In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 2

1927 Jeppesen Home in Preston, Idaho

The little house was friendly and warm. Someone had built a fire in the big kitchen stove. A pot of soup bubbled fragrantly and I realized how hungry I was. A fresh-baked loaf of bread wrapped in a snowy dishtowel was on the table along with a dish of yellow butter. While Grandma busied herself undressing sleepy, unhappy Mark, Aunt Lindy came in from helping Grandpa finish the chores. Setting me at the table, she dished me up a bowl of soup. Grandma Hansen sliced the bread and Grandpa put the coffeepot on front of the stove to boil. Now it was my turn to have my face washed and my warm flannel gown pulled over my head. Climbing up into the high bed and then snuggling down into the comfort of the feather tick. I curled up around Mark's warm little body. I hoped Mama would come soon. My prayers had been said that night at Great Grandma's knee and again she touched my head and said "Poor little Selda." but I was too tired to cry and I went to sleep, to wake tomorrow to a new life in a new place. It was April 1927.

That was the same spring that Charles Lindberg flew his Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic to Paris and even in our small Idaho town, the news was received with excitement. I was a child of fantasy and given to dreaming. As they talked about that silver plane flying through the clouds, I wondered if that was how my father had flown through the clouds to Heaven, where everyone kept telling me he had gone.

I could not stay sad long. Mama came and I got to share her bed with her. The jonny-jump-ups were blooming in the grass at the feet of the poplar trees and Grandpa had made me his chief garden planting helper. It was pleasing when he came home from work as a section hand on the railroad, to help him cut the seed potatoes, making sure that each section had an eye. Following him down the moist garden row, dropping a potato in each hole he dug, then mounding up the dirt into a mound, I thought of huge mounds of mashed potatoes with lots of butter.

I finally made friends with Grandma's green parrot. After ignoring Grandma's warning and getting my fingernail thoroughly bitten by his sharp beak when I attempted to scratch his head as she did, I learned to keep my hands safely away from his cage. Finally he got to know me and would cluck excitedly when I came around and learned my name, calling me "Selda", as Grandpa Jeppesen and Grandma Hansen did. When I couldn't tell my thoughts to grown-ups, I would go and have a secret conversation with Polly. He would give me sympathetic and understanding sounds and I always felt better.

I also had two cousins about my age up the street. There was Laura of the golden curls and beautiful manners that I was constantly being urged to copy. Her dress was never torn and dirty, as mine frequently was. Her stockings never got holes in the knees, as mine did. She always wore shoes and I loved nothing better than pushing my feet out of mine and going barefoot. Even so, I still loved to sit with her on the top step of the outside staircase of her house and would try to copy her neat embroidery stitches.

We were thus employed one sunny Sunday when Great Grandma Hansen found us and lectured to us long and diligently about the sin of such a deed on the Sabbath. She told us as she rustled away that we would have to pick every one of those stitches with our nose in the hereafter. We worried about that the next few days and secretly picked all the stitches so the Lord wouldn't require such a thing of us.

My other close by cousin was Laura's brother, Elmer or "Egg", as we used to call him. He was a little older than I was but I spent most of that first summer trying to keep up with him and by earning my reputation as a tomboy. His friends reluctantly let me tag along and finally accepted me as one of them. We climbed the highest trees and jumped from the highest haylofts into the deepest haystacks. We knew where the water snakes lived in the deep grass along the ditch banks and carried them wiggling in our hands to scare the more timid Laura and her friends. We would "run away" to the sand hills after we had been scolded or punished, but we always came home in time for dinner and more scolding. I loved Aunt Lindy and never really minded her scolding because while she did so, she usually was preparing thick slices of bread with lots of butter and homemade raspberry jam or a cold drink of buttery buttermilk. She thoroughly believed that growing children should always be fed, no matter what.