Put Your Bloomers On

     Thanks to a long distance friend, Brenda Velde, I purchased a pair of bloomers!  They were perfect!  I love being a rural women, celebrating my rural roots and acknowledging the power of women in rural communities.  I was able to wear my bloomers and express to a group of women recently at a Montana Farmers Union Women's Conference the importance of each of us recognizing our value.  Bloomers were first called for by a health periodical, the Water-Cure Journal, in 1849, because they wanted women to start wearing something that would not alter the wearer's organs as they were being pushed out of their normal placement.  The style of dress at the time was long heavy skirts that dragged two inches too long on the ground, made up of horse hair worked into the hem of the skirt, with a whale bone corset.  Bloomers came to the public in 1851 when a Amelia Bloomer, a temperance journalist started wearing them.  They were radical and scandalous, because they were believed to usurped male authority.  I Believe that all life, male and female, is valuable, and if wearing bloomers makes you feel valuable by all means put your bloomers on!

      Our farm is 102 years old, homesteaded originally by Ralph and Mary Weller and Leonard and Alvina Rutledge.  Through the years the family as added a few other 160 acres homesteads from families long gone.  There is one family that haunts me.  I do identify with her because I can touch what she touched.  I wonder what brought her joy, peace and wonder!   Their place is still visible if you want to see it.  The home's basement, the old farm equipment left on the prairie, the rock lined well still solid, and the rock piles!  The rock piles untouched for 100 years remain; proof of her existence.  An old neighbor of mine, who has since passed away, told me he remembered her because she would come over to his place when he was a boy.  His mother would take her in, because she had been "beaten to a bloody pulp"  by her husband.  She would stay at his home until she was healed and then she would return to her husband--this happened over and over.   The rock piles where hers.  Most of the rocks fit into the palm of my hand, small, yet I still know they were removed from the field by her hands.  

This one I picked up and it sits in my living room where it serves as a reminder to honor myself as well as His creation.

Alan picking up one of the small rock at one of the rock piles

The rock lined well.  It is incredible beautiful!

A plow is abandoned on the Montana praire next to the dug out basement of her home.   

   She probably felt she had no alternative.  Did she pick rocks because her husband made her?  Or did she pick rocks for peaceful solitude?  I think of her because I believe that life is meant to be lived deliberately.  If we just let life take us from one day to the next, never discovering who God intended us to be, if all we do is mirror the same activitiy day and after day, if we live from one weekend to the next never growing, never developing into the women we are intended to be we might as well pick rocks day after day.

     It's time for all agriculture women to put their bloomers on.  We have so much to contribute.