During our years in Indiana, it was de rigeur to spend every holiday of the year up in Edgerton, Wisconsin, celebrating with our Heller, Hanson, Anderson, and Stricker relatives. It would be difficult to say for sure whose home I enjoyed being at most because each household came with its own unique set of interesting experiences. If pressed, however, I’d have to settle on the Anderson family farm in Milton.
Life on the farm was so completely different than my own, that, to me, it was filled with magic and wonder. There were cats and kittens, dogs and puppies, chickens and chicks, dairy cows, tractors, all manner of sounds from buzzing flies to bellowed profanity, and adventures that provided all kinds of scope for the imagination.
One of those adventures began over the Memorial Day weekend of 1972. I had just turned 14 years old and was beginning to “fill out” as the euphemism of the day went. I wasn’t quite the scrawny kid I’d been for my entire life and was gaining in height and strength. My Aunt Louise took a look at me and stated that she thought I might be useful on the planter. Dad said he thought so, too, and I was quickly recruited to help plant the tobacco.
The planter was an unsophisticated piece of equipment that I suspect was built by my Uncle Hunk and Uncle Bob using leftover bits of the numerous relics that filled one of the barns. Aunt Florence loaded up the back platform of the planter with the baby tobacco plants that she and the other aunts had been tending for the past several weeks, and off we went. My memory isn’t exactly clear on the whole method, but I vaguely remember that Aunt Florence laid on her stomach with the upper part of her body extended off the back of the planter. The planter must have had a device on the front end that made the holes; she then plopped a plant into the hole; and a copper tube that extended beyond her squirted water on the plant. I’m pretty sure Aunt Bea and Aunt Louise helped, too. My job was to keep feeding those baby plants to Aunt Florence so she always had one in her hand ready for the next hole.
When we were done I was very proud to have helped plant the tobacco crop. When I went back home after the weekend, I told all my friends what it was like to be a farmer.
Knowing that the crop would be ready around the middle of July, I begged my parents to let me go back up to help with the harvest. Phone calls were made, logistics were discussed, and finally plans were made. We would go back up to Wisconsin for the Fourth of July weekend per usual. But, I would be left behind for two full weeks during which it was reckoned that the crop would be ready. Mom, Dad, and Susan would come back to pick me up on the third weekend of July when, to everyone’s delight, Edgerton had plans for a first-ever grand celebration they were calling Tobacco Days.
During my stay at Grandpa and Grandma Anderson’s, I walked up to the pool to swim almost every day, took a lanyard-making class at the park, rode bicycles with some second cousins, and waited patiently for the call from the farm that would summon me to the harvest. It came about halfway through my stay.
I rode out to the farm with Grandpa Anderson where we ate a good breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast, and then went to our assigned places to get started. Grandpa worked side-by-side with his brothers to remove the leaves from the stalks. My job was to help my cousin Betty Jean load the “sled” with the leaves handed to us by the men and drive the tractor back to the barn where the leaves would be hung to cure. The aunts were in the barn where they took the leaves from us and rammed them onto long sticks that were then positioned upon the rafters. Then it was back to the fields where we would get covered in little brown hopper insects. Part of our job was to inspect the cut leaves for tobacco worms, and remove any that we saw. This went on for three days in the hot sun. It was hard, grimy work, but completely satisfying. Showers never felt so good as they did after being in the fields.
By the time my family returned to Wisconsin, it was time to celebrate. Grandma bought me a Tobacco Days t-shirt that I then wore just about every day for the rest of the summer, and on weekends through the next school year. We participated in the carnival-like atmosphere of downtown Edgerton where I reveled in the excitement and joy I found in the town of my birth. I had planted and harvested tobacco—quite the experience for a girl from the suburbs.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2017
