I don’t remember my birth mother, who had died just after I was born. Pa re-married within a year following my first mother’s death and I had been loved and cared for by my new mother for as long as I could remember. She had been kind to me and my older siblings as well as the four younger children she had borne my father. A slender, soft spoken woman whose domain was the big farm kitchen, where she cooked and baked and canned, she seemed always to have a new born in a sash across her chest or a baby on her hip. As far as I was concerned, she was my Ma and I hated to make her unhappy. She had taught Bertha and me all about cooking and cleaning and looking after babies. In the evenings, she spent what little spare time she had at the kitchen table under the lamplight teaching us all to read and write and do our sums.
Images of what would have been a typical dwelling of the time.
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