Lela was now running about, playing in the fenced-in yard while her mother gardened, pegged laundry on the clothesline, gathered eggs, and fed the chickens and pigs. She remembered that Pluma planted violet and pink and white sweet peas in the front of the house and they grew two feet tall on woven wire attached to an oval fence. Lela loved their aroma and would go with her mother to watch her water them with buckets of water.

Ruth, Edna Fern, Lyman, and Bob were away at school during the warm days of spring, summer, and fall, so Percy built Lela her own playground to keep her entertained. The playground was at the south side of the house next to the woodpile and a shrub windbreaker along the path to the garden. First he built her a swing using log-poles he had peeled with his own hands. When she was three or four, her dad brought a load of sand and dumped it in the yard for her to play in. He used the grain wagon to transport the sand, since it had a tight box so the grain wouldn’t leak out and neither would the sand.

There were no gates in the fence between the yard and the garden. Instead, there were three up-and-down steps on either side to keep the animals out. This made it easier to carry milk from the barn and buckets of vegetables from the garden. Lela liked to climb up and down these steps and trot around the yard on the imaginary horse her dad had carved out of a tree branch and bridled with string. She liked to chase her kittens or baby piglets—her daytime companions.

Lela remembered, “Mother would watch out the kitchen window if she was indoors. One time I crawled under the fence and got into the pigpen to get at the squealing piglets. Mother came out with a tea kettle full of boiling water and spilt a bit out on the sow’s nose to chase it away; she stopped it in its tracks and got me back into the house where she could keep a closer eye on me.”

A very special memory for Lela was of times when the older kids were away at school or off with their friends and she would help her mother with the cooking, baking, and kneading bread. Pluma taught her songs like “Frére Jacque,” “Old Grumbly Died,” “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” “Rubber Dollie,” “You Can’t Play at My House Anymore,” and “Cowboy Jack.”

Because Lela was the only one of the five children to be raised on a farm from birth, she learned to ride horseback at an early age: “Sometimes I would sit bareback on Old Bet while Dad would guide the old mare cultivating the garden rows. If I leaned too far to look at Old Bet’s feet, I would tumble off the horse and Dad would get a scolding from Mother for not having me tied on. But I never got badly hurt, and that’s how I learned to balance bareback on a horse.”