years now. It is the longest I have ever lived in the same house in my entire life.

It’s nice to have roots.

I was born poor to teenage parents in the 70s. My husband was raised without much money too — we are peas in a pod except he had two parents in the home and lived his first 18 years on a farm in NE Missouri. A little bit of security, if not money.

Meanwhile, I was moving from state to state with single parents who married and then divorced and then married someone else and divorced again. And again. And again. I don’t fault them. We all do the best we can.

It was exhausting, though. Roots would start to grow and then get pulled up every few years.

I was thinking about this a few weeks back while pulling down Christmas decorations from the only room in our old house that we haven’t renovated. We use it as storage.

We call it the “airplane room” because it is covered in old patriotic wallpaper with bombers and Liberty Bells and the Statue of Liberty and warships and stars and stripes — it has to date back to the 40s. It’s the largest room in the house. Plaster is falling off in chunks revealing the lathe inside. A skeleton peeking out here and there.

When we bought the house, this room was in the worst shape, so we left it since we didn’t need the space.

The room itself is interesting. It has sloping eaves that follow the high pitch of the roofline. It has original wood floors that seem to have been painted at one point and covered in linoleum at another point and finally carpeted. The carpet was pulled out before we bought the house leaving us with floors that are desperate for refinishing. They scream at me each time I enter the room.

The airplane room is on the second floor of our farmhouse, at the end of a narrow hallway, making moving anything in there a challenge. The room has an old exterior door leading outside to the north side of the house. Out to nowhere…just a drop onto the ground. You’d break a leg or worse if you stepped out of the door.

My kids asked if there used to be a balcony up there. No. The door was used to move furniture or other heavy objects in and out because of the narrow hallway. Think of how you use a hayloft.

There are four other bedrooms in this old farmhouse, so we can afford to use the airplane room for storage. I dream of making the room a primary bedroom someday. But, when winter moves in, it gets pretty cold up there —the wood stove on the first floor only heats so much.

Sounds expensive.

We bought the farmhouse and the ground for less than the price of a new car in 2017 and paid it off within a few years so we could put money into renovating the place. It has been a long eight years of work to make the place first livable and then quaint.

One project at a time.

It’s going to be a process to renovate the airplane room, but I think I’m going to have a lot of nervous energy in the next few years that I can put to use up there. I think a lot of us will.

*****

I lived half of my life in poverty and I know many of us act like we are in poverty even when we have moved out of poverty. If you think my Master’s degree gives me any relief, you’re wrong. There is a persistent song in my head…things may be okay now, but I could lose everything tomorrow. The chorus is annoying.

I inherited the thinking of the older folks.

Like my great-grandparents who lived through the Great Depression. My mom’s paternal grandparents. They died back in the 90s, but I knew them well — one of the perks of being a child of teenage parents.

They were lifelong Democrats. I will never forget the concrete donkey that sat near their front steps. It was not at all uncommon to be a rural Democrat a few decades back.

My great-grandparents were from Branch, Arkansas. They lived right on the highway and owned a filling station before I was born. My great-grandpa was also the Rawleigh man for several counties. He sold flour and sugar and vitamins and ointments to farms in Franklin County and beyond. He worked door-to-door. He sold home and auto insurance in his later years.

Everyone knew him.

We called my great-grandparents grandma and granddad. Grandma always called her husband “Mr. Rutledge” even to us kids and I know it may seem a little old-fashioned, but I love it.

They grew huge gardens and canned everything they didn’t eat. Granddad was about 5’4 and Grandma must have been about five feet at most. They had a farmhouse kitchen with cabinets to the ceiling filled with canned veggies and fruit that Grandma would use a stepstool to reach. She also had a cellar lined with more canned goods.

Every time I visited, Grandma would make a sweet potato for my lunch. She was positive it was my favorite and always made it for me without fail—she’d slather it with some butter and sprinkle on a little brown sugar if she had it.

Sweet potatoes were not my favorite and I gagged trying to get the extra sweet spud down, but I never said anything because it would hurt her feelings. I dreaded eating those potatoes for years. But, I always ate them for her — now I crave them.

My great-grandparents were anything but poor when they passed away, but you’d never have known it. They stayed in that little house and heated only a few rooms with a gas heater in the main room to save money. The entire house always smelled like natural gas…if you know, you know.

It must have been 80 degrees on winter days in the front room with a blue flame blazing from the wall-mounted heater, but not exactly warm in the other rooms.

They grew gardens until they couldn’t and drew water from a well even when they had city water.

The last time I visited, Grandad had dementia and Grandma was nearly completely blind, but she got up and made a sweet potato for me. Butter and sugar. She sat at the little table with me as I ate.

They died soon after and I think about them a lot. I actually dream about them more — and the house. I dream about that little house and the sweet potatoes and how some folks really never change even when things get better. How habits stick. How circumstances may change, but there’s a part of your brain that just can’t.

I dream about my other grandparents and their farmhouse too.

My mom’s maternal grandparents (which I also knew well) had an old shotgun-style farmhouse with Papa sleeping in a tiny room at the back in a twin bed and Nanny sleeping in a front room papered with roses. The house also had a large kitchen with cabinets up to the ceiling with canned goods and a hastily added indoor bathroom. They kept chickens in an old hen house with the occasional black snake hanging from the rafters. They had acquired their 60 acres after Papa promised to properly bury a neighbor after his death.

Now that is an interesting story for another day.

My grandparents had roots and now so do I. So do my kids. And my grandkids.

Chicken nuggets with ranch rather than sweet potatoes with brown sugar.

I wonder if my grandkids will one day dream about the airplane room and the old wells on our property and the single bathroom and the wood stove. Or the donkey.

I wonder if the door to nowhere will float into their sleep. I wonder if my old house and the airplane wallpaper will appear in their thoughts and dreams.

I can only hope.

~Jess