Childhood Evenings: Quilts, Boots, and Mom's Hair

Evenings in our home when I was growing up were cozy family affairs. We always had sit-down dinners with each of us having our place at the table. (Casy sat beside my dad in what he called the “training seat”.) Even after Casy and then Susan left for college, we continued to sit in the same places with their seats left empty. After dinner, we retreated to the family room to watch TV as a family.

I remember primetime including Little House on the Prairie, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and The Waltons. (Saturday nights we watched Love Boat and Fantasy Island.) If you left your seat, someone else was likely to steal it while you were out of the room. Dad usually lay on the shag carpeting with a quilt made by our Great Grandma Mostrom. (I still have mine and was snuggled under it tonight!) Of course, dad was also famous for kicking back in his recliner and then asking the daughter who happened to walk by, “Would you pull off my boots?” He always wore boots. My father very rarely wore tennis shoes when I was a kid.

My mother, however, almost always sat in front of one of us on the floor and asked, “Do you want to do my hair?” We had containers of barrettes, curlers, combs, brushes, pony tail holders, and bobby pins. I wonder how many hours each of us spent fixing my mother’s hair. Sometimes we tried hard to make her look beautiful while other times we did our best to make her look silly. She didn’t care—she just loved the feel of her girls playing with her hair. Her famous line when we handed her the handheld mirror was, “Now if we could just do something about the face!” This just made us chuckle. We knew she was beautiful with her perfect smile and adorable dimple.

As I think back about it, I can almost feel and even smell her hair. She always kept it fairly short and I don’t remember a time that she didn’t color it. We had these horrible black poky curlers with pink plastic pens to hold them in place. I remember filling her hair with these and then pretending the curls were set so I could take them out, style her hair, and spray it with hairspray. We had Dippity Doo to hold stray hairs in place and Happy Hair to help get out the tangles.

When we go home to visit now, my mom often sits in front of one of the granddaughters and asks, “Would you like to do my hair?” My girls have both had the pleasure of styling my mother’s hair as she sat patiently and enjoyed the attention while they watched something together on TV.

Yesterday at Tana’s first swim meet, Annie sat in front of me in the bleachers. After a while, she turned around and asked, “Mom, will you mess with my hair?” I didn’t have the brushes, bobby pins, or curlers so I just used my fingers to comb her hair. When I would get distracted and stop, she would turn around and beg me to continue. She’s so much like my mom…especially when she flashes that dimple.

Mostromisms

It's funny how when you are growing up, there are things that your family does that you don't realize are unique to just your family. Here are some of them for the Mostroms.

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Silverbars: We had a swingset in the backyard that was homemade. Someone hand-welded thick pipe together and added the attachments for swings and even a glider. It was then painted silver. So, we called them the "silverbars". On the playground at school I wonder if my friends ever thought it strange that I would say, "Let's go play on the silverbars!" To me, it was another word for swingset. I spent hours on this thing growing up. In fact, there are lots of pictures of me as a little toe-headed toddler riding a swinging horse and grinning from ear to ear. They just don't make them like that anymore.

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Pig: I don't know how this got started, but the absolute filthiest thing that we could call each other growing up was "pig." Mom said later that since we thought it was a dirty word, in her book it was a dirty word. When we used it, she knew we were cussing each other, and we got in BIG trouble. Isn't it interesting how words can provoke such emotion?

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Gudgurl: This one started when I was very young, in fact, probably before I was even born while Mom was potty training Casy and Susan. When we would succeed in pooping in the toilet, Mom would exclaim, "Good girl!" or "That's a good girl!" We didn't realize that our mother was praising us for saving her from cleaning up a mess. Instead, we thought she was telling us the name of this nasty stuff--and that she was excited about it! For years I thought "gudgurl" was a nice name for poop. As in "I need to gudgurl." My mom thought it was cute, and that this sounded much better than the alternative.

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Bud Buddies: Dad and Mom always had lots of friends who were always lots of fun. One of these couples was Ron and Gloria White. Each couple had three daughters and soon each had a fourth. It was an interesting coincidence and one that led to lots of shared time together as families. Their girls (in order by age) are Barbara, Brenda, Kelly, and Kristi. Kelly and Casy were the same age and so were Kristi and Lisa. Brenda and Susan were pretty close in age and had similar personalities. When we met them, however, I was very young so I was always paired up with Barbara who probably had to keep an eye on me. The were our "Bud Buddies". I'm not sure where the term came from but it is what we always called each other. Ron's girls were still growing up when he died suddenly from a massive heart attack and Gloria never remarried after losing the love of her life.

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Gary's Polka: My Grandpa Mostrom (Grandpapa) played the accordian by ear. This is a complicated instrument with many strange keys and a very large, awkward size. Once he heard a song, he could play it. As a child I didn't realize what a unique and special gift this was. When he and Grandmama were young, they played dance after dance with her on the trapset. One of the songs they played was "Gary's Polka". Gary is my father and this song was written and played solely for him. To us, this was just another fun polka that my Grandparents would play. Although we have old recordings of them playing it, I often wish I could hear it live once more.

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Stirrin' Stick: Dad was a farmer. All of us spent time helping him with different tasks in the fields. One of the more time-consuming ones was "changing water". Before pivot irrigation, we would load aluminum pipe on a trailer and it would take three of us (a driver and two pipe-movers) to lay the pipe to water the fields. These pipes had gates on them that could be opened and closed as needed to sufficiently water each row. What a chore this was! Often the gates needed replacing, the pipes stubbornly wouldn't fit together easily, and little animals (from rabbits to snakes) would be inside. Once laid, the water was started and would make it's way from one end of the field to the other. Later, Dad would "check water" which meant that he drove along the other side and listed the rows that needed more water and the rows that were fully watered. We would then go back out with a "stirrin' stick" to close and open gates as needed.

Opening these little gates by hand would be silly. Besides the fact that they were often very tight and hard to move, you never knew what little critter may be down there! The tool that I most often used to complete this task was simply a golf putter. Dad had several thrown in the back of the pickup. But THE "stirrin' stick" was an old tractor tire iron--perfectly rounded to conform nicely to the shape of the pipe. This was a precious tool to my father. To this day it hangs in his shed, a reminder of all of the time he spent walking through his turnrows and tending his land.