Mother-in-law

All my life I have heard jokes and sayings about how hard it is to relate to, get along with, or spend time with your mother-in-law - nothing could be further from that thought than the relationship I have had with my mother-in-law, Esther Ringkob. From the fall of 1967 when I first met her until today, we have had a great relationship and hundreds of meaningful and enjoyable conversations. Perhaps conversation or communication was so easy for us because we had so much in common, a sense of common sense and many similar interests. Esther probably describes my definition of a “farm wife” as well as anyone I know.
My first visits to the Tom Ringkob farm were as a student stopping by to drop Marita off at Jackson on my way home to Olivia, Minnesota, from Iowa State University where we were both students and later as we visited from Spencer, Iowa, where we had our first jobs (about 40 miles from Jackson). It didn’t matter if the visit was announced or unannounced, within 15 minutes of our arrival, Esther could put a delicious nutritional home cooked meal on the table and Tom & Esther would always make me feel welcome - she always had a good supply of food on hand and of course, I enjoyed eating, especially her sour cream apple pie and her fresh rhubarb dessert.
All of my life I have been very close to production agriculture, as a “farm wife” Esther and I had a lot in common and many great discussions about farm life.

I remember her talking about hauling grain to the Windom elevator 20 miles north on highway 71, a rough pavement road. The trucks she drove were split axel straight stick (manual transmission) straight trucks, held 250-300 bushels. She said the ride was so rough - she thought it would shake out her liver - well, she’s almost 99 and still has a liver. Years later when Esther lived in Jackson along the river, she thought she should buy a new car - she wanted a 4 wheel drive Subaru, the local dealer in Sioux Falls had gone out of business. She asked me if I would take her to the Des Moines Subaru dealer and help her buy a new car. In 1992, she drove to Ames (she was 80 years old) and we went to the Subaru dealer on a Saturday to look at cars - she was interested in a Subaru Legacy. A young rather smooth-talking car salesman was to show us a Legacy, when he discussed the finer features of the car and demonstrated it for us, he apologized because the only Legacy they had on the lot was a straight stick (he could hardly drive it himself - he was sort of jerking along) but he did kind of reluctantly ask Esther if she wanted to test drive the car. She got behind the wheel and maneuvered in and out of the Subaru dealership, up and down I-35, and back to the dealership through all 5 gears just like she was hauling grain on highway 71 with a split axel grain truck - I think she rather enjoyed the drive. Needless to say, the young smooth-talking salesman was both embarrassed and amazed. Bottom line - she ordered a new white Subaru Legacy that day, but Esther did buy an automatic transmission - probably thought she would get old some day and the automatic would make the hill along the river in Jackson easier to maneuver.


During their later years on the farm from 1974-1976 (after Tom’s first open heart surgery in 1974), they were getting older and while they had a good line of machinery, farming 480 acres was becoming a bit more of a challenge. I remember coming up from Spencer one Friday afternoon to help Tom with the spring planting on a week-end. I arrived and went directly to the machine shed where Tom was frantically trying to get a spraying unit remodeled and attached to the corn planter (as I remember it, seemingly a yearly event). It was late in the day and Tom was tired and flustered, Esther was sitting patiently on the sideline in the machine shed observing. She gets up goes to the workbench and picks up a tool, hands it to Tom and says “maybe this might work”. Tom’s response was “hush up woman”, two minutes later he tries the tool and it solves the problem. That’s how Esther understood farming. There wasn’t much she couldn’t do - she could run the combine, haul the grain, care for the livestock and most importantly keep the records.
-Gene

No comments:

Post a Comment

!-- Start post reversal code -->