The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

My mother was born in North Dakota, in the middle of The Great Depression, at a time when it was “Root hog or die.” Times were tough. Banks were failing. Drought was everywhere, and then the grasshoppers came.

“My job was to watch the bunch of turkeys we were raising,” said my mother. “The grasshoppers fed them.” They ate,”Ma said, until their craws were dragging.”

The expression “Root hog or die” apparently applies to turkeys. Too.

“Root hog or die” was an expression Ma used. It came out of a time when you just barely got by, even when you were really trying. I grew up with stories of mom as a little girl–now back in the Wapsi Pinnican river woods in NE Iowa–climbing up on moving coal trains that went through their land. And accidentally knocking off a few pieces of Eastern briquette coal, which she was only supposed to pick up off the ground, pieces that fell off the train.

When did you ever climb up on a moving train, onto a peaked-up load of coal? That should give you some idea of how my mother approached life. How she had to. Some of my best memories of her are of her vocabulary, which grew out of those times.

“You got a good scald on that one!” I remember her saying that when she saw our first born. Now, in case you don’t know, the difference between getting all the pin feathers off a bird you just butchered–or not–lies in the temperature of the water into which you dunk that bird, whether it was a duck, chicken, turkey, or whatever. Too hot–the skin comes off. Too cold–nothing comes off. “A good scald” meant you did good.

“It takes two to tango” was another expression I heard her use. Any time she heard of two people not getting along, and each one convinced of the validity of their side of things, she would come out with that saying. She was heavily engaged in church activities. Gossip among The Ladies Aid flowed like water. And she shrugged it off with that saying. She shrugged a lot off, I bet, knowing how gossip there fostered disagreement.

“He–or she–would cut off his–or her–nose to spite their face.” I heard this expression quite often just after I heard “It takes two to tango.” Usually after or around whenever these sayings were said, I’d hear:  “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

On one of my earliest service calls, I went out to a house to figure out why there was no heat in some of their rooms. It was readily apparent to me that the ductwork was badly designed and it was installed even worse. I said something like: “Boy, this ductwork must have been done by an idiot,” or something to that effect.

The woman of the house, who was showing it to me said: “My brother did this.”  Oh. 

I learned from this. (And no, they didn’t hire me to fix it.) It was immediately evident to me that another one of my mother’s sayings apparently didn’t stick to me. “If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all.”

And I’ve lived by that, as over the years, I’ve seen construction work, electrical wiring, HVAC stuff, you name it, that would come back to haunt the folks to whom it was done. Sorry.

I stayed quiet. Said instead something like: “That ductwork is pretty unique, you know.”

And tried not to “stick my nose into someone else’s business.” And that was another one of her’s.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words’ll never hurt me.” Another of mother’s favorites. There was a year in my country school when some new farmer moved in, with a son named Eugene. Eugene had perhaps failed a couple of grades, because he was bigger than every one of us. He was a bully. I remember coming home from school and telling mom about mean things he said. You can guess what she said. Sticks and stones again.

Growing up in the forties and fifties on a root hog or die farm brought occasions when we said: “Is that store-bought ?” (In which case we were aghast that someone would squander good money on whatever it was.)  “Money don’t grow on trees.” 

And then along came: “You take those shoes off when you get back from church: “You know those are your Sunday shoes.”

And finally, in what was kind of a prophecy of sorts, Ma often said: “Hospitals are no place to be sick in.”

No. They certainly are not.