Pioneers
If Mama were here today, I believe she'd tell me it was a bold thing for my grandpa and grandma to do, leave Bloomington, in eastern Idaho, where their people, the Nelsons and Madsens, had long-established farms and where the friends and family of a lifetime lived. Grandpa's cousin Warren had gone to western Idaho a year earlier and told Heber to come on.
And he did. They did, leaving behind everything they knew. But they were young then, a family of three. Heber, Samantha, and their little girl, Lola. They would make a go of it.
The farm they built made Mama proud. "The best dry farm in the valley," she said.
But it was Grandpa that made her proudest. She was only a small child back then, so I wonder if she knew what it meant to eat well, but that's what she told me. They ate well those years, because her dad could make anything grow. I guess everyone else in the place knew it, too. “Heber Nelson, he knows how to work the land. Plain outwits that old white soil.”
And you could tell Grandpa's farm afar off, Mama said, by his hay stacks. Most farmers in that Idaho valley rolled their hay. Not my grandpa. He baled and stacked it tight, a point of pride with him, used his Mormon derrick to lift and lay the bales so you couldn’t even get a knife blade between them.
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