As a young girl, I loved to visit my grandparents. I would ride my bicycle to their house. We lived on 7th East in Salt Lake City, Utah and they lived on Leland Avenue, about three or four blocks away.
I remember that my grandfather [Folkert T. Folkers] often sat in the kitchen in his wooden rocking chair with arms . The little cottage on Leland Avenue had two rooms and a porch. In one room there was a bed and what was called a davenport (like a hide-a-bed today). When I could sleep over with grandma and grandpa, they would pull the davenport out and make up the bed. I thought that this was the greatest!
Where grandpa and grandma lived in this little cottage, there was no running water in the house. There was no bathroom. The lady next door owned an apple orchard located behind the cottage. Grandma asked the lady if she could pick up the apples thathad fallen to the ground. The woman said, "No, Grandma was not to have any of that." So, when the lady wasn't home, grandma would go out and pick up all the apples that had dropped to the ground underneath the trees. She would bring them into the house and we would sit and peel them and cut them into quarters.
We would string those pieces of apples on a string with a needle. Grandma would hang the big, long strings of apples all around the edge of the kitchen ceiling to dry them. So we would have apple pie, apple sauce, etc. in the wintertime from these apples.
Grandma carried all of her water from the hand pump outside, which was a little ways away from the house. She'd carry the water into the house to do her laundry, to do her cooking, to do her cleaning, and anything else that required water. There was a sink in the kitchen built in one corner, but there were no taps or anything there. Grandma would use that sink to wash her clothes. She carried the water to the sink and used a scrubbing board and then hung them, in good weather,on the clotheslines outside. In bad weather they were hung on lines in the back porch.
Grandma would let me go out and feed the chickens. She had a little chicken wire run with only enough room for about a dozen chilckens in that area. Grandpa had six or eight rabbits in hutches out behind the little shop that was there. I can remember that one time some neighbors' dogs got loose, and that was the end of grandpa's rabbits. He was growing them for meat for the table.
Grandma put the chicken droppings and the rabbit droppings in this big five-gallon bucket and filled it with water and let it sit. Then she would take that water and water her plants in her garden (by hand). She always had a gorgious, gorgious garden. There was never a weed in it. She couldn't stand to see a weed that was growing in there.
Grandpa and grandma had brought a lot of seeds from Holland that she had planted in her garden. This was the first time I was every introduced to kale, and I just loved kale. I always asked mother to make "stumppot" with kale for my birthday. Stumppot was kale and potatoes mashed together. And a ring of mettwurst that they got from the Dutch Store would be cut by my mother in about one-inch chunks and put in the stamppot. I always thought that flavor was really "out of this world".
Mettwurst - German Sausage
We could get it for years, and then all of a sudden we couldn't get it. I have looked for mettwurst whenever I've gone anywhere that is in a meat market but I've never been able to find it.