When caregiving is a woman’s farm life experience “She was a Dust Bowl girl, about 9 or 10. You’d have to sweep the South Dakota dust out of the house three or four times a day. Towels were at the doors and windows, with a wet one over the crock so the drinking water wouldn’t get dirty.
She wanted to go to school real bad that day. She made a fuss, so her dad, Lloyd, wrapped a handkerchief around young Lorraine’s head and grabbed a fishing pole. They set out down the road. You couldn’t see to know if you were on the road or not, so her dad stuck the fishing pole out to the side. They knew they were OK when the pole clacked the fencepost. Clack. Clack. Clack.”
—Rebecca Lampman
Excerpt from Trailing the Walker
My grandma is the original dairy farmer in our family. Born in Volga, South Dakota, in 1923, Grandma Lorraine remembers using horses to accomplish the crop farming, and as the oldest child in the family and one who preferred farm work to housework, she milked 10 cows by hand twice a day. She faithfully cared for children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including her own son who had cerebral palsy, until she was no longer able to at 80 years old.
When her first marriage turned sour because of his alcoholism, she went to beauty school so she could support herself and got a divorce – all at a time when societal expectations would have a woman just tolerate her husband’s actions.
My grandma and I share a very special bond, so when the time came for her to need some extra help and care in her old age, I was happy, as many women are, to step up to the plate.
But stepping up to that plate requires me to step back from other things. I haven’t yet finished painting the last side of our weathered barn. Projects like these that I start on the farm often take much longer to finish than for my husband because the amount of time I can spend in a day working on things is so much shorter.
Someone has to clean and cook and care for the needs of children and our elderly. Women are often faced with the challenges of balancing their work life and family needs, and it isn’t any different on the farm.
My grandma’s needs are so great that she is now in a nursing home, and just this past week, I had to make the difficult choice to bring in hospice. I am moved by the kindness and the loving care all of those in Grandma’s nursing home provide to both her and me, and I have also fallen in love with many of the residents, some of whom have no family visitors to love and care for them.
Doing Grandma’s hair, visiting and giving her massages is a gift and blessing, and sometimes it is exhausting, but never a burden. It is by spending all this time with Grandma these past five years that I have been able to hear her many stories about her life, one that started with cows and chickens and goats and dust storms on a small farm in South Dakota. The legacy she leaves to our family is in part through these stories.
That legacy we leave the next farming generation is about more than just the painted barn or the nice herd of milk cows. It is about honoring those who arrived and lived and loved before us. It is the humble knowing of where we came from and where we are all headed to someday. I can’t look down at the barnyard and see the result of all the effort and time spent with Grandma these past few years.
The culmination of that effort resides in my heart and in the many wonderful memories of Grandma I have been so privileged to be a part of. In a poem by Adrienne Rich, she says,
the child’s height penciled
on the cellar door
In this cold barn we dream
a universe of humble things –
and without these no memory
no faithfulness, no purpose
for the future
no honor to the past
So thank you, Grandma. The pleasure has been all mine. Soon you will find your feet again, and you will be dancing those waltzes and polkas and shoddies. Until then, I’ve got your back and your stories. I love you. PD
Rebecca Lampman lives and works with her husband and three children on their 250-cow dairy farm in Bruneau, Idaho. She wrote many of her grandma’s stories down in a literary collage piece titled “Trailing the Walker” that uses different genres – poetry, narrative, dialogue, a treasured family recipe and song lyrics from John Mellencamp – to help preserve the legacy of her grandma and their special bond.
It was published in 2015 in The Whistle Pig, an Elmore County Idaho Literary Journal, Volume 7, and can be purchased on Amazon.
