CHAPTER 8

My father’s parents lived in West Texas on a farm near Rule and were by some standards well off. They had a John Deere tractor rather than horses and mules. We called the tractor “Popping Johnnie.” It was so named as it had only one large cylinder with the resulting pop, pop, pop noise from firing on only one cylinder. To keep the engine’s momentum, there was a large, heavy external flywheel. The flywheel also served as a power transfer by applying a belt to it and onto another piece of farm equipment such as a buzz saw.

There was a windmill for water. We had cows and hogs and chickens. There was a little building called the smokehouse. Its purpose was curing meat by smoking it. Whole hogs hung upside down in the smokehouse. We milked the cows for our milk and cream. A machine called a separator brought the cream to the top with the richer milk. We churned butter from the cream. A churn was a three-foot-tall, heavy, glass-like cone with a smaller hole in the top where a pole with a plunger at the end was pushed up and down to agitate the cream and make butter. After the cream and whole milk came to the top, the milk remaining, today’s nonfat milk, was fed to the hogs with the leftovers from our meals. We called it slopping the hogs.

Later, a milkman delivered our milk in glass bottles; the top several inches would be cream, and sometimes in the winter the milk would freeze before we got it inside, and the paper cap would pop up and the cream would rise an inch or so.

Cotton was the primary money crop on both farms, although maize and corn were also grown, and probably other things I do not recall. Maize and corn were fed to the cows, horses, and mules, and maize to the chickens; we also had vegetable gardens. My grandfather Robert Edwards, known as Bob, was also the county judge, as mentioned earlier.

When I was in first grade, I rode to school in a horse-drawn wagon and carried a bag of eggs that I traded for my lunch. The farm was several miles outside of Rochelle, which was small with a population of about two hundred. The population density was and is about two people per square mile. The county seat was Brady, miles farther, where the population was perhaps five thousand.

The population in Rule, Texas, is today 636. The population of Rochelle, Texas, is today about 163. I now live in the city of San Diego, California, with a pop