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a blanket, and watch the clouds change shape.  With imagination one can see strange sights when watching clouds and on one particular night my imagination must have been going great.  I saw a picture I’ve never forgotten.  An old woman was bending over a camp fire; a tepee was close by and as the cloud slowly moved she seemed to be stirring something in a big kettle.

I suppose ma had been reading Longfellow’s Hiawatha to us and to me this was the wrinkled old Nokomis preparing supper for Hiawatha.  Anyway it made an impression that has lasted a long time.

 

Harvest was never a big deal for us.  We had only a small acreage of small grain.  Mostly wheat & Speltz.  Probably forty acres of wheat and ten or fifteen acres of speltz.  It was cut with a header and put in stacks.  The header, in some ways, was like a modern windrower, but instead of making a windrow on the ground, the straw was elevated into a header box or barge and was then stacked in small stacks about three feet apart in the field.  The reason for stacking

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