Home-made Root Beer
Our dad and his brother, Uncle Richard, always made home-made root beer. They even put it in bottles and closed them with a capper. This was a great treat for us, as we never got soda, or pop as we called it, except in summer when we had our Mission Festival. It served as a special treat when we went on picnics, or after a hard day's work on the farm.
When we visited our Uncle Richard in Wausau, he would often serve us some of this root beer. I especially remember the one time when he opened a bottle and it all squirted out onto the ceiling. It must have gotten too warm or been shaken up too much, because it had plenty of "kick". That was quite some excitement for us. He did, however, open another bottle, so we didn't have to go without our root beer.
Most of the time at home, we got our root beer after a hard day's work. It had been a long, hot day in the hayfield, and when we got home, we would carry enough cold water from the pump to fill a wash tub under the shade tree. Then we'd put a few bottles of root beer in the water and wait patiently for it to cool. While we were waiting, we'd go to the straw stack in the barnyard and find a nice clean straw through which we would drink our root beer. We never got straws from the store. I guess we never knew that they were available.
All the waiting and anticipation made the moment when we actually got our root beer to drink even more delightful. Looking forward to this made our day in the field more tolerable. It was all worth waiting for and something we looked forward to every summer.
A few times Dad made dandelion wine. We were sent to the fields with pails to gather the dandelion heads. These were never in short supply. This wine-making process is not as clear in my memory, as we never got to drink any of the wine, and the only part we played in it was to gather the dandelion heads. Sometimes we would stop and braid some dandelion crowns which we would wear to finish our task. Combining play with our work made the job less tedious.
Many of the jobs given us to do were mundane, but we were always there, underfoot, and if we had little jobs like this, we would be occupied for quite some time, and most of the time it even turned out to be helpful.