Growing Up in North Dakota

Again, Hamilton was a very rural town. There were no paved streets and one little teeny general store where the basics could be purchased. Fresh produce was a rare commodity, and frozen vegetables weren’t yet “invented,” so we ate mostly canned vegetables. Iceberg lettuce was the only green you could purchase, though I do remember that my mom once bought a little carton of bing cherries, the first I’d ever had. In these days, getting an orange in a Christmas stocking was a pretty big deal. I also never remember, when we lived in North Dakota, going clothes shopping in a store. If we were able to buy new

clothes, they always came from a catalogue (I remember one beautiful winter jacket that came from the Sears/Roebuck catalogue – it was white with red embroidered braid as a decoration). Most of my clothes were hand sewn or were hand-me-downs from my cousin Meredith (Georgine’s sister’s daughter). I remember getting packages filled with “new” clothes in the mail from them. Those packages were wonderful to receive because Meredith’s family had more money than we did and her clothes were all store bought.