ProetryPlace Blog 68: The Farm at Wilxox
I am prompted to write this scrap of family history after reading Truman Capote’s wonderful autobiographical short story “A Christmas Memory.” The story’s setting is a farmhouse in the deep South. The main characters are a young boy and his elderly aunt. If you have not read it, read it now.
As a young boy, I spent two full summers at such a farmhouse with an endearing elderly “aunt” and her bachelor son. The Wisconsin farm goes back to the beginning of our family history in the United States. It is where great grandmother Elisabeth married and reared her family with August Noren after her first husband, Peter Hanson, perished in the great Peshtigo Fire of 1871. It is where my father and his two younger sisters, Nora and Evelyn, lived for a time after being orphaned when their parents died at an early age. It is where our family spent Dad’s one week of vacation from work for several years .It is a place that was dear to the hearts of my father and his siblings and remains so for many of their descendants today. It is the embodiment of many dearly loved who lived there for generations past.
I write here, not of my long summers at the farm, but of one of the too- short, week-long family visits.
The Farm at Wilcox
The farm lies exactly one mile off US Highway 41 near the town of Peshtigo in northern Wisconsin. It was a mile of high anticipation for the three Anderson children who shared the narrow back seat of the old Buick sedan on the hours-long journey from Milwaukee on a warm summer afternoon in 1938.
“Here’s the road,” Dad said, hoping to stifle the back seat squabbling and to answer the often repeated question, are we there yet? We rumbled along the unpaved, one-lane road through the still forest of tall pines. Mom whispered, “If you’re very quiet, you might see a deer.”
The road opened onto clearings and fields and fences. We passed the Johnson farm off to the left. We came to the Milwaukee Road tracks marked by a big black X and the small incongruous sign: WILCOX. We stopped, looked and listened before traversing the unguarded crossing. Just a hundred yards further on, we could see the big gray barn and the tall concrete silo. We came to the barnyard. Brother Ron jumped from the car and ran to swing open the wide metal gate to admit the Buick. We paused at the horse barn while he quickly swung the heavy gate shut and carefully secured it behind us. On to the second gate. Now the old farmhouse came clearly into view. We had arrived!
By the time the other children burst from the car, Aunt Annie appeared on the back porch outside the kitchen door. Annie’s tall and slender frame was endowed with the strength and endurance of a woman who had known farming all her life. Her long dark hair was pulled back. Her strong face might have been seen as severe if not for her broad, ready smile and kind eyes. “Hello!” she greeted us in rich baritone voice. “Hello!” and raised her arms and smiled.
Annie Graef had married Charlie Noren 24 years earlier, and together they had reared their three children, Roland, Evelyn and Robert, on the farm at Wilcox. They also, on occasion, hosted and cared for others, including some of the seven orphaned children of Edvard Anderson and Charlie’s half-sister, Augusta when that couple died at an early age of consumption—tuberculosis.
We rarely saw Roland on our visits to the farm. The oldest, he moved first to city and married. Evelyn married and moved out several years later. Robert, who we called Bob and the neighboring farmers dubbed Ro-Bart, remained unmarried and lived on the farm until his death in 1971 at the age of 51.
“Charlie will be up from the barn shortly,” Annie said. She tended to details of dinner preparation while Mom helped set the table and Dad settled into a kitchen chair to wait and visit. We children proceeded on to rediscover the parlor and the only form of entertainment in the house (other than conversation)—the big, dark upright player piano and dozens of piano rolls with rare old tunes like The Old Gray Mare , Springtime in the Rockies and The Death of Floyd Collins. The largest room in the house, the parlor was rarely occupied. It would serve this week as the children’s bedroom with a few quilts and blankets spread on the hardwood floor to serve as mattresses. A rare treat.
The aroma of fresh baking-powder biscuits and the sound of Uncle Charlie’s hearty voice summoned us back to the kitchen, the center of life in the century-old log house. The big black cast iron, wood-fired stove that dominated the room was heated winter and summer. The primitive appliance served not only to prepare meals, but as the only source of heat and hot water in the house. Skill and experience were essential to successfully use the unregulated oven for roasting and baking and the top surface to heat the cast iron cookware—the closer to the firebox, the hotter the “burner,” no High, Medium and Low.
While Uncle Charlie pumped water to wash up at the sink in the pantry, we gathered around the big kitchen table. Evelyn and Aunt Annie brought food to the table: puffy brown biscuits warm enough to melt the creamery butter, and farm-fresh potatoes, vegetables and roasted chicken. While Charlie offered up grace, I watched and listened to the hopeless, helpless flies stuck on the long spiraled strips suspended from the ceiling. Fascinated by their frenetic, incessant buzzing, I offered my own prayer that maybe just one would escape and fly gratefully and gleefully away.
Adult conversation slowed while the meal was consumed, except for an off-hand question now and then. “Have you heard from so-and-so lately?” or “Did you know that what’shername almost died last week from this-or-that?” After the serving platters were picked clean, Charlie lit the kerosene lamps, and the house was gradually enveloped in the darkness of a country night. The children adjourned again to the parlor and, one by one, fell asleep on the floor while the adults talked into the night about the present and the past in the flickering lamplight at the kitchen table.
Each day, Annie and Charlie were up before dawn. Chores awaited. Then the children, needing to visit the redolent three-hole outhouse that stood behind the granary. Mom and Dad might sleep a while longer—it was their only week of vacation—to awaken blissfully to the smell of Annie’s coffee perking and maybe some sizzling bacon to go with the warm, buttered toast.
Ron and I were by then already at the barn, waiting for Uncle Charlie to load the heavy milk cans into the back of the model-T and crank the old vehicle into sputtering life. We had waited an entire year to ride with him again to the County Line Cheese Factory with the cargo of fresh whole milk and the week was already drawing to a close. What mental mementos would we carry back to the city?
The thick, sweet smell of warm whey pouring into empty milk cans to be returned to the farm to slop the pigs lingers still, along with the unforgettable olfactory sensations of the steaming manure pile and, more pleasantly, Annie’s bewitching biscuits—all magical mementos of the farm at Wilcox.
“Aunt” Annie was in fact the wife of the half-brother of my father’s mother. She was a woman of wisdom, faith and quiet grace acquired from daily accommodation of nature’s whims in order to survive and thrive in the rugged life of independent living on a small farm.
