Artifacts From a Childhood in Rural Kansas: A Short Memoir

Artifacts From a Childhood in Rural Kansas: A Short Memoir

Emma Kaster

The highlight and backbone of any small town in Kansas is the Dollar General. Its yellow and black sign is a beacon for kids who are bored half to death with piggy bank money to spend on a toy they’d break on the same day. I was no different from the other small town hooligans, and I frequented the DG as often as my mom would allow. One such shopping spree resulted in me walking home with a bug catching kit. I wasn’t so fond of bugs, but the kit came with a magnifying glass and I thought that was pretty cool.

My dad showed me how to kill ants with the magnifying glass and I thought that was pretty cool too.

My mom did not think it was very cool that I spent the afternoon sitting in the gravel driveway, lighting mini fires to exterminate the ants, which I found so offensive.

The DG was also the spot to buy birthday gifts before online shopping became a thing and stayed around long enough for people in rural Kansas to catch on. It takes at least five years for most trends or societal developments to make their way from the coasts all the way inward to the sunflower state. Family members had to communicate and make sure they didn’t buy the exact same coloring book, jigsaw puzzle, or birthday card for so-and-so’s cousin’s birthday party at the bowling alley—which was the only place to have a birthday party in Stockton, Kansas.

While I don’t have any of the DG birthday gifts or cards I received during my childhood, I do still have the magnifying glass. I don’t use it to kill ants anymore because I realize that is cruel, so now it sits in my desk drawer along with dried out markers and broken pencils where it has been for over a decade. I keep the magnifying glass for no reason other than it reminds me of where it came from, where I came from. It is proof that I used to shop at the Dollar General, before a kid in my relatively wealthy, Nebraska elementary school told me it was a store for “white trash poor people.” It makes me think about our tiny rental on the corner, where my mom frantically swung a broom and killed a bat that landed on the couch with a soft thud—and the pool towel, which covered the spot on the couch for months thereafter. It is evidence that I lived in Stockton, a town run by police who sleep with the meth dealers. It reminds me that I used to kill ants for fun and my dad was okay with that.

The magnifying glass implores me to reflect on moments when I was oblivious to concepts like rich and poor, right and wrong, and even that the town I lived in was very small in a world that is very, very big.

…

For every person in Kansas, there are two cows. My grandpa and his dad and probably his dad all had cows, pastures full of them. I’ve never had a single one. Though I did at one point have a chicken.

I got my pet chicken when I was probably three years old, when we lived a few miles outside of Hays, a big small town. I don’t remember if it was a he or a she, I just always called it “B,” which seemed like a good name for a chicken to have. My chicken lived in our garage, in a tote filled with sawdust, food, water, and one of those lamps my dad used when working on a tractor. As one might predict, B did not stay the fuzzy, yellow chick in the tote for long. Before I was ready, B grew up and needed a bigger place to live. We took B to great grandma Eileen’s where she had an outdoor pen for chickens. The day we left B at the chicken pen was the last time I ever saw my beloved pet.

The next time I visited great grandma Eileen and inquired about B, she told me that my chicken flew away. I am embarrassed to admit this, but I truly believed B flew out of the pen until I was fourteen. It was later revealed that a fox got into the pen and ate the chickens, but great grandma didn’t want to have to tell me that B met such a violent end.

To help lessen the blow of B’s “departure,” great grandma Eileen gifted me a ceramic chicken from her very own collection to forever remind me of my pet. I’ve dropped the thing and broken it a handful of times, but my dad always found a way to superglue it back together.

I sometimes forget that I had a pet chicken, and I often forget that a chicken is a rather unusual pet to have. Whenever it comes up in conversation, people laugh and think I’m joking, or ask if I grew up on a farm. I never quite know how to answer that question. Did I live on a farm growing up? No, not really. Did I spend a lot of my childhood on a farm? Certainly. Am I a farmer? Definitely not. Does my family own a farm? Technically, yes. To the actual farmers in Kansas, I am a city kid through and through. To a classmate in Boston, I am a country bumpkin. It’s a rather minor identity crisis to have, but an identity crisis nonetheless. I don’t feel as though I fit quite right into either, the city or the farm.

Whenever I imagine my family in Kansas visiting me in Boston, I can’t help but laugh at how out of place they would look walking through Prudential in their worn-out, boot-cut jeans and NASCAR t-shirts. None of them have ever been on a plane, and trying to get them to take the subway would be a whole other ordeal. Alternatively, when I picture my friends from college sitting on the porch swing of my grandpa’s farmhouse in the middle of absolutely nowhere, I cringe at how strange it would be for them, how uncomfortable they would be if they walked in the house, up the stairs, and saw the hundreds of dead ladybugs scattered there as they are every summer.

Although I feel somewhat out of place, I have the privilege of experiencing two extreme and opposite walks of life. I’ve lived a past full of rainbow sherbet Kansas sunsets, and now I’m living a present spent wandering weathered sidewalks in Boston. And I have a future to look forward to, somewhere in a place I don’t yet know.

…

As a little kid on grandpa’s farm, I often went around outside with an ice cream bucket and picked up pig noses. Think of pig noses as similar to acorns, except they come from black walnut trees and look like a pig’s nose. My cousin and I would race to see who could fill up their bucket the fastest. The winner didn’t get a prize and after we collected the useless pig noses we tossed them into the creek, but it was still something to do.

Sometimes, we would put the sprinkler under the ancient trampoline and jump and jump and jump through the water until the sun went down behind the hills. The trampoline was so old that it rubbed off on our bodies, leaving charcoal-colored patches wherever we connected with the material. The sprinkler didn’t do much to combat the charcoal stains, so when my cousin and I did this, we had to jump in nothing but our underwear (which was from the DG no doubt) so that we didn’t ruin our clothes. Why we never thought to bring swimsuits, I have no idea. We were no older than five, so being mostly naked in front of each other and whoever drove past the farm wasn’t such a huge deal to us or anyone else.

I miss being that carefree—the feeling of running around barefoot, completely covered in dirt, hunting down pig noses, laughing with my cousin as we both slipped on the drenched trampoline. I miss exploring grandpa’s shop filled with car parts, wandering down to the creek, driving the four-wheeler back through the junkyard and into the pasture filled with wild grasses, cows, and oil wells. I miss drinking sun tea at supper, sleeping on the floor of the farmhouse living room with the quilted denim blanket. I miss riding to town in the bed of grandpa’s pick-up, and trying to make gum from the wheat in the field next to the house.

For a long time, after moving to the suburbs of West Omaha, I did all I could to forget that part of myself. I didn’t want to be seen as “white trash” or any other name people in affluent suburbs like to use when referring to people like my family in Kansas. I envied my friends who had normal family members, who didn’t wear cowboy boots and jeans stained with oil, who spoke clearly without any accent, who were always politically correct, who didn’t live in the middle of nowhere Kansas. I didn’t want to associate myself with people who much of society views as uneducated and backwards. I wanted so badly to be different from them, to be better than them.

But I think the worst part is that I understand them. While I am now vastly different from my family in Kansas and I know that there’s a whole world outside of America’s breadbasket, I understand them, and I can’t condemn them for being who they are. I can’t condemn great grandma Eileen for her devotion to God, or my grandpa for having a thick accent and being a farmer who also profited off the oil industry, or even the town of Stockton for being full of meth addicts. That wouldn’t be fair. I can’t even be embarrassed of them, of where I came from—that wouldn’t be fair either. I am as much a product of that place as they are. We are the same, in that regard.

For as much as my high school self resented the fact I grew up a stereotypical hillbilly, and for as much as I tried to erase that, the version of myself writing this still gets excited whenever I see a pig nose stuck in the dirt.

…

My earliest memories took place within the Ellis and Rooks county lines—two tiny blocks in the patchwork quilt that is Kansas. From an aerial view, the state resembles a quilt, with its acres and acres of farmland divided up nicely into even squares. Dirt and limestone roads outline those squares, separating the fields and pastures. Miles upon miles of wire fences rest between the roads and the farmland, stitching the whole thing together to make up the so-called sunflower state. Maybe the sunflowers don’t grow between Ellis and Rooks, but I’ve never seen a single one growing of its own accord in nature. I think “Kansas: The Quilted State” would be a more fitting nickname.

When I think about growing up in Kansas, my mind clings to quilts, but for an entirely different reason. Great grandma Eileen, whether she liked to admit it or not, was an artist. She was a quilting magician and stitched love into everything she made with nimble hands which seemed to never tire for the ninety-three years she lived. While I think she had magical sewing powers, being the good Christian woman she was, she would probably laugh, shake her head, and attribute her gifts to God.

There was a sign in her bathroom which read: “A day hemmed with prayer rarely unravels.” I have no doubt she believed this to be true. At great grandma Eileen’s we prayed before every meal, or rather listened to her speak to God from the head of the table while the rest of us resisted the urge to dig into the mashed potatoes and sweet corn.

Great grandma Eileen had another sign, which sat on the windowsill above the kitchen sink: “Old quilters never die, they just go to pieces.” I like to think this one is true. She passed away a couple Christmases ago, but since she spent her whole life hand-stitching her love into the quilts she made for her family, I’m led to believe her spirit lives in the fibers of her works of art.

She made one for each of her kids, grandkids, great grandkids, and great great grandkids.

She gave me mine for Christmas one year in high school, a brown quilt with blocks of sheet music and autumn leaf patterned fabric.

“I usually wait until graduation to give you all your quilts, but I probably won’t be around then,” she told me with a calmness one wouldn’t expect from such a bleak statement.

At the time, I thought she was being a bit dramatic, uncharacteristically pessimistic. She was older than the queen of England, and in my opinion, far more important. She had little to no health problems, so it didn’t make sense that she would pass away in the near future. And it didn’t make sense that she seemed to have an idea of when that would be. But somehow she did. Great grandma Eileen passed away peacefully in her sleep precisely five months before I graduated high school.

The quilt she made me is folded neatly under my bed and I can’t bring myself to use it like how I know she intended for me to do. Before she passed, I slept with it every night. But now, it feels like something that should be preserved. The quilt feels important, as if things like it won’t exist when I am old. Her quilts are relics from a time when things were handmade because there was no other choice. Her quilts are proof that she existed, that I am a descendant of such a strong, kindhearted woman. I believe she made our quilts to remind us that her love lives on, and that we might choose to lead a life where we too can leave our love behind.

And in leading this life where I left Kansas behind, its love remains