Country Living Skills

Via: TwinCities.com

“Tell me a farm story, Grandma.”

That’s what Mildred Kalish’s granddaughter used to say when Kalish walked the little girl to school some 20 years ago.

“I started to tell her stories of my life, and then it dawned on me to put them down for the rest of the grandchildren,” Kalish recalled in a phone conversation from her home in northern California. “So I worked at it sporadically for years, writing down this and that.”

Kalish’s jottings were the basis for her popular memoir “Little Heathens,” which is what her grandmother called the kids when they mis-behaved.

Subtitled “Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression,” Kalish’s book was published in 2007 when she was 85 years old. Her friendly voice and easy writing style made her story an instant success with critics and readers.

Kalish says another impetus for writing “Little Heathens” was that her life was so different from her friends’ lives.

“When I would tell a story about things I learned on the farm, everybody said I should write a book,” she recalls. “I just always knew more than they did about how to cope. I remember being invited to a fancy party by poet Louis Simpson. When I cut the meringue pies, I asked his wife for a big glass of hot water (to dip the knife into). She said, ‘Millie, I never in my life knew how to do that.’ “

“Little Heathens” begins when Millie Armstrong was 5 years old and her grandfather “banished my father from our lives forever for
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some transgression that was not to be disclosed to us children. …” She and her three siblings lived part of the year on one of her grandfather’s farms and part of the year in the little town of Garrison with their grandparents so they could walk to school. Those grandparents had tough rules about how to behave, and their philosophy was “waste not, want not.” But Grandma sure could cook.

Kalish offers recipes, from mouthwatering apple cream pie to head cheese (not so mouth-watering), as well as down-home remedies for removing warts, ways to catch raccoons and how to find morel mushrooms.

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