Out of Place

              When I shared lunch with a friend not long ago, she spoke of how out-of-place she felt in a situation in which she had recently been involved.  All of a sudden, memories began to flood back as how out of place I felt when we first moved to an Indiana small town, farming community in 1951. I was twenty years old.

              I was raised a city girl: most houses divided by driveways, no barns, “postal stamp” yards, bathroom and electricity in the home, all food came from a market.  I had never seen vast fields of corn and soy beans before, never been around a real farm and never seen live pigs  – which those famers raised in those days.

              The women made their own noodles, used real lard to make cookies, pie crust and biscuits.  They washed clothes every Monday (I often thought that they many have done their washing Sunday evening because of how early  they would be hanging out their washing on Monday morning – no electric dryers then). These farmers all ate their big meal, “dinner,” around noon,  “Supper” became a light meal, perhaps of leftovers, in the evening.

              We moved there the first week of July, so the vegetables from all the home gardens (which I had never seen or heard of – they actually planted food gardens in their back yard! ) In all my experience, nothing ever tasted better than “roasting ears” (their name for corn-on-the-cob) freshly picked, tomatoes just off the vines and home grown green beans favored with a bit of ham.

              My most vivid memory occurred when Pete and I decided to go to the State Fair in Indianapolis to learn more about our new home state.  We have a great time until we arrived at the cow barn.  There, a man had had his entire right arm stuffed into the rear end of a cow! I could not believe it!  And no one was at all alarmed about it!  I made such a fuss that finally a local man told me that the cow had just calved and the man was a veterinarian who had kelped the cow with the birth.   Now this vet was cleaning her up.  It was at that point that I realized how really out-of-place I was, and how much I really had to learn.

              And I did learn a lot as time passed.  I learned how to kill, cut up and fry a chicken (But I never learned how to make noodles.  I’m convinced one has to be born in Indiana to make noodles).  I learned how to plant corn, tomatoes and green beans in our back yard.  I even learned how to sew up a baby pig when its mother had gashed it with her hoof during the birth process.

              But most of all, I learned what fine people Hoosiers are.  That community took me under their wings and patiently nurtured and cared for me.  I look back on the six-plus years we lived there with great respect and deep love for those folk who took in a young naïve out of place woman and made her feel at home.