Excerpt from Remembrances of Rosabelle Larsen Schneider, My Mother
By Her Son Dallas Max Schneider
Rose was raised on a farm and
hated that kind of a life because she had to wear bib overalls like a boy and
work like a man. It
was
degrading to a sensitive young girl but a necessity. One of her jobs was to
tromp hay in the summer. What that meant was that as the men pitched the semi
dry clumps of hay onto the wagon she had to walk over every foot of that fluffy
fodder and compact it with her weight.
It was tiresome, endless work of
lifting her legs high out of the yielding long stemmed alfalfa to make each
step count in crushing it down. It allowed more hay to be put on the wagon
and made it easier to unload into the barn or a haystack outside. A
well-tromped wagon would sometimes be 10 feet high from the base of the wagon
to the top of the load. The wagon was always moving so she had to be careful
and not lose her balance as the wagon lurched over the hayfield. The men would
pitch the hay as high as they could reach and that determined the size of the
burden that could be hauled into the barnyard and stored for the winter-feeding
of the cattle. It was a hot, dusty,
and dirty job for a young girl but everyone worked hard on the Larsen farm, men
women and children. It was expected of
them.
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