Tag: Great Depression

The Turtle in the Truck

Brenda Stratton

My parents grew up during the Great Depression. Dad grew up on a farm where it was common to eat what you could raise or hunt.

Mom, having grown up in the same era, understood this in a way we might find a little more difficult today. I know Dad brought her rabbit, squirrel, and occasionally had her cook him a mess of frog legs.

One day, when Mom was running the Kewanee milk route alone, she got quite a surprise when one of Dad’s “acquisitions” crawled out from under the seat of the milk truck.

The acquisition?

A soft-shelled turtle—that Dad had intended to make into turtle soup.

Since I wasn’t there and only heard the story later, I can only imagine the look on my mother’s face.

If I’ve given you the impression that she didn’t like animals, that’s not strictly true. She did—but mostly puppies and kittens. She didn’t like unwelcome surprises, and this one definitely qualified.

I don’t know whether she was driving when it happened or if she had already stopped at the next farm.

I only know that she got out of the truck and refused to get back in until the turtle was gone.

The farmer at the stop had to remove it for her. Mom wasn’t about to touch that turtle, and she made it very clear she wasn’t getting back into the truck until it was gone.

The farmer ended up with the turtle.

Dad missed having turtle soup—

…and so did the turtle.

The Patched Dishcloth

Brenda Stratton

One day, long after I was married and had children of my own, I was at Mom’s house, cooking and doing dishes as we prepared for a family dinner. I reached into the drawer where she kept her dishcloths and towels. A scrap of multicolored terrycloth with white stitching caught my eye, and I reached in to pull it out of the drawer. 

I immediately started laughing. Turning without comment, I held it up in front of her. She recognized why I was laughing, then she began to laugh along with me.

What I held in my hands was a patched dishcloth. It was a solid piece of fabric, clearly made from two different cloths — one pink, one lavender — stitched together with white thread to form something new. It represented her life in so many ways — and how she cared for her family.

Both of my parents’ lives were shaped by the Great Depression and the years of World War II where they learned the value of taking care of what they owned and mending what was broken. In this case, a torn dishcloth, insignificant by itself, was made into something useful once again. 

I thought of the other things she mended without ceremony. Socks turned inside out and mended as she watched television with the family, hems let down or taken up as we grew, small tears stitched before they became big ones. She crocheted doilies to decorate our home, kept the house tidy, and somehow made ordinary days feel cared for. None of it was showy. It was simply how she cared for us. 

Everything that she did in life was to see that we were warm and fed and had everything that we needed and almost everything that we wanted. As a child, I may not have appreciated that fully. As an adult and the mother of four, I understood precisely where her heart was and what it takes to make a home.

After Mom passed away, I took that patched dishcloth and put it away as a cherished memento — not just of her life, but of the quiet, ordinary care she gave us every day.