I'm Mary from South Dakota. I've lived in South Dakota almost all my life, almost 90 years. It's home for me.
My dad and mom came here from Holland, but my brothers and sisters and I were born here. I grew up here. I went to school here and taught school here.
I got married here, and raised eleven kids here. I'm a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother.
Photo: Sandy Peters
Today at lunch in the cafe, we had a cookie for dessert...an oatmeal raisin cookie. It was nice and soft and real good.
Recently, a friend of mine in Dell Rapids that I went to school with said she remembered my mom always had cookies on hand. I remember the big round container she had that always had cookies in it.
I can’t even remember not having cookies. We had sugar cookies, oatmeal cookies, and raisin cookies. She always baked them herself; you didn’t buy cookies in those days.
Speaking of Mom's cookies makes me think of our lunch pails when we went to the old school house.
My brother Ted and I started school together. We
went to all eight grades in this old school house. There was just one
teacher for all the grades. We walked a mile and a half to school every
day.
We
always took lunch pails to school with peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches...peanut butter with apple, strawberry, or plum jelly. We
always had a cookie, an apple, or a piece of cake in our pails, too. My
mother baked one cake a week on Saturday. It had to last for a week.
Photo from Mary's photo album, taken years later
My dad, Emil Brakke, came over from Holland. He left behind his parents, two brothers, and a sister. He didn't come alone though. He came over with two friends.
He landed in Iowa first, and met and married Mom there. He was 25 at the time. I don't know how old she was, but I think she was two years older than he was.
She came from Holland, too, but she had come over with her folks when she was a child. She was like six years old when her mother died and some folks adapted her, or rather just took her into their home.
Photo from Mary's photo album
Mom and Dad's wedding
My mom, Gertrude Brakke, was a homebody. She liked to read and crochet. She never drove a car; she was content to stay at home and didn't visit or go places much.
She liked to work in the field, picking corn or shocking grain. She drove a team of horses and helped with the milking, milking the cows by hand.
She was always the first one up in the morning. She would start the fires and get breakfast going. She always saw to it that each of us got going. She did our sewing. She always sewed our dresses and aprons.
She liked to can and had a big garden. That was nice. When company came from Iowa, she never worried. She just told us to go downstairs and get beef, peaches and potatos. We always had sauce, peaches, and berries, too. We went down in the trap door to get whatever we needed for dinner.
This is a picture of Mom when she was older.
Photo from Mary's photo album
For breakfast, we had pancakes. My dad always had cornflakes and pancakes. We never had eggs or bacon or anything like that...not like people usually eat for breakfast now.
We made ice cream; we didn't buy it. In an ice cream
mixer, you mixed milk and sugar and what you needed to make it. Then
you put ice all around it and turned it and turned it until you had ice
cream.
Mom never made anything real sweet for us—not a lot of sugar ever; and when she baked a cake on Saturdays, the cake frosting was always thin, not thick.
Yet, us kids all had bad teeth. I used to hate those visits to the dentist. They would drill right down and raise you ten feet off the chair.
Photos from Mary's photo album
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