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Show 226 home on. My husband calculated how much gas we would need, bought an extra tank which he had welded in place and bought gas enough for the trip with most of the money. With the three-fifty which was left we bought food for the journey. From malnutrition, lack of medicines, we limped home sick and starving. The children had contracted whooping cough and we all had boils, mine in my ears. We ran out of food in St. George and the children added tonsillitus with high fevers to their other miseries. The car pulled up in front of home with its last gasp of fuel, and never did a place look so welcome! There was no place to go but up. We traded some now worthless bank and mill stock which Papa had left me for a city lot, one fourth of a five acre block. Mama gave me the set of logs from the house in which I had been born and the now discarded furniture Aunt Jane had bought more than thirty years before for Mama's wedding. There was even a rag carpet and a shuck tick. My husband worked for lumber flooring and shingles. Mama also gave me a setting hen and thirteen eggs. We traded our car for a cow and acquired a shoat or two. Neither the power nor water lines reached our place, a block east of Mama's, so we carried our water and used kerosene lamps. In one easy lesson we reverted to pioneer times. Eventually we began to ship milk for a tiny milk check and took three hives of bees from George Robinson to increase on shares. We churned our butter and robbed the bees for honey, cooked cracked wheat for cereal and traded work for flour. The men combined labor and hauled wood from the hills, fat pine logs and splintery cedar free for the picking up. A cousin |
