A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media: First Person

June 14, 1931, My Father Read to Me
By Gloria Sanders
May 08, 2008

It was my seventh birthday, and my father read to me. That he was idle, sitting on the back porch, was an amazing thing. We lived on an Iowa farm. He had cows to milk, pigs to slop, a pair of horses to hitch and work, crops and pastures to tend. The morning chores were done, it was raining buckets and he could not get out into the fields.

I was reading "Robinson Crusoe" and the man Friday frightened me. He was a strange menacing character; thinking about him in the night, I had drawn bed covers close around me. I was in suspense to know the end of the story and dreading to read more, and here was an unexpected opportunity to finish the book, safe with Daddy. While he read to me, the rain continued in torrents, the cistern overflowed and the creek rose and flooded the fields of corn.

My father could pick and shuck one hundred bushels of corn a day but there was little corn to harvest that fall. His prized registered Jersey cows were sold at public auction to pay debts. The pigs went to market to become pork. The farm wagon was loaded with our household goods, the horses hitched and my father drove them to a town seventy miles and two days away. An uncle came in his coupe for my mother, me and my brothers. My mother held my baby brother and sat inside, and I and my five year old brother were tucked with blankets into the rumble seat with our aunt.

I had felt threatened by a story but was innocent of the reality that my family had lost its means of livelihood.

My parents' despair and anxieties were not communicated to me and it is a marvel and precious memory that I felt secure during the ensuing years of hardship.

About the author:
How wonderful! A web site that invites me to write. I am an old woman, live in a mud house with two dogs in a multicultural state, much different from the Midwest where I grew up and worked most of my adult life.