I've run across some incidental photos to add to re-creating the Bloomfield farm. The oldest of these are from 1938, my birth year, when [Great] Aunt Nellie and [Great] Uncle John Feddersen with their younger son, Donley, were clearly visiting Nellie's baby sister, Fern, and Laurence. Most cousins are more familiar with Mervin, Nellie and John's older son, because his second wife, Charlotte, and their two children live close to the Iowa cousins decades later. My middle name is for Velma's favorite cousin in those days.
Gram's writing across the bottom of the photo is duplicated in my caption. This large garden was north of the house and provided many of the foodstuffs for canning and everyday meals. It also had large bleeding heart and love-lies-bleeding (amaranthus cauditis) plants I always associated with Gramma and, much later, peony plants along the front. The view is toward the corncrib-hog shed. Below are the pictures next to it.
I couldn't get the smaller photos cropped well enough, so we have the trio, featuring an optical illusion, as the much taller Nellie is standing farther back and then by Fern. It's a good shot of the big barn, and there is no chicken house by the windmill.
We liked playing in the musty, dusty barn with all its climbing areas and overhead haymow. Milking was a daily chore. Grampa would squirt us with the sticky milk and bark a laugh. Mom could milk, of course, and often helped with chores beyond the planting and harvesting. I never learned how to sit on the one-legged milk stool nor how to squeeze and pull on the udder simultaneously to squirt the milk noisily into the pail, a sound I can still hear, though Mike and Denny did. The milk was warm and not at all like the town store milk I was accustomed to, nor was the rich cream and the almost white butter produced by the separator and churn, two simple machines easier to master. I think Gram even made cottage cheese. The milk and eggs were taken to town weekly on Saturdays, the busiest day for all the towns, the sidewalks full of people shopping and socializing, the only day the stores were open late, usually 9:30 or 10:00 p.m.
Then there is this photo. Audree is in the dress, but I haven't identified the others. The view is east northeast. At the left is the front gate, the barn in the background. Here is the hill I mentioned. Red with white trim like the other outbuildings, the shed in the middle had a row of nests, but the main chicken coop for egg gathering was at the right. The underground cellar with its slanted door is either obscured or not dug yet. The photo is early, for the trees aren't grown, and the yard is full of ground ivy/Creeping Charlie, found in medicinal herbals for home remedies and a rich vitamin C source but a pungent and invasive enemy weed.
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