My Grandpa and Grandma Brackin (Roy and Genevieve) retired on a farm in Oskaloosa, Iowa. The farm had been in the family since the mid-1800s when it was built. Originally part of the underground railroad, the house had a hidden compartment behind the back of one of the kitchen cabinets where people could hide. The shelves and the back of the cabinet could be removed to reveal a small room in the center of the house. The house had a unique layout and all sorts of interesting features from an older time. There was a back room off of the kitchen with a dumb waiter that was later removed and turned into a clothes chute. The original iron pump for well water was right next to the back porch and remained even after plumbing was installed in later years. That old house had all sorts of reminders of its past, including the original wood stove (which still worked and they used every winter), the fruit cellar under the kitchen, and the window shutters which were actually functional. A 1950s fridge sat humming in the kitchen as shiny as the day it was purchased, and the first floor bathroom had an iron claw foot tub and the original porcelain sink. There was a spooky winding back stairway off of the parlor, and some of the bedrooms still had their linen wallpaper from when the house was built.
An addition was built onto the back of the house in the late 1960s (it's partly cut off in the photo below) with a large living room, fireplace, and a modern basement underneath. As a kid, the ceilings throughout the first floor seemed ridiculously high, but I think they were designed that way to make the temperatures in the house more bearable during the summer.
The house sat on 22 acres of land, almost half of it wooded, and I used to explore it all the time. It seemed like a vast wilderness all to myself when I was a kid and the Calvin and Hobbes comics always reminded me of my grandparent's place. Bill Watterson may as well have used their property as his inspiration. There was a cow path leading down the hill from the barn into the woods and ended at the creek. I spent a lot of time playing along the creek and floating toy boats down it. My brother and I used to take turns riding an old metal Greyhound wagon down that hill to the creek and then we'd bail out before it launched off the bank into the water.
In the most wooded part of the property farthest from the house was the remains of a little house that sat near the creek. A rusty shell of an old pickup jutted up out of the mud as well. There were always things to explore and I used to walk my grandparent's dogs in the woods and when he was old enough my brother joined me as well.
A pen and ink drawing I made of my grandparent's house when I was in high school:
My grandpa pulling me around the front yard:
My grandparents had a couple of horses/ponies, but Strawberry (shown in the next two photos below) is the only one I remember. My Aunt Anna used to hitch a sled up to Strawberry in the winter and the grownups would take turns trying to stay on as long as they could once Strawberry was turned loose.
Tigger and Fuzzy hanging out with Strawberry:
My mom at my grandparent's posing with a pony whose name is forgotten:
Part of my grandparent's acreage was rented out as farmland. The crops alternated between corn and beans and provided additional income. Below are a couple of undated photos my grandma took of the harvest one year:
Me and my brother in May 1987 (behind us is the living room in the addition):
The picture below was taken sometime around 1990-91 and yup, I'm dragging my sister along in a sled over dry ground. She could be persuasive sometimes. And my brother is walking a collie that's as big as he is. The woods and creek are in the background at the bottom of a hill.
Somewhere there are pictures of my grandparents and a lot more pictures of their house. When I find them I will add them to this post.
