In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 6

As soon as Joyce was old enough, we drove down to Brigham City to show her off to Grandma Jones. Ione "oh'ed and aw'ed" and refused to let anyone else hold her. It was love at first sight. She had lived all her life with Grandma Jones and Aunt Lucille, but she decided that summer that she wanted to come "home" and live with her new little sister. Ione was ten and I was eight and I can tell you the idea surely appealed to me. I loved my brothers, but Joyce was a baby and Ione was a sister I could share with.

And share we did. For the rest of our growing up years. Sometimes loving, sometimes fighting, but always making up. We shared our bed and our secrets. The first night Ione stayed in Preston, Mama made her bed on the parlor sofa that folded out into a bed. I wanted to share it with her, but I had an "unfortunate" fault. I sometimes still wet the bed, but Mama extracted a promise and gave me a chance. It must have worked, for that was almost the end of my bad habit. Ione and I were together until she married eight years later. Ione was the "lady" and I was the "tom boy", but we made a good pair. She preferred staying home, helping with Joyce and I preferred tramping the fields with Daddy. I would get up and go with him at three o'clock in the morning when he took his watering turn in the sugar beet fields he had contracted to grow. He taught me to milk the cow when he was working "campaign" and I would help haul the water when he would kill and clean the pork for our winter meat.

When I was very small, Mama would stay up at night making me doll houses out of shoeboxes and hanging crepe paper curtains. She would not be so lonely then.

1928 Laverna Jones

Later, on rainy days, Ione and I would play girl games. We would cut out paper dolls from Montgomery Ward catalogues and design our clothes for them on drawing paper, and with crayons. We would set up houses on the cabinets and the kitchen table, and the hours would hurry by and it would be time to put away our things and set the table for supper.

Our loudest battles were over mopping the kitchen floor. Daddy remodeled the house. We had a large, square kitchen. The linoleum had to be laid in two strips, with a seam down the middle. Old fashioned, inlaid linoleum was designed like tile, with niches and cracks to fill with dirt. Wax, in those days, was a hard paste that had to be rubbed on with "elbow grease" and it was for hard wood floors, not linoleum. That meant that every night that floor had to be scrubbed to meet Mama's criteria for cleanliness. We would each take a half, to the line down the middle. Boy, were we meticulous about not going even a half-inch over the other's side of the line. Often Mama made us redo the center because we missed some. She tried to have each of us clean the whole floor every other night but that didn't work either for we actually missed our confrontations while we were on our knees.

I actually started school in Salt Lake City at the old Oquirrh School on the "West" side. I was in kindergarten. When we went to Preston, there was no kindergarten, so I had to wait until September to go back to school. I went to the Central School, an old, three story brick edifice. I had the same first grade teacher that Mama had, "Old" Mrs. Dalley.

1931 Oneida Stake Academy, Preston, Idaho

I tremble to think what the fire marshals would say about that school today. The floors were well oiled and swept with sawdust. The lower windows were barred. The first and second grades were on the ground floor and the third and fourth grades were on the second floor. The stairway going up on the east was for the girls and the boys had to use the one on the west. Ione's first year in Preston was as fifth grader and she went to Jefferson School. I was still in the old Central and I really envied her. Jefferson was really the Junior High but the overflow from crowded Central used the top floor for the fifth and sixth grades. The top-half of the fourth grade also got to go there. I had an incentive to excel so I could go with Ione the next year. I succeeded and I really enjoyed that next year.

1946 Ione and Joyce

Sometimes Mama would give us a dime, two eggs, and a cream bottle. We would sell the bottles and eggs to the baker for a pint of milk and two big "cinnamon" bars. The dime went for the 2-for-1 Wednesday after school movie next door. There was always a cartoon and a continued serial besides the movie. Sometimes there were scary movies. It was often dark when we came home and we would hold hands as we walked across the track and home.

The night we saw "The Mummy" with Boris Karloff we were living in the Johnson house at the very end of the road that led out into the country. We held onto each other, walked in the middle of the street and jumped at every shadow. It was frosty cold with ice under our feet. We started running, our breathing in the icy air made our chests hurt and we slipped on the ice underfoot. How welcome was the light on the front porch that awaited us, but the next week we would go back. One warm night it wasn't the scary movie we were running from. It was to get away from the Bosworth's house. In the front yard was a large pile of watermelons awaiting pick-up the next morning. Reid Bosworth, about Ione's age, and one of her "boy friends", was sleeping on a quilt beside the pile. Even so, we managed to grab one and run without awakening him, we think. We made it to our own corner, under the arc light, and broke open the melon and used our hands to eat it. I think that was the most delicious melon I ever ate.